As a small business owner, most of us use social media or blogs to promote our businesses with our potential and existing audience. But when you know that most audiences engage with your content within the first eight seconds, it’s crucial to draw them in. This is where images are invaluable.
The phrase ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ simply means that an image can convey a point or idea just as effectively as the written word. Images sometimes speak to us and actually say more than any caption you could write. According to Wikipedia, the phrase was first used by a journalist in 1911, so it’s nothing new. A photo or painting can show you certain emotions with one glance.
Images can be calming…quirky…modern…shocking – the media use images to convey their story. What do the images below say to you?
Some are calm images, some a bit scary – they might mean different things to different people, but they are very important in an article or blog and help pull a reader into your writing.
Audiences are lazy and don’t necessarily want to read a full article to get the gist of it – they want information as quickly as possible. However, if you were to write a blog post with just images, it wouldn’t mean a lot; they are important, but they have a supportive role that enhances your writing.
When writing anything, paragraphs are used to break up the text – in the same way, images should be used to help break up the monotony of just words on a page. If faced with a very long piece of text, in general people are more likely to scroll on through, but if the text is broken up with relevant images that illustrate what the text is about, this makes the text easier on the eye, easier to read and understand.
Clear, crisp image!
When writing online, it’s important to have clear images. You can either take photographs yourself (make sure that they are high resolution) or you can use photos from the internet. However, it is very important that you do not breach any laws of copyright, so use a reputable site to source your images. There are several different types of images available…
- Royalty free – you can usually use these images as you like, but you must not edit the pictures or resell them.
- Rights managed – With this type of image, you have to buy a single-use license for each image you want. You also have to decide where and how you are going to use that image. As the license suggests, it is for single use, so if you buy it for an article or blog post, you wouldn’t then be able to use the same image elsewhere – you would have to buy an additional license.
- Public domain. These images don’t have any restrictions, you don’t have to ask permission to use them and, although it’s considered courteous to put an accreditation note on the image, it’s not necessary and definitely not obligatory in any way.
- Creative Commons. These are images that have been created by someone who wants to have accreditation to his/her work.
There are lots of sites out there, for example, Shutterstock, are great for buying images. If you want free images that need no accreditation, check out Unsplash or Pixabay. I use these regularly!
Images don’t just have to be photographs. If you’re trying to explain something technical, screen shots can be a great way to illustrate what you’re trying to say. And graphs, pie charts and info-graphics all have their place too in helping to make your text stand out and to help you tell your story.
Images are also fabulous at helping you with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you add an image to your blog, put a caption on your image. This caption or alternative text, as it is more widely known, is what Google uses to crawl the internet looking for images, so descriptive ‘alternative text’ can help Google find your images…and therefore your blog.
Images of people are always popular; as humans we tend to relate to other humans, so the image of someone’s face will pull readers in. There are lots of stock photo images of groups of people and individuals, but don’t use these too often as they are too staged – try and take some of your own. If you’re giving someone advice about a topic, include a photo of yourself smiling and encouraging. Your readers will be able to relate to you and it’s always good to know the face behind the words!
Obviously you don’t want to overdo it. Images should be there to serve a purpose and illustrate a point. You don’t want to shove in a few pics randomly – they need to relate to your content.
Finally, size isn’t everything! You don’t want your images to overpower your words, so keep them to a reasonable size, so your reader can see them without zooming in, but not so big that they take over the text.
I hope this has been helpful. Please let me know if you have any further hints or tips for using images alongside the written word.
Nowadays, most businesses, even very small businesses, have an online presence – be it a website, social media page or advert. Because of the internet, small businesses are not limited to local business; we can sell worldwide and reach millions of people at the click of a mouse…and businesses are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Although this is fabulous, in that you can reach millions of potential customers, it’s harder to manage your business’s reputation. If someone has left a negative comment somewhere on the web, you won’t always see it, but it can be just as damaging as a word of mouth negative remark. So how do you manage your online reputation?
also various events I was involved in years ago when I was employed in the UK. Also try entering your name into google images – that surprised me too!
completely active on them all the time, but if you add content once a month, this can help your online reputation. As well as the usual sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, there is also Tumblr, Pinterest and YouTube, which are great channels to be a part of. I belong to a few of them, but am mainly active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube. One of my goals for this year is to be more active on these and a couple of other sites…even if only adding the odd article or adding a comment to something and why it is interesting to me.
your friends can see them. There is still a problem with this as social media sites are always changing their rules and regulations, so you can’t be sure that privacy settings are really private…or will be in future. I always used to tell my children when they were teenagers – don’t post anything that you wouldn’t mind your grandparents seeing or, for that matter, the whole wide world! After all, it is the World Wide Web!
