Why do you write a blog? To inform your reader. Right? But sometimes feeding your reader with unlimited amount of text is not necessarily the preferred approach to convey your message.
Adding images, videos and other forms of visual content has several unsurprising benefits –
1. People process visual communication faster. In fact, 65 percent of the population are visual learners Source
2. Some concepts are explained well when explained visually
3. Posts populated with a mix of unique media content are likely to see increased engagement
4. Some digital platforms promote visual elements over text. Social media platform Pinterest need you to have images in order to be pinned.
4. Images and videos can break long blocks of text and add desired freshness in a message
While text rich content communicates with impact, we’ve seen steady rise in an interesting internet culture, where text and visual elements are favored to go together – attention grabbing infographics, animations, videos, gifs, slides etc. Post Covid19, Podcast as an audio content type is also finding its voice.
While visual elements increase the possibility of post engagement, creating them is often time consuming, need expertise to a degree and could be costly.
If you don’t want to invest money and time creating those content, there are ways to gather them freely online. But wait!
- You can’t just take any image from the Internet and put it on your blog post.
- You may not want to use the freely available images because they have already been used multiple times in many other places
- Sometimes; it is hard to identify which images and other visual content are really free and whether you are legally allowed to use them for commercial purpose
- How many people who use free photo sites read their disclaimers? Oftentimes, the sites disclaim their responsibility in case any of the pictures available with them turns out to be a copyrighted work
- Having publicly available free visual content doesn’t give you exclusivity
<strong>So what’s the best way to produce unique visual content?</strong>
Creating your own visual content. Yes, it’s beneficial in a number of ways –
- You can add a dash of personality into your content
- By having your own content, it’s easy to incorporate character into the message
- There’s no risk of copyright infringement, although you have to protect your own content
If you are a small business, a freelancer, an independent blogger, getting quality visual elements is often a difficult task and as mentioned above is an effort seeking and time consuming activity.
Now, if you look closely, you can very easily create visual content on your own, with very little effort and without spending anything.
All you need is a working computer, some freely available tools, your phone and knowledge of using some sites.
How to use stunning visual elements on your blog for free?
1. MS Paint
This awesome graphic creation tool allows kids and parents of kids to draw literally anything with as much accuracy as any high end paid tool available on the market.
Don’t believe? Check this.
Now you don’t need to create such awesome graphics. Most of those work are done by excellent creative people who also toiled hard learning this tool.
In our cases, MS Paint can be used in a number of less creative but in a meaningful way. For example in this article. I have used different types of shapes made in MS paint to justify the points I’ve enlisted.
I know some of them look very awkward, but that’s fine because even in their idiot forms, they reveal something and that’s good enough than having low quality free images.
2. Take a pic
The quickest way to produce original visual content for your blog is to have pictures that you own. Today our mobile devices empower us to capture moments as they pass by. So taking a picture and editing it to certain level using built in editor is very easy. And having your own pictures add elements of freshness, and authenticity to your blog content.
For example if you are writing about cake recipe, did you need to take pictures from the Internet? You will shoot your own cake and have it uploaded to bring a personal touch in the content.
The same goes with French Fries (as in the pics :))
In some cases however you may not want to add images. For example, if you writing about the aliens, you can’t take a pic. Also, you may not want to take your own pictures for privacy concerns. For these situations, you need to think about other options –
3. Drawing/Illustrations
Good at art? Why don’t you use your own drawings and illustrations? Or if you know someone close to you who draws well, you can take their help. Art is free, it is the natural consequence of creativity, it needs less resources, and is satisfying.
It allows you to stand out with your own set of exclusive visual content form. It adds flair, style, substance to your content and makes your message memorable.
4. Video
Videos are an excellent content type. The popularity of YouTube, which is presently a search engine itself, shows how easily video content can connect with audience.
Videos are good for building long standing awareness, amplify your digital footprint, boost social media mentions and most importantly allows the producer to connect face to face with audience thereby installing a sense of trust.
With mobile marketing becoming popular, videos provide full screen experience to your audience, and often shows increased ad effectiveness.
If you want to create faceless videos, you have several tools to get started. Using audio only video content, whiteboard animated videos, videos with a mix of images and audio etc provide you the means to make videos without showing your face.
5. Screenshot and screen video
Screenshot add authenticity, often making the message clear and simple! They are instantly done and can be used without having to use any editing tools. However using tools you can bring annotation, shapes, sketches into them – making them more powerful visual communication types.
Both screenshots and screen videos are irreplaceable in certain situations. Like you would want use a screenshot to show your Google analytics data and record your screen to show a step-by-step how to tutorial on android.
These are some alternative of using images on your blog, and ways to insert stunning visual elements without spending a money. Sometimes all should do is to look what all we have and hopefully that’s enough for all we wanted to achieve!