What is Visual Blogging?
Visual blogging is a form of blogging that involves producing content that is almost completely visual. A visual blog post might contain a combination of infographics, memes, embedded videos, still images, and Gifs. A visual blog post might also contain some textual elements as well. Each of these elements are sequenced or combined together in a way that makes a cohesive point. It may be helpful to think of regular blogging as print journalism and visual blogging as photojournalism. In photojournalism, the story is told almost completely by the visuals.
What is The Appeal of Visual Blogging?
Visual blog posts inspire readers to become engaged with your content. This increases the likelihood that our posts will be shared and that your readers will discuss your posts. Here are a few of the reasons that visual blog posts are so attractive to people:
- You can use visuals to make complicated ideas easier to understand
- Visual content is easy to consume and is often small screen friendly
- They evoke an emotional response
- People will stay on a page with visual content, especially moving visual content for longer periods of time.
- They can share this content to create conversations with friends and family members
Just think about the content that you are most likely to share with others. Chances are, most of that content is heavily visual. There's a reason for that, visual content gets social shares.
How Does Visual Blogging Increase Conversion Rates
To begin with, any content that has visual elements in it is going to be more search optimized, read by more people, and shared by more people. As a simple numbers game, this is going to result in more people answering your call to action. However, you shouldn't expect a one to one relationship between a single visual blog post and a big boost in conversions. The idea is to adopt visual content as part of your overall marketing strategy. This will bring in more followers and more social shares. As you continue to do this, you will see your web page visits and other metrics increase. Eventually, your conversions will also follow suit.
Where to Begin
If you have little to no visual content in your blog posts right now, try adding just a few pictures into each blog post. A head shot of yourself, some pictures of your team, and maybe a picture of a product that you are discussing can be added to a blog post to make it more interesting. After that, try producing a few videos and releasing them as blog posts. It takes a bit of time to learn how to do this, but there are utilities that you can use to produce really slick looking infographics and other images. Another thing that you can do is join Instagram and learn to love taking pictures. Then, find ways to incorporate these pictures into your posts. If you aren't familiar with gifs, they are short looping videos that capture attention grabbing action. These images are usually hysterically funny or downright shocking. GIFs along with memes are extremely popular among younger computer users. A meme is a picture with TXT that expresses a commonly felt sentiment. Memes are usually pictures of people that generate the same reaction among large groups of people. However, some memes are drawn. One popular meme is simply a stick figure drawing of a man looking very skeptical. This meme is often used in response to false information. If you choose to use memes in your content, be careful. If you don't understand how the meme is intended to be used, you risk facing a bit of backlash from your younger followers.
Once you become well-versed in the various types of visual content there are, you can start using more than one type of content in each blog post. Soon, you will be creating great blog posts that are made up of almost entirely visual content.
Should You Abandon Text Based Content All Together?
Absolutely not. What you should do is make an effort to include at least one image in every blog post, or one other visual element. Then, every few publishing cycles, make sure that you have at least one visual heavy post that you are putting out. This helps add variety to your posts, and will keep your readers interested in what you have to say. If you are nervous about using more visual content, you could try some testing. Maybe promote some of your visual content on one of your social media sites and see what the response is like. Also, encourage your readers to give you feedback. They may be hard on you in the beginning, but you will learn what they like.