However, there will always be the odd person who will give you a bad review or say something negative about you or your business. This is not necessarily a bad thing; the knee jerk reaction is to delete negative comments, but in reality, if you can address the problem publicly, taking a proactive 
approach, apologising if necessary and offering alternative products or solutions…or asking the person making the comment to suggest how you can address the problem. Often, this shows you listen to your customers and take action, which can only show you in good light. The worst thing you can do is to ignore it and hope it will go away, or delete it. My advice would be to always reply and try and address any issues. Often this turns a negative into a positive.
build your business.
quiet after the Christmas period and January seems to go on forever…or is that just me? It’s a time when we feel lethargic and I always think January feels like a bit of a let-down after the festivities of Christmas and New Year…..a bit like my Chimp friend here on the right!
Physical – everything your customers see and feel when interacting with your business. This can be from the physical environment of your shops, office or wherever you provide and showcase your products or services, to meeting you face to face and how you come across to them, how you act and relate to your customers. It also includes your packaging and your branding.
a particular product, but just saying you want to sell more isn’t enough – you need to be specific, so you have something concrete to aim for. For example, say you have a crafting business and you make rag dolls. An objective might be to sell 40% more rag dolls in 2019, than you did in 2018. This gives you a solid and specific objective.
Once you have your list of objectives, put them into a timeline – what you want to achieve and by when. This makes it much easier for you to review at a later date. I usually put a date in my diary at the beginning of the year to review my business objectives every three months…of course, I’m not always brilliant at keeping to that date, but by having it in my diary, at least it’s a reminder and I do review things…even if it’s a couple of weeks after the date I originally set!
dolls over the next 12 months. You know what you want to do – you know when you want that result. How are you going to sell that extra 40%? These could be some of your options…
The last thing on your list is how will you measure the success of each of your objectives? Sticking with the rag doll example, this is an easy one – each quarter, measure how many more dolls you have sold compared to the same time last year. To achieve your 40% increase over the course of the year, you need to see a steady increase in sales from the new selling strategies you’ve put in place.
OK, so you’ve tested whether you can be found, you’ve registered your business to make it easier to be found in search engines. Now you need to look at your website and ensure you have the right keywords and phrases in place.
If you are a creative person, you may find that everyday jobs like email, accounts, taxes, marketing, social media or marketing, a distraction from what you want to be focussing on. Hiring someone to do those jobs for you is a great option, and hiring in an expert gives you peace of mind that everything will be done to a high standard and you can stop worrying about it.
Running your own business can be very isolating and this can be depressing if you were previously used to working in a busy environment. There are always local groups of small businesses who get together to network, have lunch and generally chat about their businesses. Join some of those groups and meet other people … it’s highly motivating to talk to someone who is enthusiastic about what they do and that energy is contagious and will help you to revive your excitement about your business.
When you’re first in business, it’s like being in love. Exhilarating, exciting, stimulating. Then, after a while, it might feel like your business is losing its appeal, it’s become humdrum and a bit boring, as reality of day to day life sets in. It’s hard work and maybe not as financially rewarding as you hoped…and it makes you tired and irritable.
So what’s the secret to rekindling the love for your business? Remind yourself of all the good things…make a list of all that’s good about your business, the positive things it brings you. What really matters to you and what ignited that spark to be in business in the first time? And finally, never lose hope, being in business for yourself isn’t a bed of roses, but with a little bit of patience and effort, you can learn to love it again and keep it alive and kicking.
I came across an article online the other day about a slimming club. It gave the most amazing stories about people who had lost a lot of weight by changing the way they think about food. Then it occurred to me that this mind-set could apply to marketing. We’re all guilty of thinking that the hill is impossible to climb and that, in itself, puts obstacles in our way.
the Marketing and Communications department, I wanted to go for a promotion. In a meeting with my boss, she told me that if I wanted to go further and get my next grade, I needed to act like I already had that grade. So I looked at the criteria for the next grade and started learning how to do some of things that required and started acting like I was doing the job. After a relatively short time, I was promoted – my behaviours had changed and, instead of sitting there wishing I was the next grade up, I worked and thought as if I was already there. Applying this to small businesses, by learning the right marketing behaviours and practicing them, over time you will become more successful at marketing.
If a free ‘gift’ is being offered, such as the cookery cards, they are giving you something to try in the hope that you’ll be impressed, like them and then buy their product. Similarly, if you sign up to a monthly newsletter, it might be that you get some great information, but at some point there will be an opportunity to try a training course, or buy an e-book. Of course, there is no obligation to do this and you’ll still get the information, but it’s a great marketing ploy to plug your business. And the way the CTA is written doesn’t give you time to think – the ‘do it now’ approach with no obligation means you have nothing to lose – it encourages you to respond straight away.
You may find someone or a few people who you could collaborate with. For example if you’re a hairdresser, you might want to team up with a make-up artist, so you can pull together a package for weddings or prom events. You can put a link to their website on yours and vice versa.
If you’re a blogger, arrange to interview an influential person in your niche…someone who is an expert or leading authority on the kind of thing you do. You could interview them as a podcast or use it for a blog post. Either way, once published, that person will tell his/her contacts about the interview and point them to it…and you will get more traffic to your blog/website and the possibility of them using your products or services.
The Write Way 