OK, this might be a sensitive question, but do you include blog images with your posts? If you don’t – and I know many people still don’t – you are losing out in so many ways.
- Images attract the eye, and people are more likely to click on them to view more posts. In fact, images on FaceBook get 43 percent more likes that text posts, according to Hubspot.
- Images drive home a point in another medium, and some people respond better to visual information.
- Images convey a lot of information. A pic is worth a thousand words.
If these reasons are not enough to convince you to include images with your blog posts, perhaps the extra opportunities for promotion are.
Let’s clear the air tight away, because as soon as anyone mentions promoting images, everybody thinks of Pinterest. Good call. If you want to promote on Pinterest, you need an image.
Bonus tip: Want some extra juice? Try using Pinwoot . (That’s an affiliate link; I don’t earn money from it, but I do get extra points for more pins.) Pinwoot amplifies my efforts with pins that I think are most attractive to casual passers by.
OK, on to the rest of the Internet.
I mentioned FaceBook above, and it is true. FaceBook automatically pulls an image from your post. It is not always the one you want pulled, but you often have several choices (in status updates, but not in comments). The key point to note, however, is that if FaceBook has no image to pull, your link will have no image. When all the other posts around have images, that makes yours invisible.
Twitter is all about the 140-words-or-less tweet. But have you noticed how more and more tweets contain pictures? And Twitter has been encouraging it. Look how pictures display:
Frankly, I have never seen a post of Google Plus without an image. I am guessing that it is possible, but I have never seen one. If posting without an image is possible and if anyone has posted without an image, those posts must be truly invisible.
Bonus tip: If you want to really show off your blog images, don’t post your link to Google Plus. Post your image. It will show up much bigger. See below the difference between the posts where I submitted the image and then added the link to the description, compared to those where I submitted the link, and Google added a thumbnail to it.
SNAPZU
Not as many people have heard of Snapzu, but it is a growing community of social sharing that is image-based. It’s not just for self-promotion, though.
SCOOP.IT
Scoop.it is the reigning site for content creation. It is also image-based. A lot of social media addicts – sorry, I mean “gurus”, right? – use Scoop.it. This is a good place to curate your own content, as well as related content from elsewhere on the Web. Your curation sets you up as a subject-matter expert…and with that, your own posts are in good company.
GENTLEMINT, MANTERESTING, DARTITUP, DUDEPINS
Yes, that’s right. Not one, not two, not three, but four male answers to the female-dominated Pinterest. Here is my Manteresting page. I’ll tell you shortly why I am sharing it with you.
These are all places to promote the images from your posts. Not that I say ” promote the images from your posts”. If people like the images, they’ll click through to your post, and the search engines will, too.
Be gone boring pics!
There are ways to make your images more promotable. The first thing to do, above all else, is to make sure they relate to the topic of your post. That is critical both so that the post with the image makes sense to the readers, and so that people know what they are clicking on.
The second factor to consider is that the picture stands on its own. So when somebody sees the image, it makes sense. That way they will click through or share the image. Motivational posters, cartoons, graphs – these all can stand on their own.
Third, make sure they are interesting. Who would click on or share a boring stock photography image? I did not say to ignore stock photography, mind you. I have done some cool stuff to make stock photography interesting – share-worthy. Speaking of “stuff”, here is an example where I stuffed a few words into a stock photo to end up with a truly buzz-worthy image.
If you need ideas, go to my Manteresting page that I mentioned earlier, which probably has the best collection of different truly interesting images (not a lot of product shots and such).
A fourth suggestion is to give it some text. Ideally that text might hint at what is on the other side (if viewers click through), but that is not always practical.
Never mind the artwork. My most popular post is an SEO Infographic that I have described as a what-do-you-call-that-awkward-thing – certainly not exemplary of the fine evolution of design. Art is good, but the message is better.
If your images are really superb – if your creative mind deserves a Nobel prize – why not set up a gallery for people to grab a code to republish your images? Of course, include a link to your blog so that viewers and search engines can find you?
So I put to you the question – are you promoting your blog images? It’s not just the words that count anymore. Words are great. Images are great. Together, they rule the Internet.
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