It doesn’t matter if you are just a lonely housewife blogging about your life and what meal you cooked today, an aspiring poet sharing your words, or if you are a business blogging to increase your credibility in your field, you should be including photos with each of your blog posts. For one thing, it just makes them look better and more interesting. It adds a little something extra to what you have to say.
Adding photos to a blog post doesn’t need to be a difficult or tricky thing, even if you aren’t handy with a camera yourself. In fact, you can find websites that offer stock photos, sometimes for free. Just make sure that you are picking royalty-free photos, and that you follow any instruction on crediting photos you use that are not your own.
Photos Add Color
One thing that photos do for your blog posts is to simply add some color to the post (unless you’re using black and white photos, which are good too). If you’ve done any research into the power of colors you know that different colors can make people feel different things, so pick photos that are clear and vivid.
They Bring Depth
If you take a moment to compare a blog post with no photo present right next to one with a photo, you may realize that the photo gives more depth to the story. It gives you something to help you visualize what you are actually reading.
This also means that it is important to choose your photos wisely, and make sure that what you pick actually goes with what you are writing about in your post. You wouldn’t want to write about making a cheesecake and have a photo of your dog playing fetch.
A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words
This is especially true if you are using your own photos that go along with the story your post is trying to tell. People can get a better sense of what you were thinking or feeling as you write, just by looking at the photo you’ve chosen for your post.
Photos can evoke emotion in anyone, so if you want your piece to really speak to someone it’s important to use the right photo. Without a photo your story could even be lost on them, or less relatable anyway.
No matter what you are blogging about, you have an opportunity to make your post something more, simply by adding a photograph. It can be something simple, like the finished product of a recipe for a post on how to make a certain dish, or it can be something thought provoking, like a photo of a child on a swing when writing about the loneliness of being an only child. It’s up to you what you do, but if you skip using photos in your posts you may be losing out on a lot of readers that you could be getting just for making your posts more attractive.