Reasons Why Graphics Are Vital To Articles

The most important type of content for marketing your business today is arguably the content you put on your website's blog, especially articles. This is the content that will attract visitors through search engine traffic based on keyword-rich content generated when your audience conducts a search.

Research shows that blogging and writing articles about your business, products and services at least twenty times per month will allow you to get five times more traffic compared to when you don't. This is according to a study done by HubSpot. You can literally double your website's traffic in six months if you keep it up. All this is considered content marketing and is geared towards you sharing what you write.

But, if you want the visitors to stick to your website and read your new content, it's critical that you make your blog articles visually pleasing. Placing graphics in your articles will break up the text to make your blog more attractive. In addition, it can help further explain the meaning of the content that you talk about. Taking the time to choose a relevant image will make your blog look and feel more professional.

There are many ways you can find appropriate graphics, free and paid.

Take Photos Yourself [FREE]

You can create perfectly awesome graphics by using your smartphone or standalone cameras(i.e. SLR) to take relevant pictures. If you want to take pictures of your products, make yourself a portable light box or try taking pictures outside in natural light.

Get Creative

A graphic doesn't have to be a photograph; it can be an attractive arrangement of a quote from your blog post made into a .jpg file with a beautiful and colorful background. This is a great way to add interest as well as call out an important point within your article. It looks attractive and helps explain the meaning to your readers. You can also create infographics to help explain rules and processes through images.

Hire Someone [PAID]

There are plenty of graphic designers on sites like Fiverr and UpWork, as well as other quality sites that you can hire help with appropriate graphics for your articles. They may be better at coming up ways to express your ideas, and it's perfectly fine to hire someone. If you outsource your articles, ask your hired writer if they can help you locate graphics too.

Look on Stock Photo Sites [FREE & PAID]

There are quite a few stock photo sites you can use, iStockphoto, SXC.hu, Morguefile, and RGBStock, that you can use to find appropriate images to use on your website. Some sites are free, and some are paid. Just check the license rules to ensure that you have a right to use the image. It's also good practice to give credit for images.

The Rundown

You want to use graphics, but don't go overboard. Remember to consider the loading time of your website. Use smaller images, jpg, and optimize them whenever possible. As well as that, remember to use the “alt” tags on the images so that if the graphics don't show up for some reason it will tell the reader what the image is and can be used by software for the hearing impaired. This is also another way to alert search engines about the subject of your website.

For more on how to Boss Up Your Blog join our challenge and learn more awesome ways that you can incorporate images to your website.