Do you want to transform your blog or social media posts from hum-drum to engaging and powerful content that helps build your personal brand and online influence?
Then you’ll need to have some dynamic imagery. And this post is here to help you with that. I’m going to help you:
- Find captivating, rights-free images
- Discover tools to easily optimize and edit those images
- Use available sources to create your own unique graphics
Quality Images are an Extremely Important Part of Your Content
High quality images help to achieve peak engagement, make an emotional connection with your audience, and establish your personal brand. And you don’t have to be an expert, artist, or designer to have access to those quality images.
Did you know that:
- Articles with images get 94% more views?
- Facebook posts with images get 37% more engagement?
- Tweets with images get retweeted 1.5x more than those without?
And these are just a few testaments to the power of images!
Where Do You Find These Images?
You can always make the time to take you own photos, and I even recommend that if you have that time and the means to do so. And of course, with the help of Instagram filters and iPhone apps almost anyone can create a professional looking image for their online content these days.
But if you want to use the work of pros, or find an image that may be out of your scope, luckily there are a whole host of rights-free images and stock photo sites online.
These sites are especially helpful because you can search by image topics and themes to find one that is just right for you.
A few favorites of mine are Pixabay and Unsplash. And awhile back, I made an extensive list of 20 sources for free images.
Pixabay has so many beautiful images and they’re easy to download. The one drawback is that they do present images from Shutterstock, which are not free, so you just have to check the source.
Unsplash lets you easily grab and download its ever-updating stock of images, which are all free! Just remember that when you save images, give them relevant titles with numbers and letters only, and store them in a folder for later use.
At least a few of these are bound to be an almost endless supply of images that will fit your brand and content.
Optimize and Edit Your Images for Maximum Effect
I won’t bore you with the details of aspect ratio, image width and image file types in this post. Mostly because there are so many tools out there that will automatically optimize or edit your images for your specific platform that you can skip those details for now.
Here are some useful things you should know about file types though, so you have a better idea of how to save your images.
JPEG – Best for photographs of people, places or things—It’s the noun of images!
PNG – Best for logos, graphics, text-heavy designs, and images with transparent backgrounds—like the type you design yourself
GIF – These are animated images—the kind that loop and have movement
Two easy tools to use to automatically optimize or edit your images are Adobe Spark and Web Resizer.
This desktop suite of apps allows you to choose from images in its database or upload your own. It automatically formats these images for you depending on intended use and lets you pin them directly to background size or move them freely so that you can get the frame you want.
You can add text, or logos and even use their templates. You can also use your own brand colors and create your own graphics.
Webresizer automatically scales down the size of your uploaded image. You can also use it to crop and customize the size. Just upload your photo and it works its magic!
Create Your Own Graphics
You don’t have to be a designer to create your own simple graphics for your social and blog posts. Besides Adobe Spark, there are a few other tools available for creating your own graphics. Two that are fairly easy to use and have the most options are Canva and Venngage.
Canva is a graphic design platform that lets you create your own graphics from scratch or from templates. You can store your brand fonts and colors for easy creation. It’s fairly easy to use, even for a novice. You can spend some time getting comfortable with it and see what you come up with!
Venngage is used more for creating infographics and has a ton of professionally designed templates to choose from. You can also upload your own images to create templates. This one is a bit less user-friendly but offers options that others don’t. Specifically, infographics. Which, by the way, get shared 3 times more than other content according to Marketing Influencer, Jeff Bullas.
In conclusion, images are as important, if not more so, than written content. So, now that you have this knowledge and a list of resources for finding, creating and using those images, it’s time to start harnessing that power!
So, do some research and a bit of work learning some small skills and start making your content sparkle!
