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How to Grab Your Audience With Engaging Imagery

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Images in blog posts are important. More important than you probably realize. I don’t feel like you need a sermon on how this current generation (and the one coming up) are incredibly visual; you already know that. You just need some encouragement to help you get some great imagery into your posts.

The step of putting imagery into you posts may take a solid 30 seconds longer, but it’s worth it, especially for your readers. So, here are the nuts and bolts of getting rockin’ images into your posts to increase your effectiveness and engage your audience in a more unique way.

What Not To Do

• Don’t put canned, studio images in your posts. This is a double no-no if the image is a self-portrait that you would normally staple to a resume. These are more than boring, they’re stale.
• Don’t use images you took on your cell phone. These hurt our eyes, usually aren’t coherent enough to be understood, and are generally offensive to our taste in photography. (This rule doesn’t apply to mini-blogging platforms like Tumblr or Vox.)
• Don’t use images you don’t have the right to use or that you haven’t gotten permission to use. Although it’s unlikely that you’ll get caught by anyone who cares, it’s similar to burning CDs five years ago. Just because you’re not getting caught doesn’t mean you’re right in doing so.
• Don’t use random images that don’t have anything to do with your post. It doesn’t need to make perfect sense, but if your post is about kittens, don’t attach a photo of a nuclear explosion just because you like it.

What To Do

• Use unique imagery that’s engaging and interesting. It doesn’t have to be uber-artsy, just not boring or bland.
• Watch for inappropriate imagery and avoid it. Try to avoid immodesty, vulgarity, and offensiveness at all costs. If you wouldn’t write it, don’t use it in an image. (Use the “what if Jesus was reading this” rule to help you decide.)
• Stick with your blog’s overall feel. If you’ve got a professional-styled blog, don’t use grunge imagery very often. If you’ve got a personal blog, don’t use professional images. You get the point.
• Take the time to find the good stuff. I’ve read some pretty bland blog posts for sole reason that they offered engaging imagery up front. The author, despite their lack of writing skills, took the time to find the right imagery and it paid off.

The “How-To” Section

There are a couple ways to get good imagery into your posts with relative ease. I’m going to help the Wordpress users specifically, but most of these techniques are useful for you silly Blogger and Typepad users.

Where to get the images:

• Flickr - If you want professional quality images that don’t always look like it, you’ve got to use flickr. Within the “advanced search” section, there’s a way to filter your search to only give you Creative Commons licensed photos. That means you have permission to use them, given that you give the artist credit, which you should always be doing. Here’s a cool plugin if you’re running a self-hosted Wordpress application.
• Do it yourself - Try to use high resolutions. Also, since they’re your own images, you can be really choosy and grab only the best one. To get these images on the web, you can either upload them to a host like flickr or photobucket, and then embed them on your blog in a second step, or just upload them straight to your Wordpress dashboard. Either way works.

How to get the images into your posts:

• Easy way - You can pull them off of flickr, photobucket, or your camera and upload them to your dashboard. From there, just click the button that says “Send to Editor”. You can then drag the image to the proper place and adjust size, alignment, and wrap from there.
• Less easy way, but not hard - You can embed the images into the code by clicking the “Code” tab above your post editor. Then, use this code to embed. <img src=”IMAGE-LINK”> The image link is the address of where the image is hosted. You can get this link by right clicking (secondary clicking) on the image and choosing “Copy image location” from the menu that appears.

I hope this helps. I made a tutorial video showing you how it’s done with flickr, but you have to come to my blog to watch it.

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