Keith Goodrum

Today’s guest post is by Sharyn Essman is a recovering attorney and the owner of FeeFiFoto.com. You can find more about her or contact her through her blog.

Remember Mrs. Fisher, the miniskirted junior high typing teacher whose male students never seemed to improve despite their slavish attention to her every move thigh word?

Not technically Mrs. Fisher, but you get the picture

Anyway. Focus.

Remember her insistence that numbers less than ten (10 — or was it 20?) must be written typed out? Turns out Mrs. Fisher wasn’t 100% right.

After abandoning the practice of law I wrote resumes for 15 years, obsessing over design, language and font choice. Before too long I concluded that for a piece of sales-oriented writing to be impressive and memorable it must above all be easy to read and interpret; font choice was irrelevant. The intended audience resented having to play hide and seek; they wanted to be spoon fed and not forced to hunt for pertinent information. Unusual fonts or layouts would just annoy readers and send them on to the next piece in the Inbox.

Like it? It’s called “Gypsy Curse.” Great for a Halloween party invitation. For a resume? Not so much.

From Sinisterfonts.com

A key element of this rule was to use digits whenever possible, since the eye is drawn to anything distinct from the surrounding material. In other words, a “seventeen percent” increase in sales would catch the eye better written as “17%”.

Try it – skim the previous paragraphs and note how the digits catch your eye. I’ll wait.

Musical interlude: “Feelings! Whoa, whoa, whoa – feelings!”

Bet she got your attention, didn’t she?

Image from rocktownweekly.com

See my point? If you aim to stand out from tons of material similar to yours but you make it difficult to detect what’s important about you, your intended audience will abandon you and move on to the next candidate.

Why am I telling you this? Because I have nothing better to talk about Because it illustrates the importance of images in making your marketing and blogging memorable.

Remember Crazy Eddie? His prices were INSANE and he was too, but he sure was hard to forget.

Image from nextnetworks.com

As a blogger you compete for the attention of readers who are being pulled in eleventy million directions, kind of like moms but with a bit less spill wipage. If you aspire to retain your reader’s attention, you’d darn well better offer something interesting, useful and easily accessible or risk her stumbling on to someone else’s blog. One easy and effective way to make your blog memorable is to use images in your posts.

A picture’s worth – well, you know.

No matter what you’re selling, provide an image to help readers visualize your subject. I blog to promote my website, FeeFiFoto, which puts digital photos on all sorts of gift items. I’d be foolish to describe a personalized photo watch, for example, without providing a related image. The same goes for any other consumer item: selling your car, or camera, or computer, or anything on eBay is much easier if you provide an image along with the description.

You claim images are beneath your blog’s dignity? Well, bravo for dignity, but if you challenge your reader to trudge through your material on a scavenger hunt for what you’re selling, you’ll be like a tree falling in the forest and just maybe no one will hear you.

Always wondered how the Wall Street Journal created these portraits. I figured it was done with computers, but guess what: real people draw these! And admit it – it catches and holds your attention.

Image by Randy Glass

Even the Wall Street Journal, the embodiment of dignity, provides images. You should too.