Keeping your blog populated with high quality content, and making sure that there is plenty of it on a regular basis, is no easy task. Whether it is a company blog dedicated to promoting a brand and giving some interesting industry information, or travel blog with tips and reviews, the most important thing is give the audience something that they can’t get anywhere else.
Presentation plays a huge role in making your blog successful – you can’t just have one big column of text, because anyone who tries to read it will eventually get bored and click away. Of course, apart from some clever formatting, there is one thing you can do to garner more attention for your blog online – adding plenty of visual content to switch things up.
Table of Contents
It Helps Keep The Viewers Interested By Breaking Up Blocks Of Text:
Since the average online viewer prefers to skim through content, a good blog post should be broken up into a number of headings, contain some bullet points and keep a good flow by using shorter sentences. However, images can help you add some color and give the reader a bit of a break from reading to him/her engaged. Dynamic elements like short videos and gifs also draw your readers’ attention and help keep them glued to your content.
All of these things contribute to your content being perceived as more interesting and easy to read, which in turn leads to more shares. People tend to retain information better if they are presented in a fun and colourful way, and they are also more likely to share content that they feel their friends will also find both visually appealing, as well as inspirational and informative.
The Featured Image Is There To Grab Attention And Get People To Click:
Sure, a good headline will tickle a person’s imagination and spark some curiosity, but you can only get so creative with 50-60 characters. The right feature image helps you achieve two important things:
- Set the tone for the entire article from the start
- Help your headline pack more punch
If you want to elicit a particular emotion from your readers – confusion, outrage, curiosity, empathy etc. – visuals can be a powerful ally. Although a good headline about the hardships of people in a warn-torn country can tug at the heartstring of a reader, a picture of a little girl crying is what will really connect and inspire the reader to find out more on the topic. The same “show and tell” principle can be used for just about any niche or topic, and is a particularly good way to get people clicking on posts shared through social media.
Images, Gifs And Videos Can Help Provide Additional Information:
If there is a lot of ground to cover, but you don’t wish your content to get too long-winded or you want to convey some statistics without making them seem bland, then visuals are your best choice. Throw in a colourful infographic and you can rely some fairly dry data in a visually stimulating way, and allow the readers to run through potentially boring areas fairly quickly, which will keep them on the page.
A video can be a good way to provide additional information for those who want to know more and are willing to spend 5-10 extra minutes learning more on the subject, while at the same time keeping the entire presentation concise and allowing those who just want to skim through to do so efficiently.
You can build an entire article around a featured video or infographic, and if you’ve made compelling visuals other website will want to feature them, and social media or industry influencers will be more likely to share them. It’s enough to have your content shared by one incredibly popular account to give your website some serious exposure, which can double or triple your number of visitors.
Images Give You Additional Content To Share On Social Media:
Not only can you use a video or infographic as a great piece of shareable content in itself, but you can also incorporate several beautiful images, videos, and infographics within a single article or web page. This gives you a lot more freedom when it comes to sharing and garnering more attention.
For example, you can upload a couple of videos on YouTube and lead people to the article where they are featured and your blog from there, while at the same time posting some of the images on Instagram or pinning them to Pinterest. If you’ve already shared the article itself on Facebook and Twitter, you have pretty much covered all your social media accounts and garnered maximum exposure for your content and your blog.
Viewers Will Rarely Read 2-3 Minutes Of Text, But They Will Watch A 2 Minute Video:
Be it promotional content or something that your primary audience will find useful and will get them to come to your blog, what you are looking for is to them on the page, and hopefully get them curious enough to where they keep exploring your website and taking actions, i.e. filling out a signup form, getting in contact with you or making a purchase.
The problem is that the internet is such a vast place that most people don’t manage to keep their attention on one thing for too long – most of the people reading this probably have at least 3-4 additional tabs open, and some are likely switching between their Facebook chat and what they are reading every 10-20 seconds.
However, not only do visuals get stored more easily in our long-term memory, but people are actually ready to spend a lot more time on video material than they are on text. Considering the fact that the average person now spends about 40 minutes a day watching YouTube video on a mobile device, a lack of video content cuts your blog off from a vast audience of mobile users. This can work well for business too, as landing pages with video content have been shown to increase conversion rates by a staggering 86%.
In order to build a popular blog that draws a lot of viewers to your website, the first thing you need is plenty go very unique, insightful, fun, engaging and well-presented content, and visuals like high quality images, gifs, videos and infographics can make your content truly stand out. If you want to promote your blog, focus on adding some more visual material and sharing it strategically.
About the Author:Paddy Lock is an Developer and Content Strategist Eduonix Learning Solutions since 2013. Content planning for websites, blogs, guest posts, articles, press release, etc.
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