The average attention span of a human is 8 seconds. To put this in perspective, goldfish have a better attention span than us! This essentially means that as a blogger or marketer, you have up to 8 seconds to pique the curiosity of your audience…..aaaaaand times up! Still reading? Good.
The whole world has become obsessed with photographs and it’s no secret that one of the best ways of grabbing the reader’s attention is to use images. In fact, the imagery you use can either make or break the entire piece of content. Studies have shown that adding images to your content can [highlight] increase its views by up to 94%! [/highlight] This is a pretty drastic improvement but it doesn’t mean that you can just slap some clipart into your article and expect it to work wonders. Rather, careful selection needs to go into choosing which photos you’d like to use and where you’d like to place them.
Here are 5 tips on picking images that ‘work’:
1. Quality Control
When selecting images, always try to use high-resolution images and make sure that they are not blurry, pixelated or grainy. Basically this means that the picture needs to look nice and while this may seem obvious, you’d be surprised by how many times marketers use bad quality images to promote their businesses.
2. Make sure the picture is worth a thousand words!
The photos you use should always enhance the message that you are trying to get across and not distract from it. Don’t use an image that is irrelevant just for the sake of it! The pictures you use should be striking, emotional and original in order to get the reader interested. When possible, use your own photography. Although, if you are not photographically inclined then there are tons of stock photo websites, such as [highlight] Shutterstock [/highlight], that allow you to buy high quality images of pretty much anything and everything. Just be careful when choosing which images to buy as the audience can often tell when it is a stock photo and this can make your content seem impersonal. It can also take a while to find one that is suitable and the continued use of stock images can get rather pricey! There are also some sites where they have images available for free download. [highlight] Pixabay [/highlight], for example, offers a large selection of free high resolution photos, vectors and art illustrations.
3. Highlight your brand
Try to use photos that reinforce your brand image and what your brand stands for. This is also why it often works best to use your own photography as your audience begins to recognise your personal style.

4. Sharing is Caring
Always make sure that the photos you use are the right dimensions and sizes for sharing! Part of effective content marketing is sharing your content on social platforms and posts with photos are much more likely to attract attention and engagement on social media. Different social platforms have different requirements for image dimensions. Make sure to find out what these are before sharing the post as otherwise the image may get distorted.
5. Give credit where credit is due
Sometimes you have to use somebody else’s photos and that’s okay. There is this really easy thing that you can do to credit people for their work…it’s called a by-line. This is especially important when using images that you’ve sourced from professional photographers. It’s best to also always get permission from the relevant person to use images that don’t belong to you. Never just take a photo off Google without understanding the implications!
