How to Create Great Images for Your Blog Posts

How to Create Great Images for Your Blog Posts Images for your blog posts  are important for many reasons. They illustrate important points to your readers, make social shares of your posts stand out in the newsfeed, break up text to make the content easier to read, and encourage people to share your post for no other reason than they like the main image. While there are many sources of ready to use images available, you should consider creating unique images on your own. In this post, were going to look at the reasons why you should create your own great images for content and the ways you can do it. Why You Need to Create Your Own Images You might be wondering, since I mentioned that there are many sources of ready to use images already available, why you would want to spend the time creating your own. Here are just a few good reasons. Stock photos are generic and widely used. Anyone can buy and use a stock photo for less than a dollar, which means many images appear on the Internet hundreds, or even thousands of times. If youre goal is to create unique content, why top it off with a generic image? Creative Commons image use can backfire. Many Creative Commons images are licensed specifically for non-commercial use. Non-commercial is open to interpretation by the owner of the image, therefore, if you use their image on a blog owned by a business or a blog that generates revenue, it may be considered commercial usage. People are more like to share images theyve never seen. People who love sharing images on sites like Pinterest are more likely to share yours if its something theyve never seen before that is either useful or simply visually appealing. People are more like to share images theyve never seen. #visualcontent #contentmarketing @kikolaniNow that you know why you should create your own images, lets take a look at how to create them. How to Create Effective Screenshots For those who enjoy creating how-to and tutorial content, screenshots are essential. Free tools like Jing will allow you to not only capture screenshots, but also easily annotate them. Annotations help make your points or instructions crystal clear to readers who need a little visual supplementation. People will not only appreciate your ability to illustrate your points clearly, but youll also get requests from others who want to share your annotated screenshots. Use those requests to get your name in front of new audiences without any additional work. Another great tool for screenshots is FooCapture. You install the extension on Google Chrome and use it to capture screenshots, annotate them, and have them automatically added to your WordPress (WordPress.com or WordPress.org) media library. Premium service plans for this tool is only $6 per month for unlimited connections / WordPress connections. How to Customize Images on Canva For graphically challenged individuals like myself, Canva is a tool that helps you quickly create graphics for your blog content, social media, and presentations. They have templates with built-in images and overlay text that you customize to fit your content. All of the work is done online, and what you create is free, unless you pick a template that uses a stock photo in the background. If youve browsed the blog graphic templates, you might have noticed they all come in one size (800px x 1200px). The key to using Canva is to not limit yourself to the blog graphic templates, even if thats what you are using them for. There is a total of twenty categories of template types, with square and rectangular designs. You might find that the Facebook cover templates are better suited to your posts than the actual blog graphic templates. To further customize your images, use your own background photos, or find stock imagery from other sources. This will easily differentiate your blog graphics from someone elses. When you do choose your own background photo, aim for a similar color pattern and blurring effect, the latter of which you can do using tools mentioned in the upcoming section about using your own photographs. This will ensure the text overlay provided in the template still stands out. How to Generate Infographics Infographics have gotten a bad reputation in the last year due to the influx of low-quality infographics created in order to build links for SEO purposes. They are still some of the most popular types of images to share. So how do you create infographics? First, youll need to start with some interesting data that relates to your products, services, or industry. ShareThis, a popular social sharing plugin, regularly publishes infographics about the social sharing statistics around music festivals, sporting events, holidays, and other trending topics. If you dont have data from your products, you can use public data sources or conduct surveys on your own. Once you have your data, you will want to share it in a visually appealing image, aka the infographic. Tools like Piktochart allow you to create infographics based on pre-built templates or using their drag and drop editor, removing the need for you to be a graphic designer. Similar tools include Infogr.am, Visual.ly, and Easel.ly. How to Use Your Own Photographs If you enjoy photography, then creating your own photos for content is a great way to incorporate your hobby into your marketing. Take your camera everywhere you go to capture images that could be used for future pieces of content. For example, if you write about local marketing, then photos of local businesses would be great literal options. If you like to inject some humor into your content, take photos of things that would be funny. Any opportunity to photograph a scene with words can also come in handy for content. The best part about using your own photography is that you dont have to be a professional photographer with expensive equipment and software to create great photos. You can simply use your smartphone and free apps like Aviary to edit the photos you create, right on your device. You dont have to be a professional photographer to create great photos. @kikolaniFor those who do have a digital camera, you can do simple editing work (such as cropping your images) in free programs like Gimp. For those who want to do more advanced editing, such as adjusting brightness, contrast, color balance, saturation, clarity, and built-in presets, there is Adobe Lightroom. It has lots of great features for photo editing without the complexity of Photoshop. Best of all, thanks to the Adobe Creative Cloud, if you do want Photoshop, you pay a monthly access fee as opposed to hundreds of dollars up front. For example, you can take Photoshop and Lightroom for a 30-day free trial, and then pay for $9.99 per month. How to Create Memes Speaking of using your own photography, if youre a fan of memes, you can create your own with your photographs. Start by going to the all famous Cheezburger site and click on the Create link at the top right. To add a simple caption, choose the Add a caption option. Upload your photo, and then select it to add some captions. The result? Your own meme! Captions can help you turn almost any image into one that is relevant to the piece of content you are writing. The best part is people love them! I created one for a post a while back using a photo of my newest adopted family member a sweet little black and white kitten. It resulted in a lot of pins.