More Words About Images for Your Business Blog

“Don’t put that stock photo on your website,” begs Peter Wolfgram of Roundpeg. “You didn’t have to do it,” he says. “You could have taken that picture yourself. You could have shared your unique people and culture with a picture taken by your unique self.”

Over the past two weeks in my Say It For You blog, I’ve been discussing the use of images in business blog posts. The Roundpeg newsletter piece about using original vs. stock photos happened to coincide with my choice of topic at the time, making we think all the harder about the whole visual component in blogging for business.

“What we see has a profound effect on what we do, how we feel, and who we are,” Mike Parkinson of Billion Dollar Graphics asserts. Parkinson quotes famed psychologist Albert Mehrabian, who demonstrated that no less than 93% of communication is nonverbal.

There’s no question that visuals are one of the three “legs” of the business blog “stool”, along with information and perspective or “slant”. I’m not sure, on the other hand, that I agree that all OPI’s (Other People’s Images) are a bad thing. Yes, photos of you and your team members are part of “getting real” and introducing your company or practice to readers, so they get to know the people who will be serving them.

The other category of images for sale, though, is clip art, and I happen to like many of those images a lot. And, no, they’re not original to my clients’ businesses or to mine, and they are not able to – or intended to – show the products and services offered.  What those images do accomplish is capturing concepts, which helps me as the content writer, express the main idea I’m trying to articulate.

Since I’m a corporate blogging trainer as well as a blog writer, I’m keenly aware there’s another piece to this whole stock art question. That piece is time. While business owners know that blog frequency impacts customer acquisition, (see HubSpots’s State of Inbound Marketing.), most have a very hard time sustaining their content marketing efforts even without the additional burden of generating original photography. Sure, finding a good stock or free image takes time, too, but good stock clip art can offer a reasonable compromise.

My advice: definitely go ahead and use visuals to add interest to your blog. When it comes to photos, try for originals, and for concept pieces, OPI’s are AOK.