With a highly-visual audience, your content should be full of images that engage your reader and keep them scrolling through your text. What better way to create your content than to start with the image? Finding the perfect images, infographic, data visualization or instructograph can help enlighten your audience — and all you have to do is write about it without being redundant.
The Visual Aid
Ah, the good ol’ college days…did you ever take a communications or public speaking class? I took a few and every single one of them stressed the importance of not putting all your presentation points on your slides, right? The point of a visual aid is to keep your audience interested and help them focus on what you are saying. The audience gets bored and stops listening if you are just using up extra words to talk about something they are reading about behind you. Ever listened to someone read long-winded points or quotes off their slides? It’s a miserable fail.
Blog writing is much the same – if you are using a visual aid, you will want to select images that are captivating and help make your point without literally making your point. If, for example, you are using an infographic or instructograph, you will definitely not want to then spell out the same information in your article text. Use a few points, but come at the data from an all-new angle to give your reader something different to consider in addition to the great visual. If it’s all in the visual, your writing is a waste of space.
Infographics, Data Visualization and Instructographs – Oh, My!
You might be scratching your head about some of these visual aid names, so let’s go over them briefly:
Image/Graphic/Picture/Illustration
Photos, drawings or other forms of a single image or picture that can be used to illustrate your text or article direction in some way.
Meme
A humorous image that usually has text overlay (many different texts might be used for the same image).
Data Visualization
A creative type of “pie chart” or method for displaying one type of statistic in graphic form.
(Data Visualization about Successful Infographics)
Infographic
A combination of illustration, graphic design, and text to express a series of statistics (often from different sources) to get across a larger and more powerful point to the viewer.
Instructograph
A series of illustrations or photos combined with text (usually in a vertical or horizontal layout), presenting a visual “how-to” demonstration that clearly helps a viewer achieve a task.
(Segment of an instructographic on creating instructographics)
Visual Inspiration and Your Copywriter for Hire
I’ve already written about the importance of visual aids in your articles. Did you know a typical viewer will stay only a few seconds, unless immediately engaged? Present your copywriter for hire with a great visual aid and let them craft content to fit — it is more sharable, more interesting, and more impacting with an image. Oh, and you also have less time invested in brainstorming content ideas.
Alethea M is a corporate blogging guru and freelance writer for WriterAccess. She often uses interesting facts from her article research to impress friends at dinner parties. Her husband is her biggest fan — though this may be because her writing income allows her to share in bill-paying each month.
