3 Powerful Strategies for a Better Visual Blog

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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 in a shareable package.

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

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

Internet traffic is fueled by video. Is your blog ready?

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 on your blog. You can get more views for your YouTube channel if it's your video.

Or you could highlight an interview 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 lets 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 to 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 tiny, animated graphics are packed with insights for marketers to help shape future campaigns and creative.”

Finding GIFs that others 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 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 an 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 unsure about your blog and its 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 height.
• Preserve copyright metadata, creation date, and GPS location in the original images.

Did you see how many ways you can share this blog post with visuals? Get clever and get people to share your content!

I hope you take at least one idea 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!

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