Having a visual blog is a must these days. Blog traffic has slowed over the years with more and more competition for attention on the internet.

What do I mean by a visual blog? I mean an article with shareable images, interesting graphics, engaging videos all in a shareable package.

this for later

A  Cisco Systems Inc. report that shows growth in Internet traffic is fueled by video.

The report, which says video is expected to grow to 84 percent of Internet traffic in the United States by 2018 from 78 percent currently.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Internet traffic is fueled by video. Is your blog ready? ???????????? pic.twitter.com/3naTtedgal ” quote=”Internet traffic is fueled by video. Is your blog ready? ????????????  ” theme=”style1″]

Try that click to tweet above to see a GIF magically appear on your tweet. ✨

Here are three powerful strategies that you can use to create a more visual blog:

1. Embed YouTube videos

You can quickly grab the embed code from any YouTube video and embed it to your blog. If it's your own video, you can get more views for your YouTube channel.

Or you could highlight an interview that someone did with you for their channel and help it get more views from your blog.

Go to the video and hit share and then the share popup let's you choose where to share. Hit embed and then make a few choices below.

Once you add the HTML code to the TEXT editor portion of your WordPress site, you'll have an embedded video like the one below.

2. Stay on top of trends

GIFs are one of the most popular trends on social media. Have you brought GIFs into your blog visual mix yet?

GIFs are a looping video that repeats. They're mesmerizing. Instagram's Boomerangs are similar but the video plays forward and backward – it's not a simple repeating loop like a GIF.

GIFs give context your your text. People use them to have conversations and express things with humor.

“GIFs are becoming a more popular way for people to express their emotions and talk to their friends—they also allow us to share stories with our fans in their voice,” said Peter Callaro, group director of the social center for Coca-Cola North America.

Beyond their popularity, the small, animated graphics are packed with insights for marketers to help shape future campaigns and creative.”

Finding GIFs that other's have created takes the burden off of you to create new content.

They're fun and easy to use. You can even create your own in Canva or GIPHY.

I created the below GIF in Canva as an example of something you could add to a blog post and also use for sharing on social media. This experimental feature is available in Canva for Work.

Here’s how to create one:

1. When your design is ready for downloading, click the Download button.
2. Toggle the dropdown menu arrow under File Type.
3. Choose animated Movie/GIF.
4. Click on Preview Animation.
5. Choose an Animation Style (Rise, Bounce, Slide, Block, 3D, Fade).
6. Click Download as a Movie or Download as a GIF.
7. After you save the GIF, you can drag it into your WordPress blog and it uploads it to your article.

GIFs are pinnable to Pinterest so it's a fantastic way to add more opportunities to get long-term blog traffic from your content.

3. Compress your big images

A slow blog isn't a better blog so make sure that you put your images into tinypng.com or another service to compress them.

If you're not sure about your blog and it's speed, use this Google Page Speed tool to help you speed things up. It will tell you which images you need to compress to help increase your load time.

A huge time saver is loading the TinyPNG WordPress plugin to your blog so it automatically compresses images for you when you upload them. Free here.

On average JPEG images are compressed by 40-60% and PNG images by 50-80% without visible loss in quality.

It will do these things and more:

• Automatically optimize new images on upload.
• Optimize individual images already in your media library.
• Easy bulk optimization of your existing media library.
• Resize large original images by setting a maximum width and/or height.
• Preserve copyright metadata, creation date and GPS location in the original images.

Did you see how many ways you have to share this blog post with visuals? Try the click to tweet above and you'll see a GIF on your tweet. Get clever and get people sharing your content!

I hope that you take at least one idea that I've shared back to your blog to help make it a more visual blog. And that you get more quality traffic to your website from it!