Blogging is becoming so crucial these days, and we’re not just talking about for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Even large businesses and corporations are warming up to the fact that a blog is a necessity when it comes to online marketing. Creating quality, consistent content is the new SEO.
Having a great blog not attracts new potential clients to your website. Additionally, it shines a spotlight on your expertise. Blogs help build an immense amount of trust in you and the work you do. The more people find what they’re looking for on your blog, the more likely they’ll be to turn to you when they need help down the road.
The Legacy of Your Blog
One of the greatest things about a blog is how long-lasting they are. Once you hit post, they live out in the world unless for some reason you decide to take them down. There’s no algorithm that will hide your blog posts or prevent people from finding them, and you can repurpose them in so many ways: you can email them, post them on social media, turn them into an ebook… the possibilities are endless!
However, this also means you should be putting a lot of thought into not only the words you use, but also the imagery. According to social media marketing strategist Jeff Bullas, articles that contain images get 94% more total views. This is a staggering number, and it should be enough to convince even the biggest skeptic of the importance of having images in your blog posts.
Image Quality Matters
Even if we all agree that blog imagery is important, image quality is a little more subjective. However, we’ve all encountered a post or an article that was being dragged down by some hastily shot iPhone photos. It doesn’t matter how much research and thought went into the topic. That content isn’t appealing now, and it won’t be appealing months or years down the road, either.
Don’t panic, though. This doesn’t mean you have to be a professional photographer or have super expensive equipment to have loyal followers or content that gets lots of shares and engagement. Many (and I mean many) bloggers turn to styled stock photography for their blog posts, as well as their other marketing materials.
The Benefits of Styled Stock Photography
When we say styled stock photography, we’re not talking about your run-of-the-mill, often overly cheesy stock photography. Stay away from this kind of unnatural imagery. You have to be mindful of how the imagery will reflect on your blog as a whole. You spent so much time researching and writing… don’t let one image ruin all of that!
When you choose to use styled stock photography for your blog, you have so much more consistency and control over not only the tone of the post, but of your entire blog and image. Just like the rest of your branding, you want your blog to be fairly uniform. You don’t want images full of bright, neon colors in one blog, and then dark, muted tones on the next. When you go to share your blog posts on your social media feeds, everything will end up looking really disjointed.
Styled stock photography allows you to find a large number of images in your preferred style. Often, you will see that images are categorized by theme, color, tone, and/or season. This makes it very easy to match the photography style to your brand, creating a cohesive look across all your platforms.
When you make an effort to invest in your blog’s imagery, you’ll be surprised at what effect it will have. You never know… you might impress the right person and your blog could be featured on that website you have major heart eyes about! Or, you might land a guest blogging opportunity with someone in your industry you admire. No matter what, styled stock photography can help make your blog stand out for all the right reasons, which makes your efforts worthwhile.
