visuals in content

We’ve all heard the saying: a picture is worth a thousand words. But how does this impact blogging? Today, it’s virtually impossible to create a great blog without also creating strong visual content. In other words, your words matter less when they stand on their own. Modern readers want to be engaged on all fronts, and they look to visual materials to facilitate this. It’s proven: blogs with high-quality, original images rank better, get more attention, and earn more shares than those without. And with over 70 million blogs going out on WordPress each month, you can’t afford to stop and invest in real methods to stand out. One great method to use to stand out in your blogging is to invest in custom, high-quality graphics created to match your brand and blog topic. An eye-tracking statistic by Springer International Publishing has said that people following a set of directions (which is common to long-form blogs) respond 323% better with illustrations included along the way! This leaves one big question, though… How, exactly, do you go about creating “high-quality, shareable, original images?” What does that even mean? Here’s your complete guide. [bctt tweet=”Learn all about how to create themed, share-worthy, on-point blog images in our guide ?#blogging” username=”ExpWriters”] The Ultimate Guide on How to Create Your Best Blog Images Ever: First, The Importance of Visuals in Your Blogs 37% of marketers report that visual marketing is the single most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging. With this in mind, consider what happens when you combine the two! Visuals have always been a critical form of marketing. In addition to the fact that people are more likely to remember what they see than they are what they read or hear, content with images has a long history of performing better in search results and with shares on social media platforms. And, BuzzSumo once reported that blog posts with images every 75-100 words earned twice as many shares on social media as posts with few or no images! Adding images to your blogs is more important today than ever before. But, here’s where our guide comes in. It is not enough, folks, to simply slap a stock photo into your WordPress blog and call it a day. Stop right there. You’ve got to go the extra mile and create high-quality, custom images that provide relevance for your users, and context for your content. And if you use stock photos in the process, use them well. That’s what we’re here to talk about. How to Create Your Best Blog Images (7 Steps to Follow) Learning how to create or delegate the creation of blog images that are highly effective is a process. We’ve got a few key tips to help you get off to a great start. 1. Focus on Themed Images Here at Express Writers, we believe deeply in creating authentic, beautiful, and themed images for our blog. We invest hundreds of dollars monthly with an in-house designer that’s been on staff for years to create these custom graphic assets. We create custom themed blog images in our posts on The Write Blog that follow this set of criteria: We have 5 image assets created per blog: a feature header, an ‘inset’ that is easy to share on social media, a matching CTA that references our services, and then specific sized images for Pinterest and Instagram) We follow three bucket areas of approved styles for our designer to create, and specify which one when sending her the request: Custom designs are always preferred, like the one of the artist painting a photo on this blog you’re reading. Our designer hand-draws these and then creates them in Adobe Illustrator. If a stock photo is used, it’s created with an ‘overlay’ of colors in our brand palette. See this blog for an example. If we’re referencing events or talks that I gave, we provide images that our designer uses in blog headers. See this example. Here’s another one from CMWorld. I use my iPhone to take these photos. A cutout of me for my YouTube video recap blog header sets Clear Express Writers’ palette colors (sometimes we go off-grid from the main colors, but it’s always complementary) Check out some of our examples from the blog roll: See how engaging this is, vs. a typical stock photo structure? We won’t name names, but this is from a leading content marketer’s blog. Another good brand that follows a ‘themed’ blog image look has twelveskip.com. While most people imagine some hokey holiday thing when they think of “themed images,” the reality is much different. Themed images are actually a series of images that fall into a specific design structure. Of course, this design structure varies from company to company, but it’s always predictable, reliable, and recognizable. This serves a critical purpose. By making your blog content more recognizable to your consumers, themed images help promote brand recognition and develop a consistent branding presence. If you’re going to create themed images, keep things like your company’s color scheme, typeface, and voice in mind as you work through the process. 2. Hire a Designer While platforms like Canva have made it easy to create your own graphic content, it remains a difficult and time-consuming task for people who don’t do it frequently. If you, like so many marketers, have your hands full with other responsibilities, consider hiring a professional designer to create your images for you. Not only will you get a large batch of high-quality images all at once, but you’ll save the time you would have otherwise spent struggling to create them. This time can then be applied to more productive business pursuits that help grow your company and your social presence. Not sure where to find a designer? You can go through a content agency (Express Writers offers custom image design for social media and blogs!) or work on finding a freelancer on your own. 3. Develop a Format Regardless of whether you choose to design the images on your … Read more