How to Make Your Blog Posts Visually Appealing (Part 1 Photos)

blogger with dslr and a book on improving photography

Looking to improve your bounce rate, and increase the amount of time people spend reading your blog? If you've ever checked out Google Analytics these might be the sort of things you're looking to improve- I know after taking a peek at mine I wanted to know what I could do to encourage readers to engage more with my blog. Of course you should blog for yourself, and if you're not particularly interested in writing for an audience then this wont be the post for you- however if you're looking for a couple of tips on how to give your analytics a boost then hopefully you find this helpful! This is the first of two posts focused on how to make each of your blog posts look their best. Unfortunately a general visitor won't care if a blog has the most thrilling and engaging content ever written, if it's not easy to take in then they're not going to bother. We're all guilty of it, how many times have you clicked out of a blog or website because the font gives you a headache, or the pictures and text aren't presented well on the screen?

When you spend so much time and effort thinking up ideas, writing up blog posts and taking photos the last thing you want is to be turning people off with silly things that make your posts look unappealing. As a small fish in a big bloggy pond, the best way to encourage people to read your content (rather than hop on over to someone else's blog) is to present it in a way that's nice and easy to read. My previous blogging posts have focused on layout and design as a way to improve your blog- this post will cover how I think is the best way to display your actual content. I've written this with newer bloggers in mind, if you've been blogging for a while then no doubt you'll be well aware of these things. In this post I'll be sharing some of the things that will improve the way your photos look on the page; some of these points are things I used to do myself, so hopefully you can avoid some of the mistakes I've made along the way!


Solution 1. Always Use the 'XL' Photo Setting 
If for example you're the type of blogger who writes about products, there's a good chance that most of your traffic will come from people Googling reviews. So when readers land on your page, what they're looking for are large, clear photos of the product in question. I highly recommend the 'xl' photo setting on Blogger for pictures to look their very best. It's true you can click on pictures to make them bigger, but as readers we're all about convenience. Having to click on that picture to enlarge it is making people take another unnecessary step, and possibly exit out of your blog.

Solution 2. Take Photos One Way or Use a Cropping Tool
Even when you set all of your photos to the same size in your blog post, if some have been taken portrait and others landscape you'll end up with photos that look messy and jumbled. You can get around this by keeping your camera in the landscape position when you're taking blog photos, or you can sometimes crop down taller photos which will make them them wider. Don't get too heavy handed with the cropping tool though, which leads on to my next point.

Solution 3. Find a Setting/ Photo Background You Like
This is something I was definitely guilty of when I first started out. I'd take a picture of a product and then completely crop out the background because I didn't like how it looked. Again this is something that doesn't look appealing, you're much better off finding a background you're happy with and leaving it in- some cropping might be necessary especially if you were zoomed too far out, just don't go crazy with it. It will probably take a while to find a photo setting you're happy with, definitely experiment with different places. With a DSLR camera you can use settings to soften the background when you focus in on an object. You wont achieve this effect with a regular digital camera or phone camera, and so to stop your pictures looking cluttered, photographing them against plain or patterned paper or fabric works well. Before I bought my DSLR I used to take my pictures against a piece of paper curved against a wall to give a plain white backdrop.

Solution 4. Annotate Your Photos
Annotating your photos makes it easy to see exactly what's going on at a glance, this is especially handy when you're showing multiple products or swatches in one picture Working out exactly which part of a caption corresponds with each part of a picture is just plain annoying, and when there are multiple products/ swatches being shown it can be confusing as well. Annotating your pictures makes it easier for people searching content on Google images too to see exactly what product is being shown.  I use Picmonkey.com to add text to pictures which is free to use, but any basic 'MS Paint' style program will have the option to add text.



Solution 5: Always Take Your Own Blog Photos
I think this is possibly the most important one, using stock photos makes your reviews seem extremely unreliable. We all want to read genuine, honest reviews and without a photo of what you've supposedly tested how are people to know you've even used the product? Even if you don't have the world's best camera just do your best, even pictures on camera phones can be clear if you're in a well lit place and you can adjust the brightness and contrast on sites like Picmonkey. Never ever use other bloggers photos as your own, you wouldn't copy and paste content from other peoples blog posts (I hope not anyway!) and so using their pictures as your own is just the same.


Solution 6: Use a Photo Editor to Brighten Photos
Taking perfectly bright photos is difficult. Even on a sunny day with a DSLR my photos will often come out looking dark and dingy, but you can easily fix them up. Online editors like Picmonkey are free to use with nothing to install, you simply upload your picture straight to the site and edit from there, I highly recommend using the 'brightness' and 'highlights' sliders in the exposure setting. You should always aim to take pictures with as much natural light as possible because there's only so much editing can do, but it's well worth taking the extra few minutes to make your pictures look as good as they possibly can. Be careful not to overdo it though or your pictures will look washed out or over exposed.

Other Tips
Another tip for if you're writing a post about multiple products, group the items in your pictures. For example if you're writing about your top five nail polishes, rather than take a separate photo of each one, group them together and take pictures from different angles (example here). Something I'd often do when I first started writing blog posts was take a couple of pictures thinking everything was fine and dandy, tidy everything away just to see them on the computer and realise they were blurry or no good. One of the best things you can do to save yourself a lot of hassle is to take a LOT of pictures, way more than you think you'll possibly need. Zoom in on different areas of the products, tilt your camera to snap some artistic looking angles. From doing this you'll work out what makes your pictures look best, and it saves you having to go back and re-stage them all again which is quite possibly the most annoying thing ever (been there, done that, got the t-shirt multiple times).

Your blog is very much your own slice of the internet, ultimately you should be happy with how it looks. As someone who reads a lot of blogs, these are just things I think make a blog easier to read. After all, if you're sharing reviews and opinions to help and inspire other people then it makes sense that everything is presented in a way that's easy to take in.

Let me know if you found this post helpful, you can find part two here.