Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big advocate of having a blog for your business. It’s a great way to create content for your newsletters and social media to engage your readers, while simultaneously giving your website a boost from a search engine optimization standpoint.
People love visuals and by using images (and videos too!) you can create more interest in your blog posts. If people see a post from your blog on Facebook, for example, they are more likely to click on it if it has a photo.
Here are a couple of tips for adding photos to your blog posts.
Where to get photos to put on your blog posts
If you have a visual business, like a painting contractor, for example, you probably have many photos of projects you have done that show off your expertise, give before and afters or demonstrate a technique. So your own photos are the best ones to use whenever possible (assuming they are decent quality).
If you have a non-visual business, like mine as a business coach, you will likely need to use some stock photos to add interest to your blog posts. Here’s where you need to be careful. Do NOT just search for images on Google and use them! You can be subject to copyright infringement if someone discovers you are using their photo without authorization. The exception may be when you are also linking to a vendor website from the post and including a photo from their site. You can find many low cost images from sites like iStockphoto and Fotolia. I usually buy a block of credits, so it’s then quick and easy to find an image and purchase it on the site. Be sure to observe the terms and conditions of usage.
How to edit images for your blog posts
I don’t know about you, but I am not a professional or even an experienced photo editor, so I like it to be really easy to edit photos. For years I was a big fan of Picnik, but they’ve now been acquired by Google. Their tools are supposded to be available in the Google+ Creative Kit, but it seemed more complicated than I wanted to deal with when I tried it out. What I’ve found now that I like is Pixlr.com. They have three versions (all free from what I can tell). I like the Pixlr Express which is quick and easy if you mostly need to just crop and re-size, which is 90% of what I need to do to get my photos ready for my blog. I definitely like resizing in a photo editing software as opposed to resizing with the wzard in WordPress. You have much more control to get it just the way you want it.
Happy Blogging!