How do you build a business online? Through strategy and tactics. Your strategies will develop your overall message, while your tactics will consist of how you’re communicating your messages over time.
While text may be the most powerful form of messaging, since words can persuade, it’s a mistake to forget about the subtle impact of photographs.
Imaging and the Internet
There are two basic reasons people use the web to store their photographs. The first is as a business. Professional photographers may use a service like SmugMug as a place where their clients may review, choose, and order prints of the shots they paid to have taken. In today’s digital world, far more pictures can be taken for a client’s perusal than ever before, and the cost of actually putting them all on paper would be prohibitive.
The second is for a business. It allows a business owner to store many images that can be used in advertisements, on web pages, or in blog posts to make them more visually appealing. Since this a far larger segment of the business owners in the world, let’s focus there.
Managing Your Business Photographs
Before we talk about the value of images for your business, it’s important to first discuss how to manage your business images. A photo-sharing service will help you enhance image quality and provide you with plenty of storage space. Additionally, it can help immensely if you want to have a gallery that your website visitors can view.
How Your Business Can Use Pictures
Pictures will enhance your website, your blog posts, your social media posts, your sales pages, and your advertising.
Pictures on Your Website
Imagine a website without pictures. It would immediately strike you as remarkably dull. With nothing but walls of text, you would soon lose interest and click away. Yet with images, everything comes alive.
An image on the top banner gives you a sense of what the website is all about. The smiling face of the business owner on the About Us page makes you feel welcome. The images of the products and services evoke your curiosity and interest.
Today, images are such an essential aspect of website design that it always comes as something of a shock to come across a website without images. We assume that a website will have images in the same way that we automatically we assume the walls of most rooms will have a coat of paint.
Pictures on Your Blog
Why does every blog post have one or more pictures? It’s because the image frames the message that the words spell out. The form and color of the images not only attract the reader’s eye and make the page layout more appealing, but the people, things, or scenes conveyed by the image add to the value of what’s being said in the blog post. If, for instance, the blog post is about starting your own home business, a picture of someone in front of a computer in a well-designed home office imbues the entire blog post with meaning before we’re read a single word.
Sometimes, too, images, particular screenshots are helpful if you’re reading a long-form post that describes the steps you need to do something.
Occasionally, the images are playful, too–cartoons sprinkled here and there. They immediately create a sense of informality between the reader and the blog writer.
Pictures in Your Social Media Posts
The use of pictures has become almost a necessity in social media because images are so much more engaging than just words.
Some social media platforms heavily rely on images to get a message across quickly and easily. Two, for example, that use images extensively are Facebook and Pinterest. Facebook, for instance, is almost all about messaging via an image and some descriptive words. Usually, a reader understands what the post is all about in a few seconds.
Pinterest, too, is heavily focused on images. But it uses them in a slightly different way. On this platform, images are used to condense a large amount of information into a small space. For instance, if you’re interested in finding a quick yoga routine, a Pinterest post about yoga routines could show you six quick illustrations of yoga postures with only a brief description of how to do each exercise.
Pictures on Your Sales Page
It’s remarkable what a few product images will do to help you convert on a sales page, even if the product will not exactly look the same way. For instance, a sales page selling a pdf report will show you images of 3-D book covers to vivify the idea of buying interesting information.
Pictures in Your Advertising
Images in advertising can certainly help with attracting attention. They make the idea of the product or service the advertiser is selling appear more tangible and alluring.
In conclusion, don’t make the mistake of taking pictures for granted in your business. Images enhance the ideas you are trying to get across with your words. So choose your images carefully, and do your best to focus on only using the best quality pictures.
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