In Blogs, 350 Words Are Worth One Picture

Fellow blogger Michael Fortin believes most blogs miss the mark because of lack of proof. There are several kinds of proof you can use, he points out, but one of the most powerful is a "visual representation of the product, the business, the person, the quality, the claims, or more importantly, the benefits of the product or service.  This kind of proof gives your copy a strong advantage.

There’s some science behind Fortin’s observation. Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine found that pictures allow patients with very mild Alzheimer’s disease to better identify a subject as compared with using just words. Head First Labs explains that for all of us, anything that increases brain activity aids learning.  When words appear within a picture, or there is a combination of words and a picture, that causes our brains to try to make sense of how the words and the picture relate.  "More neurons firing = more chances for your brain to get that this is something worth paying attention to."

Whenever you can include an actual photograph illustrating the content of your business blog post, that adds power to the words in the blog. If you’d like to use an image from another website, be careful to respect copyrights.  Hundreds of thousands of high-quality, royalty-free images may be purchased online to enhance your blog posts, explains buyingpicturesonline.com, including five resources in their partial listing:

           iStockphoto    http://www.istockphoto.com

           Shutterstock   http://www.shutterstock.com/

           Big Stock Photo  http://www.bigstockphoto.com/

           Fotolia   http://us.fotolia.com/

           Dreamstine   http://www.dreamstime.com/

Since it’s important to keep blogs brief, one photo image per blog post is a reasonable ratio. The proverbial picture may be worth a thousand words, but for business blogs, 350 parts words: one part picture is usually just the right ratio!