Blog Like You Have an Illustrator

As a professional illustrator, Ebony Glenn offers advice to book authors in a Writer’s Digest piece. Your story, Glenn says, will help the illustrator pair art with text.

Have a compelling theme
To get an illustrator’s wells of creativity overflowing, Glenn says, have a compelling theme. The theme is your story’s North Star. If you have too many poorly defined themes, it will be a challenge for readers to connect with you. Readers need to be able to find the why to your text.

In a sense, focus is the point in blog content writing. At Say It For You, we firmly believe in the Power of One, which means one message per post, with a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business, geared towards one narrowly defined target audience.

Provide resources
Provide your illustrator with resources and notes if your story requires additional research (it’s about a historical figure or takes place in a foreign setting), Glenn tells picture book authors. In blog content, links are part of the resources you’re providing for readers, Amy Lupold Bair says in Blogging for Dummies. At Say It For You, we see collating information from different sources and then organizing that information in a different way provides great value to readers.

Use art to arouse curiosity and evoke emotion
It is the job of the illustrator to engage readers with their imagery, Ebony Glenn admits, enriching the content with intrigue and stimulating curiosity. While words are the most important part of blogging for business, visuals, whether in the form of “clip art”, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos, add interest and evoke emotion.

Personally, in blog marketing, I like clip art. While these commercial images are not original to my client’s business or practice and they don’t actually depict a practice’s or a business’ products services, colleagues, or customers, often clip art is more effective than anything else in capturing concepts, helping me as the blog content writer express the main idea I’m articulating in a post.

Read, read, read
Asked for a top piece of advice for aspiring illustrators of all ages, picture book mentor Kim Rogers answers, “Read, read, read some more. It’s the best way to see how books are written, which ones work and which ones don’t.”

Ditto for blog content writers, I’ve been teaching at Say It For You. In order to create a valuable ongoing blog for your business, it’s going to take equal parts reading and writing. You need to keep up with what others are saying on your topic (What’s in the news? What problems and questions have been surfacing that relate to your industry or profession?) You need a constant flow of ideas.

So, no, you may not have an illustrator, but keep these valuable tips in mind in order to keep producing focused and inspiring marketing content.