This past weekend, I read a tweet from C.C. Chapman that really hit home.
Never seen a visual RSS reader? Check out Pulse on an iPad and you’ll see why photos in blog posts are more important now.#blogchat
At first I somewhat dismissed it, seeing as my goal with Vardy.me is to engage readers and my words should be able to do that alone. But the more that I thought about it, I realized that I’m a Flipboard user myself, and I tend to blaze by articles that don’t catch my eye straight away. It’s usually one of two things that does that for me:
- The person who wrote the article.
- The image accompanying the article.
There are those whose stuff I’ll read, image or no.1 But if I want to discover newer writers, an image is what will grab my attention. If the writing does it for me after I give the article a once-over, then the image was the flagpole that brought me to a new writer to check out every once in a while (or perhaps, regularly). If the image turns out to be a red herring, then I’ve been educated a little bit more on who’s worth reading. Having an image can be a win-win.
So, I’m going to be putting images in my posts going forward. I’ll likely go back and add some to my earlier posts as well. I’m pretty much a rookie when it comes to this type of writing on the web, so I don’t have a following that those who don’t use images do. I want to attract more readers to my work, and if attractive and compelling images can help me achieve that…well, then I’d be foolish not to use them.
1 You can find many of them here.
