Why I Crave Clip Art for Business Blogging

No doubt about it, the words you use to tell the story are the most important part of blogging for business. Where visuals come in, whether they’re in the form of “clip art”, photos, graphs, charts, or even videos, is to add interest and evoke emotion.

Personally, in blogging for business, I like clip art.  Sure, those commercial images are not original to my client’s business or practice and they don’t actually depict the products, the services, the colleagues, or the customers of that business or practice. Clip art can’t show the “before” and the “after”.
What clip art does accomplish, better than anything else, in my opinion, is capture concepts, helping me as the blog content writer express the main idea I’m articulating in the post. You might say that any form of visual can reinforce a point made in the text of a blog post, summarize a set of statistics (as in a chart or graph), or add emotional impact. But I particularly like to use clip art as metaphors for concepts I’m discussing in the blog.

Crisis communication:  Any business or professional practice can exercise journalistic crisis control through blogging.

“The No.2 is definitely No. 1 in the pencil market”. When you’re blogging, you’re talking to a friendly and interested audience about things that might help them.. Let the useful and interesting information you offer to readers of your blog bring out the specialness of the product or service.

Consumers want different content at each stage of their research. For prospects at this beginning stage, content should be light, educational, and product-neutral. Blog posts can focus on industry-relevant topics rather than on product.

In corporate blog posts, focus on one story, one aspect of a business, using three examples, rather like a stool that has three supporting legs.

One company I personally use to buy clip art is Getty Images’ istockphoto.com. Last month istock’s marketing department “turned the tables” on me by emailing me a concept photo to remind me to buy more stuff from them. The picture showed the front part of a truck with no back half to it, and the caption read “Don’t Get Caught Short”. Well, they got the point across…..