It has been clearly demonstrated that blog posts with compelling imagery perform much better in every respect – click-through rates, search visibility, conversion ratio and page views – even reader comprehension increases. The simplest solution to great images is taking your own (if you have the skill and camera equipment). But when you aren’t able to take time to create images, there are other options which will work just as well. Screen captures, stock photos, graphs & charts or even user generated Instagram or Facebook photos – with the creators approval.

Yes, it’s a visual medium, that’s true, but text is only part of it. Great bloggers know blog images are critical. They are an all-important ingredient, second only to a great headline. Every great book needs a cover; every great post needs an image. Why? The blog image directly affects shares and traffic. Images get shared more in Twitter. Tweets with pictures see a 35% increase in retweets. And posts with images get shared a lot more on Facebook. 87% of the top posts in Facebook include pictures. ‘Blog Images Best Practices’ by Orbit Media

It can be well worth the time invested to add images to your business blog posts so that you can add titles with large, stylized text over the image to more strongly take an editorial position. If you haven’t got experience with simple graphics programs that facilitate applying text, it can be a valuable addition to your blogging arsenal. For example, there are apps for iPhones that easily let you type in text over images and plenty of inexpensive desktop software to accomplish the same task. Photographs with text titles are a staple of business blog imagery. Screen captures with text labels can illustrate software concepts and provide colorful emphasis as overlays on images of charts and graphs.

Business blogs that feature visually interesting photos get more clicks on their article pages because there is more than a simple headline to grab the readers attention. Including large quotes across scenic backgrounds can work, depending on the subject you want to discuss in your post. Easily recognizable symbols such as a dollar sign, exclamation point or question marks can quickly draw attention to a post if applied to appropriate background images.

We’ve all seen images that can instantly evoke moods of loneliness, excitement or make us laugh out loud. Speaking of laughing, cartoons on your subject can be licensed inexpensively through a cartoonist syndication site such as CagleCartoons. It makes sense to choose a style and stick to it if your site has a strong color scheme you want to consistently compliment or a theme that lends itself to a single color palette. Whatever you decide to do, consider using images on every single post and use multiple images on long posts to help break up large blocks of text.