I’ve been blogging for years and as social media has flourished as a medium, I’ve become more and more passionate about promoting good content with social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. I’ve built a business around this concept as a means to:

1. entertain and educate people with good content
2. get my client’s name out there
3. gain links to my clients’ sites as a bonus.

I think most guest blogging professionals would agree that that’s the order our priorities should be in. There’s been a lot of conversation in the blogosphere about increasing the quality of content, which is obviously a good thing, but I’ve found that sometimes when my company writes a great article, I end up having to post it on a lower quality site that I would have liked (it happens), but then they also frequently get posted with little attention to presentation; how the article is laid out, and how appealing it is to the reader. As social media (Facebook) has continued become more and more ubiquitous, this attention to detail has become more critical.

When a site owner posts one of my articles, I really appreciate it and see it as a no-brainer to show it some social media love, but some articles shine better in a Facebook feed than others for one simple reason: images.

Big ups to My Blog Guest users RapidNewsNetwork, JonathonHewitt, rodmacb, and others for going beyond just copy, paste, and publish, but also taking the time to dress up their articles a little before they push them out the door.

Images (and video for that matter), make our articles so much more visually engaging and can draw in the reader, increasing their time spent on your site, and therefore their likelihood to click on an ad (if that’s your goal).

If you don’t want to spend money on stock photography, there’s a lot of free stock photos out there, plus there’s the WikiMedia Commons and Flickr (do an advanced search for Creative Commons licensed photos) that have tons of images that you can use free of charge as long as you follow their licensing guidelines.

When you have an article with an image in it, Facebook will usually pull it in when people share the link, and that little thumbnail really makes your link look more credible and enticing to click on. Seems like a small, silly thing, but it’s really important.

The more clicks the article you post gets in the Social Universe, the more likely that people will be to share it, which means increased traffic ($). So, the next time you’re pressed for time and tempted to just publish an article to slap some fresh content into place, consider the opportunity costs. Please, for your sake and the guest blogger’s sake too, take the extra time to give the article some visual appeal and you’ll find that your articles will perform better overall.

Thanks,

Jonathan

Jonathan Fashbaugh is president of Off-Topic Media, an online public relations company that writes content on topics ranging from social media to no-kill animal shelters and ANYTHING in between.

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