How To Create Eye Candy For Your Blog

Short on time? Pin this picture and come back later to read this article.

There’s more to your blog than content. Sure, quality content is essential. That’s a given. Your blog can be an effective tool for sharing information and showcasing your expertise. It’s one of the best ways to establish you as the authority in your niche. However, to achieve that goal, your content has to be seen by the right audience. Attract that audience with eye-candy and keep serving it up on your blog so they stick around.

What’s eye candy?

You might be asking, ‘What are the ingredients that go into this eye candy for my blog?’ Look at everything about your blog with new eyes. Is it visually appealing with relevant images that support your written content? How easy is it on your eyes to read the text on the page? Do distracting pop-ups or ads annoy your readers causing them to quickly click away?

Pay particular attention to the following elements to make sure your blog is pulling your audience in and keeping them there to sample all your candy. No sour patch candies allowed!

• Visual Images
• Branding
• Design Elements
• Ease of Reading

Visual Images

Let’s start by taking a look at the images in each of your blog posts. The old saying is true; ‘A picture is worth a thousand words!’ Articles with relevant images get 94% more views, on average, compared to articles without images.

Choosing images

Designing eye-catching graphic images is an effective method to help your blog and business get noticed. You want to be sure to choose high-quality images to use in your blog posts. Remember, you’re going for eye-candy here–you want visually appealing images. Avoid blurry photos and any outdated images.

Where to find images and where to edit them

There are plenty of sites that provide access to beautiful free images, so you don’t need to use those old, tired generic stock photos. Make sure you check each of these site’s licenses to see exactly how you can use their images for your site. You’ll want to make sure you’re able to brand these images so they lead back to your website when they’re shared on social. You can brand them with a photo editor tool like Canva or PicMonkey. Add your business logo to the image and the blog title or a quote.

Featured image

If your blog theme has a featured image option, this is one image you’ll want to spend some extra time creating. You want this design to be your most delicious eye-confectionery for each blog post! That’s because it will be the image that is most likely shared on social media, in search engines, and it will be the first image your reader sees when they click on your blog post link. Make sure the image is relevant to the topic, add the blog title and your logo before you upload it to your blog.

Social images

Other images from your post will help draw more visitors when you share them on social. Social media posts that contain a visual image are shared far more than those without. People relate to photos. Quotes elicit emotion, so include them in the image that you share.

Infographics

Is there a lot of data in your blog post that would be best represented with an infographic? Infographics provide easy to digest content in a quick, visual-appealing manner. It makes sense that such images would be shared more readily than simple text, too. You can make infographics on Canva quite easily, too.

Branding

Branding is another important ingredient for making your blog visually appealing. Your brand is the sum of people’s perception of your products, vision, and content. It’s the feeling or message people get when they see or think about your business. It’s recognizable in all the visual content you create for your business, including your blog.

Brand elements

The choice and consistent use of the same brand colors, fonts, symbols, logo, and other branding elements all add up to creating such a feeling. By using these elements consistently when you post anywhere online, you’re helping to build brand awareness. Then each time someone sees your visual representations, they will begin to recognize this as coming from you. The aim is to have visitors experience the feeling, the message, that you’re conveying for your brand anytime they experience a piece of it anywhere–virtually or in-person.  That is branding in a nutshell.

Your branding elements and your ideal client

Spend time on this part so your ideal client feels comfortable with your branding elements. As an example, branding with pink colors for an intended audience of women and girls is a good choice. If your target audience is men, this color will not translate as eye candy for them.

Use design elements to make your blog easy to read.

One thing you won’t want to skip is readability. Design the posts to be easy on your readers’ eyes. Easy on the eyes means your content is also easier to read. And if there is a lot of clutter to sift through–ads, pop-ups, and irrelevant attention distractors, your reader is going to get a sour taste in her mouth and leave.

Headers and Sub Headers

Be sure to use headers and sub-headers throughout your text. These, along with short sentences, short paragraphs, and plenty of white space between paragraphs make the text easier to skim and read.

Typeface

Choose a typeface that’s designed to be easy to read on the web. Avoid the temptation to use a lot of colored text which often leads to eye strain. You can discover the 12 most easy to read fonts in this article.

Break up the text

You can also break up the text with block-quotes–highlighting important quotes and text that gets pulled out of the article so it’s made to stand out.  You can use a free Word Press plug-in like Better Click to Tweet to make the ready to tweet quotes, too. I’ve used it to create two ready-made tweets in this article. Go ahead and Tweet them out!

Bold text and font size

Use bold text where appropriate to make it stand out and therefore, easier for the skimming readers. Lastly, don’t forget to choose a font size that won’t make your reader continuously squint.

Hopefully, it’s clear to see why you need to make your blog visually appealing for your readers. The right images will not only help you get noticed but help others identify you with your brand. Where can you add some eye candy to your blog now? Let me know in the comments below.