Increase Your Reach by Differentiating Your Images from the Crowd
By: Esat Artug
Tags: Writing, Marketing, Social Media, Productivity, Creativity

When it comes to images, using them throughout your blog posts can improve their overall look and performance.

Here are five major benefits why you should be adding images to your blog posts.

1. Posts with visuals are more appealing

A picture is the best way to create a positive first impression of your post. When your post is visually dull and lacks emotions, a lot of visitors will just leave your website without reading a word.

Visually attractive posts have more chances to create an emotional connection with readers. They look friendlier and more inviting to take action.

When you add images to your blog posts, you help create a “story” for that part of the blog. Visually appealing images keep your reader scrolling, and, as mentioned above, people are more likely to retain more information.

The right image can convey a strong message to a reader: a picture can be worth 1,000 words.

2. Blogs with images get shared more on social media

Social media marketing is a vital part of spreading awareness about your content and increasing traffic to your business blog and website as a whole.

When it comes to shared blogs on social media, articles that contain images actually get shared more, which can help drive more traffic to your site.

Statistics from Search Engine Journal reveal that:

Blog articles containing images receive 94% more views.

Tweets containing images are retweeted 150% more.

Facebook posts with images receive three times more engagement.

3. Another valuable skill to promote

When the number of bloggers keep growing so quickly, you need something that could make you more skilled than others.

You can actually learn to do some simple designing tasks and your blog could become a good place to practice. Create some custom illustrations for your posts and build a portfolio of your artwork samples.

Your readers might sooner or later notice that you create images yourself and they might eventually recognize you as a higher-profile blogger with some hands-on designing experience.

If you are selling blogging services, your customers would really appreciate hiring someone who is capable of creating custom images for them in addition to just writing.

4. Images break up text into digestible chunks

In the same way people use paragraphs to separate points and make it easier for the reader to digest, people use images to separate points and make the text easier to understand.

When they are presented with a wall of text, the first thing they’ll do is try and find another source.

Even if your wall of text isn’t as long as other people’s content if it looks too difficult to read, they’re not going to bother.

Think about the two blog posts. Even though the actual content is the same, the one with the images is infinitely easier to read and comprehend.

5. Images can help boost your SEO

Blog posts with appropriate images perform better in search engines.

One more hidden SEO benefit of images is that you can add alt text to them right in your content management system.

By following keyword best practices and adding your primary keywords to your alt text, you can boost your SEO. While readers aren’t able to see the alt text you add to each image, search engines continuously crawl all the text within your blog article — including alt text.

It is a good way to populate your post with some relevant keywords that give it more chances to be seen. Make sure you compress and resize images to optimize them for search engines and faster loading.