By now you’re set up, published, and have branded your blog to be unique to you. To take things to the next level, it’s time to start thinking about how you can make each post more flashy and eye-catching.
Adding rich media like audio, video, and images to your text-based content can really help it to reach out and jolt your audience. If you’re blogging about photography, or sharing recipes, for instance, including a visual dimension to your blog is all but essential.
Even if your blog is more personal, or about something abstract like accounting or metaphysics, illustrating your ideas can really help bring them to life. It’s a trick as old as the cave paintings primitive humans daubed on the walls to really drive their stories home and win over audiences.
“You have only 30 seconds in a TV commercial. If you grab attention in the first frame with a visual surprise, you stand a better chance of holding the viewer… When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire.”
David Ogilvy
While your blog isn’t an advertisement, the average person browsing the web will give you somewhere in the region of 4 seconds to capture their interest before moving on. With that in mind, the need to use visuals, to engage people in two-way conversation, or to pose simple, easy-to-respond-to questions via polls becomes readily apparent. If you aren’t engaging your reader directly, and personally, chances are they’ll go elsewhere to find someone else who will.
Your competition isn’t just other blogs. It’s video sharing sites like YouTube, online games, email, Twitter updates, online social networks, and that’s before you even think about what’s going on beyond the computer screen. Time to fight fire with fire!
Stage One: Adding photos & other images to your blog
If you decide to add an image to your posts or pages, you have a couple of ways of going about it. The easiest is just to click the “image” icon on the toolbar of your visual editor while you’re writing a post:
You can then select a picture from your computer to upload. Or from the same pop up screen you can select an image from your media library, which is where previously uploaded photos (or videos) are stored. The icons to the right of the photo icon are for similar actions — adding video, audio, media and polls.
You can add as many images as you like this way, or you can leave them in your media library for later use.
Once the image is uploaded, you’ll get a special screen to plug in lots of details for the image.
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Stage Two: Adding video to your blog
By now you’ve probably got the hang of uploading media. The optional VideoPress upgrade makes uploading videos from your computer as easy as uploading photos or audio, and displays your video content in beautiful high definition. Once you have the upgrade good to go, it’s as simple as clicking the insert video icon from your post editor:
If you’d rather just share a video you’ve found on YouTube, we’ve got you covered there, too.
1.) Go to YouTube and find the video you want to embed on your site. Look for the share button, and click it. A little window will appear with a URL — copy that URL.
4.) Then, in your post, click the video button.
5) Click the “From URL” tab at the top of the window and paste in the URL. Then click “insert into post.”
6. This is what it will look like now in your post editor.
Edit the post as you normally would, adding in any extra text and whatever headline you like. It will look something like this once live:
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Help for inserting sound files (audio)
