Is your blog not getting the views that you deserve? Do you want to take your blog to the next level? For businesses, having a blog is an essential part of helping them to showcase their products and establish themselves as an industry leader. For individuals, a blog can help writers monetize their work and showcase their skills.
However, as the popularity of blogging increases, the importance of visual content has never been more important. Blog post visuals can transform how readers engage with your articles. Not only can they help to break up large chunks of text, but they can also enhance how readers interact with your writing.
Nowadays, blog post visuals are essential to your content, but how do you write a good blog post using visual content?
Why is visual content important?
When it comes to creating compelling blogs, the importance of visual content cannot be understated. Every single day, over three billion images and 720,000 hours of video content are shared online. Humans are visual learners, so the use of images and content within your blog will help to attract a bigger audience and keep readers engaged.
Images are not just about making your blog content more attractive, though. Research has shown that images are a fantastic way of helping readers to remember the content too. One particular study found that, on average, a reader would remember around ten to twenty percent of the content three days later. However, add visuals into the mix, and that increases to 65%.
Blog post visuals can also help the brain to understand the message faster. Research from the Visual Teaching Alliance has shown that the brain is able to process visuals 60,000 times faster than it can the written word. Not only are images recognized more swiftly, but the brain is also able to comprehend them much quicker.
What blog post visuals should you incorporate?
There can be no denying the importance of visual content for your blog, but what are the best types of visuals to use?
There is a wide array of options available for you to choose from, and finding the right style to match your blog can help transform the way readers engage with you.
1. Images
When it comes to visuals, incorporating images into your blog is a great way to retain reader attention. Research has shown that images can increase the total views of an article by up to 94%, so they should form a crucial part of your digital strategy.
Images are a great way to help illustrate your article and keep readers engaged, but it is crucial that they are relevant to your blog. You should also make sure you are only using high-quality images, as grainy or low-quality pictures will give a bad impression on readers.
When it comes to finding images, if you do not have any of your own, then there are a wide range of websites that provide royalty-free, high-quality photos. Some of the most popular include Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels.
If you are looking to give your images a unique touch or you want to create amazing graphics, then utilizing software such as Canva can help you. This kind of software lets you quickly and easily create eye-catching graphics that will help you take your blog to the next level.
2. Infographics
When it comes to the importance of visual content, infographics are a fantastic way of helping you illustrate key information. Infographics are a highly shareable image that allows you to quickly and clearly showcase key statistics and data for your readers.
Not only are they highly informative, but infographics are typically very eye-catching and attractive too. This ensures that they can help to keep your readers engaged and reading your blog. They are also a great way of helping you to raise awareness of your website, with infographics proving very popular when shared on social media.
Infographics can also help you reduce the amount of copy that you need to write. Sometimes, just a simple opening paragraph is enough to introduce your story, and the infographic will be able to do the rest.
3. Video
In the digital world that we live in, video content is king. Moving content is highly engaging and is a proven way of keeping readers on your blog and boosting your views. While creating your own video content can be incredibly rewarding, it can also be a costly and time-consuming task. When it comes to blog post visuals, adding your own videos is not a necessity, and sharing relevant content from places such as YouTube can be just as successful.
4. Screenshots
If your blog post is a tutorial or taking the reader through a step-by-step process, then screenshots can be very useful. Just reading text can be difficult to comprehend, so screenshots will allow you to explain clearly to readers, giving them the ability to see clearly what you are describing.
Utilizing image editing software such as Canva can help you to add arrows and descriptions directly onto the screenshot, giving readers even more insight and information.
5. Slideshow presentations
If you are looking to explain a topic more thoroughly or showcase a collaborative presentation, then including a slideshow into your blog can be very effective. Some blogs can be restrictive on the level of design you can incorporate, so this type of visual will let you create a slide in any format that you want.
The clickable nature of these slideshows also makes them highly engaging, helping you to increase interaction with your readers.
Final thoughts
When it comes to taking your blog to the next level, you cannot understate the importance of visual content. No matter whether you are a marketer, small business, or individual, a blog should form an important part of your digital strategy.
Blogs are a key way of helping you to showcase yourself as an industry leader, increase your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and reach more people. Incorporating visuals will help you to boost your reader engagement and maximize the effectiveness of your articles, so make sure you stand out from the crowd with your next blog by adding some of these visuals!
—Casey