Z-Blog

Upgrading the Blogosphere. One Blog at a Time.

Why and How to Use Pictures in Your Blogs

Posted by Bostjan Spetic, under tutorial on May 19th, 2010

Uni-race Restroom sign
Image by Davezilla was taken via Flickr

Why? For immediate impact and catching your reader’s attention.

How? Just as the pros do, as analogy or irony, and with a little help from Zemanta.

The function of visual material in your blog posts is incredibly important. We live in a visual world and the invention of photography and later TV got us seriously hooked on image conveyed information. We are no longer satisfied with news in raw text only and just as we want someone to bold the important parts of the message we want to have some visual material to go with it as well, be it a photo, a chart, a drawing, a map, or a logotype.

Pictures become even more important if the readers are not ready to take a lot of time and sit down with a book but are scanning for interesting content. In those moments of fleeting attention, all text looks the same and if you have the chance to get a bit of the point across more quickly with an image, you should do just that. Look at all the commercial uses of visual material – they work in the same way, trying to convey a message in a short instance of time. Needles to say the same goes for the more pictorial road signs and airport signage, not to mention the art of labeling restrooms. Such “quick message conveying” usage of pictures is especially important for your feed readers, because they will likely browse a lot of content and only spare time for that one catching their interest.

Flickr Photos Growth Chart
Image by .rexguo via Flickr

Using vivid imagery and telling pictures, you can also increase your readership’s engagement with your posts. As said above visual material adds a different layer to the point you’re trying to get across and enriches a reader’s experience. It enables the written content to connect to otherwise overlooked points of reference or it can stir additional interest by providing a teaser for more detailed information. A picture can preset the reader in and emotional or fact reading mood and can as such help you manage the readers’ response.

It also facilitates communication by providing you with a new parallel level on which you can place a (visual) commentary of your writing either supporting or contrasting the given opinion. Use pictures as communication tools and get on top of the old saying that a picture tells more than a thousand words. For a very good example of the usage of pictures in blog storytelling check out UNICEF Fieldnotes blog.
You have all witnessed PowerPoint presentations and compared them to dry lectures. Need we say more?

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  • http://www.dougfrancis.com DougFrancis

    On my WP blog this works great and gives full credit especially to Flickr providers (you know, the amatuer photographers that take the really good ones). Have used the Zemanta plug-in for about a year now with no complications. But I do have a question, why does the Image Credit start the post off in the rss feed and post summaries? Anyone…

  • http://twitter.com/andraz Andraz Tori

    That's partly WordPress's RSS-producing problem, since it should recognize what are image captions and what not.

    The work around is to drag the image below first paragraph when you are inserting it.

    bye
    Andraz from Zemanta

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  • Sebastian

    “You have all witnessed PowerPoint presentations and compared them to dry lectures. Need we say more?”

    90% of all PowerPoint presentations are soooo poor.

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  • http://www.DeanMcNamara.com/ Dean McNamara

    I agree. I grew up with comic books – pictures are good!