by JimRaffel on January 20, 2012
I have a confession. This was not the blog post I had planned to publish today. That in itself is a good reason to blog. Yesterday morning’s events impacted me so much that I decided to capture the moment by writing about it and sharing it.
A quick blog story
Yesterday morning I woke up around 4 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep. Like many social media addicts, I grabbed my phone and took a look at my Twitter stream. In my mentions stream was a conversation that included Brandie McCallum. I know Brandie because she participates in #PrintChat every Wednesday on Twitter. We also periodically engage on Twitter in mostly fun conversations. The more I got to know Brandie the more I liked her and started to wonder what it is that she does for a living.
Brandie’s Twitter profile links to her Lttlewys blog. So there I was at 4 a.m. wide awake reading her blog on my iPhone. Brandie’s blog is similar to this one in that she mixes business and personal stories. On her “About” page she even admits to not being very good at separating business and personal. I suffer from the same thing. I like what I read, and while we may never do business together, I bet we’ll help each other’s businesses. I also learned that Brandie likes to connect people, which is another condition from which I suffer.
Your blog is you
Using the sub-headline above scared me for a minute because I don’t want it to be your permission slip for your blog to be a personal journal. It shouldn’t be if your goal is for your blog to represent you online. Your blog can and should be the center of your social media universe. Sure, I can get a glimpse of who you are in Twitter, but it’s by diving deep into your blog that I can learn how you approach the world, business issues and other human beings.
Somewhere in that 25 to 50 post range, it becomes difficult to fool us anymore. By then your blog will be a pretty clear reflection of who you are and, more importantly, who you are striving to become.
Keep it real. Keep writing.
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by JimRaffel on January 18, 2012
Today’s post on the ColorMetrix blog was repurposed from a 2007 post that first appeared here. There is one significant difference: The re-purposed post on ColorMetrix has a picture accompanying it that Shelby Sapusek spent about 30 minutes staging. She’s damn creative in the visual arts and that image (which I’ve also included with this post) is powerful for the target audience. It was so powerful that I picked up the phone to call her about it before I even read the heavily edited post.
What makes an image powerful?
- It relates to the post with which it’s published. In the case of Shelby’s image, the post on ColorMetrix.com is entitled “How to stop printing bad proofs” and right below that headline is a jar full of change with a sign stuck to it “$$$ Saved on Proofs!” As a reader, I can infer that not only will I learn how to stop making bad proofs, but I’ll save money doing it.
- It speaks to the reader. Who among us hasn’t had a jar for spare change? There also is the surprise when you take that jar in and the little bits of change you’ve emptied into it each day add up to $50 or $100. This could tell the reader that what the article will present is not a quick fix solution, but it’s going to work over time.
- When it matters, own the image. On your personal blog, creative commons images from Flickr and other sources are fine. On a company site, it is preferable to own the image. It’s worth 30 minutes of Shelby’s time to have our own image created specifically for this purpose. Sure, our competitors can “copy” the idea. What they can’t do is use the image without our permission, which we’d be fools to grant.
- Google will like you more. There are plenty of articles, such as “Feeling Sandboxed? How You Can Get 53% More Searches with One Tweak,” that have been published to substantiate this premise. If you include a properly tagged image, it will improve your search results with Google. Lots of people use Google to search for images and will find your post by finding the images.
- And here’s the granddaddy of them all … The image makes the reader/site visitor want to read the post. It’s one thing to get them to the site; it’s quite another to get them to actually read the post. A good headline paired with a strong image will increase the likelihood your site visitor will turn into a reader.
So, there you have it: Five good reasons to spend some time including appropriate images with all your blog posts.
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