You’ve been waking up every morning, diligently creating great new content for your site. Posting it to your blog to help the masses and to draw them to you.
Your content is pure gold, but you’re still kind of new on the block and you’re not well known yet.
What can help?
A couple things…
Strong Post Titles
I’ve done a few posts on the importance of an effective blog post title. But today I want to focus on the visual.
Strong, Effective Featured Image for Your Post
There are so many options online for your readers to choose from. A strong featured image for your post might just be the thing that makes them click on it to read more.
Ultimately it should have something to do with the content of the post, but don’t get too nitpicky about that. Get something that’s close enough, but really is an attention getter.
You do want to get close to the theme of your content. If you add a provocative photo of a beautiful woman, and then your content is about the newest theories in quantum physics, then it might not do anything to really help your traction and build your readership.
Now, I added a photo of a car that costs more than most people’s houses. Does it relate to this content? In this case yes, because I’m talking about images that get you noticed. But if I were actually talking about something like, “The top ten pizza toppings requested in Las Vegas, Nevada,” this photo would not be the way to go.
Also…
Studies have also shown that people are more attracted to reading posts that include at least one image. To paraphrase my good friend, photographer, Garrett Winslow, “Would you rather read a magazine with, or without photos.”
Well put.