The value of adding images to your nonprofit blog part one

If your nonprofit fundraising activities include blogging make sure that you are always adding an image to blog posts whether your update is just a few hundred words (a paragraph or two) or a longer piece that borders on being an essay which may benefit from multiple images. While you can certainly blog on a regular basis with no images attached to each post it’s almost undeniable that adding images to a post will bring more interest and thus more visits to your written content.

There has been a huge amount of research that explains the increased likelihood of a click (a visit) to an article/blog post which contains an image and as you might expect the more unique or visually arresting an image is the more likely that you’ll engage someone who could be seeing a post preview via your various social media channels. I’ve seen studies estimating that blog posts (or even indexed pages) with images will receive forty, sixty or even ninety percent more views than posts without and from my experience I’d be very inclined to agree. Twitter and Facebook updates particularly are in a format that lend themselves extremely well to adding an image and which helps to make your post more prominent in addition to being visually appealing.

Let’s conservatively estimate that adding an image increases the chance of a post being viewed by 50% (I assure you that it is higher) and with that in mind why would you possibly not take the time to add an image or multiple images to each update that you write. All of the most common social media platforms allow you add a thumbnail preview image (which will be your blog’s ‘featured image’) to help attract readers. Also, considering you’ve taken the time to construct a 500-word long article, reviewed, proofed, edited and then added any needed links it doesn’t make sense that adding an image should become little more than an afterthought. The title of a blog is something you take some time deliberating over and the images that you use also merit similar levels of attention.

It pains me to say it but we live in a world where many people are constantly rushing, many will barely read content but will instead just scan a page and in that environment the value of an image, graphic or video has probably never been as high as it is today.

image courtesy www.youtube.com

Naturally there is an inherent value in adding images that haven’t been seen dozens of times before or look like clip art circa 1998. After all the image you choose can impact just how many people will take the time to visit your site, absorb your content and hopefully want to engage with your organization so why would you possibly rush selecting an image?

In addition the search engines also index photographs and images each and every time you add them to a page and create an alt-tag for the particular image. You’ll be amazed but sometimes you’ll receive very significant website traffic to a page simply due to Google or Bing image searches. At times you might be scratching your head as to why a particular post is receiving an amazing volume of traffic all of a sudden and there’s a very good chance it’s due to the image that you have attached to the post itself.

In my next update we’ll take a look at some of the best approaches for selecting images, creative commons, giving proper credit for images and the advantages of making your own custom images.
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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business values and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.