Bloggers: A Picture May Be Worth a Thousand Words

Reprinted from a blog post of Phyllis Zimbler Miller as a National Internet Business Examiner.

If you are blogging to promote your book, you definitely want to encourage people to read your blog posts.  But there’s an awful lot of competition in cyberspace.

And the overwhelming competition doesn’t even take into account how busy people are and how much they have to read online each day.

What can you do to make your blog posts stand out in the seconds it takes for a person to decide whether to read your post?

Besides a compelling headline, short paragraphs with lots of white space, and an interesting subject?  A photo or illustration.

I’m reading the book NEUROMARKETING by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin.  If I understand the concept correctly, the primitive part of our brain responds better to visual images than words because visual understanding preceded language understanding by some hugely unimaginable time period.

And apparently this is why a photo captures our attention in ways that words cannot.

I use a photo with every one of my Examiner blog posts.  Where do I get the photos?  In most cases I buy the right to use the photos at istockphoto.com, a royalty-free online photo site.

I actually enjoy figuring out the type of photo for a certain post – and then doing searches on the site to find my ideal photo.  I strongly believe that a good photo adds to a blog post.

Did the photo I picked for this blog post get your attention?  Would you have been less likely to read this post without the picture?