Hi, I’m Rhett Soveran and sometimes I am very silly, sometimes I am very serious. Today, I am silly. This is a picture of my wife and I this past Christmas, in farm overalls, before going on a hayride. I am showing you this picture for two reasons: (1) I want you to get to know me and (2) I want you to see the importance of pictures.
I have no doubt that this topic has been covered, repeatedly, with statistics. In fact, I have read a couple. And where would humanity be without our god—Statisticus. We have stats for everything: statistics that track eye-movement and clickthrough rates and pagviews and so on. Funny enough, the numbers go up when we use images. It’s like dangling your keys in front of a baby. Gah! So shiny and makes noise. In my mind, Gah! is sound a baby makes in exclamation.
Instead of assuming the shiny-object theory, I say we give ourselves a little more credit and say that I want to see pictures because I want to get to know you. I can’t help it. I do. But you keep witholding yourself from me. I click on your About and I see just a small block of text and no pictures. Get over yourself. I know, you feel arrogant for writing in the third person and putting your beautiful face online. I used to feel that way too. Maybe the internet just needs you to be a little arrogant.
I have said it before and I will say it again, the internet is naturally void of humanity. It is your job as members of this community to bring yourselves into it. I don’t care if you are a small or big business or a personal or professional blogger. Put your damn picture online. Share yourself.
Not putting pictures of yourself, your employees and the people you love and work with online is the biggest mistake and most people don’t do it. And if you want to chalk it up to stats, marketing and keeping users on your site, than do it (And a little trick put them in a Z pattern, it leads the eye down (like pinstripes)). And I won’t argue. It will absolutely work. But, if you are looking for the deeper reason, it’s because we all want to know you. So, don’t be a jerk, put your picture online and share yourself.
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2 Comments
Pictures are definitely a must have for every type of blog I can think of. We use our own pictures for our about page and usually some kind of stock photo or free photo for our posts. It’s my job to go back over the blog my wife and I run to find posts without photos, but right now I’m feeling lazy and I’m reading this blog instead. But I will get it done (eventually) because it’s an excellent way to give emphasis to your post and give your readers a taste of what’s to come.
BTW, for those to afraid to use your own photos I regularly refer to this post on another blog about how to get free photos from Flickr with the appropriate licenses (so you don’t get sued or anything). You can find it at http://www.skelliewag.org/a-complete-guide-to-finding-and-using-incredible-flickr-images-162.htm
Sorry the link is so long.
Yeh, Jamie. I am not always completely behind Skellie’s ideas; however, that was a very helpful post. I show other people that when I can. It’s a great bit of info. The one thing that everyone should remember, especially once you are using a blog for a long period of time, is to keep the image style class the same. I have a tendency, on my personal blog, to switch themes often and it wasn’t until the third or fourth switch that I started to take the style class with me.