Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 A picture is worth a thousand words and this holds absolute truth in the blogging world. Images and visual marketing can surprisingly boost the conversions. Both videos and images (gifs, screenshots, infographics, you name it) have become an essential means to compel the readers to read more into the articles, create a personality to the writing and overall a credible branding. In this article, I’ll walk you through the process of increasing your blog traffic using visual content. Researches have proven that usage of usage of colored graphics can increase people’s interest in reading the article by 80%. This is huge and below are some reasons why should should not miss this chance. Why to use visual marketing in your blog strategy? Usage of rich content like videos, screencasts, funny memes can all have good benefit for your blog. Here is why should be using them and how they can increase your blog traffic. Content with relevant images gets 94% more views (source) Images are refreshing to blogs with long articles. They provide the reader time to stop and gasp what he has read so far. Proper screenshots are often the best way to show a tutorial. Gifs are recently popular in the content marketing arena, simply because they inject personality to the blog post. Gifs also can be used to show product details. Videos are highly essential and an increasing trend in visual marketing arena. They have many advantages, one is they boost on-page time per post. Eye-catching visuals and infographics are often link magnets and can bring quality backlinks if referenced elsewhere. Now that you know how important visual marketing is for your blog’s growth (both in terms of engagement and traffic) let’s see how to leverage it to compel readers to read your content. 1) Apply David Ogilvy’s Research to increase your readership using images: David Ogilvy, the marketing and ad maestro, has researched on the usage of images on your blog post, and here is what he found: a) Place images above the body copy and even above the headline: According to Ogilvy, images placed above the article often connects with the reader and drives them into the content. He also found that relevant and eye-catching images attracted 10% more people to read the headline below it than those with headline above them. b) Use captions to announce important call to action. People tend to read captions of images with great attention. In fact, the text used as image captions get 300% more reads than the default body copy. Now you can subtly use this captions to direct users further into the copy. This trick will help you increase user engagement and average dwell-time of your page. For example: When you are instead of just adding an image in the article write a line that encourages your visitors to read more into the next part of the post. 2) Create shareable graphics: Gone are the days when we had a bunch of boring font 11 text in the web as blogs. People these days want to read blogs that have great visual contrast. It can be through a nice font and good looking blog theme but the major share of traffic comes from great shareable graphics. If you are not a designer, you can choose to get your graphics done at canva and picmonkey, both of which don’t need photoshop skills. By simple drag and drop you can easily create awesome images that can for your various needs like blog graphics, images for sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest etc with ready-made templates. 3) Use Infographics: Infographics are still the rulers that can bring you the right traffic and even backlinks to improve your search traffic. They can be used to increase blog shares and due to their popularity, they are used by other bloggers who often give you a credit link back and thus increasing your search authority. Bloggers like Neil Patel have implemented this visual content marketing strategy to its fullest to get huge traffic and sales. In a case study done by Unbounce, they increased their search volume by a whooping 800% that too in two short years. Now this is worth the small try. Now you don’t need to create too professional infographic just create using a free tool like canva, or venngage and put it on the blog. How to make your infographic effective? You can bring maximum ROI of your infographic creation process by following a effective strategy. This includes designing eye catching visuals based on your niche topics. Make sure you include step by step tutorials, important stats, current trends based on your niche topics etc as your infographic topics. These type of infographic work better than the others. 4) Use video marketing: Videos are the next big thing in the marketing world. Brands like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram all have rolled out videos are are successfully leading in view counts and active users. YouTube alone has 4 billion video views each single day. Let’s not forget our good ‘ol YouTube which is in itself the second largest search engine. People just go to video mode if they want some tutorials or current news or even a review of a latest product. Because videos are better than text reading. You can create videos based on your niche, no matter short or long. Sharing videos on facebook is also useful since videos on facebook have the highest reach. You can later embed these videos on related blog posts of yours to boost readership. Or, you can use call to action in video description or at the end of the video to lead viewers to your blog post. If you are camera shy, you can easily create a video using a powerpoint presentation and add audio in the background. Make sure you add a copyright free audio or better use your own voice. 5) Use slideshare: Slideshare is the most underutilized medium for milking traffic. You can easily drive tons of traffic from Slideshare using some powerpoint presentations or keynote (if you use mac) and awesome imagery. Ana Hoffman, tried Slideshare as a traffic generation source and she did it right. Her slideshare uploads have gotten her 338K views and thousands of visits back to her blog, and social channels. Now this is something you wouldn’t definitely want to miss. Here is her step by step guide to use slideshare to generate traffic for your blog. 6) Use Gifs: Gifs are the art of saying more with images. May it be social media or a blog page, Gif’s always stop us from scrolling and take a look at them. You can use Gifs to show out your brand personality and also to make showcase a product of yours. Gifs are often the best way to show a how-to tutorials after videos. They are short, lightweight and easy to make than a video tutorial. The process of Gif creation and marketing to bring traffic is beyond the scope of this article but here is a guide from Buffer to use animated gifs in your marketing strategy. It includes all resources, tools tips to use gifs to drive more traffic and sales. BONUS TIP: How about doing something smart? I’d like to take on 3-4 goals with a single attempt and let’s see how? First, write a post on your blog as you usually do. Add images, content, even multimedia to make it the best post. After that, create a list of highlights of the post, like stats, actionable tips or anything that you should want to include in a summary. Then, you can head over to free stock photo sites to download relevant images that you can use with your key points. a) You can also use screenshots or some good powerpoint templates if you want. Bundle them and add them to slideshare. You can also use the same presentation and convert it into a video and upload to Facebook, or YouTube to leverage video marketing. Smart, isn’t it? This way you save your time creating multiple type of visuals for your blog and yet stay visible in all platforms. This is called repurposing your content into multiple forms. You create the content once but distribute it in multiple forms across multiple platforms and funnel visitors back to your website. Wrapping up: Visual marketing is sure to take over the traditional way of reading blogs one day. But guess what they work even today. And when something works, why not include it in your traffic generation arsenal? Always remember , whatever you produce should have a consistency. You can use this consistency in presentation style or consistency in color scheme to depict your brand. Eventually these traffic generating visuals will become your brand symbol. Don’t let the fear of “I-can’t-create-professional-visuals” stop you. Whatever we do there has to be start point and when you start you will find a way. So what visual marketing tips are you trying over your blog? Kindly share your thoughts in the comments below. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Navneet Kaushal.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Navneet Kaushal Follow @navneetkaushal Navneet Kaushal is the founder and CEO of PageTraffic, India leading SEO Agency. A leading content marketing & search engine strategist, Navneet helps clients maintain an edge in search engines and on social media channels. He has helped value-conscious businesses build site traffic, increase the user base, boost web… View full profile ›More by this author:10 Creative Ideas For Your Christmas Digital MarketingHow to Block Part of a Page From Indexing By Search EnginesGoogle December 2020 Core Update Analysis: What to Do Now?