Visuals to Enhance Your Message

Grab their attention for a few seconds

Visuals Cliffs from below 400

Website visitors are impatient.  They need visuals to distract them.  If they are not really interested in the first 3 seconds, they will probably leave your page.  So, use images with a “wow” factor to grab their attention.  The special picture should be above the fold if possible.

A picture is worth 1000 words

The brain processes a picture much faster than text — 60,000 times faster.  So, a picture is probably worth much more than 1000 words.

What makes visuals different from text?

  • Visuals are stored directly in the long-term memory
  • Text is stored in the short-term memory
  • Images increase comprehension, recollection and retention to a greater extent than text does
  • So, people are more likely to remember things on your web page if text is accompanied by a picture
  • Pictures enhance emotions more strongly than text.
  • Pictures engage the imagination to a greater extent than text
  • Pictures heighten creative thinking to a greater extent than text
  • The brain processes everything about a picture simultaneously
  • With text, the brain processes it one word at a time

 

Souces of visuals

SVisuals kitch optionsWhen you are explaining things, it often helps if you use a program such as Skitch to grab part of an image to explain a point.  Visuals help us decode text.

Sometimes, or probably usually, visitors will leave your page if you do not grab their attention within the first few seconds.  I often go to Adobe Stock and pay $3 for a photo that will “wow” people long enough to get them to read the page. 

Note that to use Adobe Stock you must pay $30 USD per month for 10 photos. If that is too much, try the nocostimages alternative.

Try going to 8 sources of free stock images.

Reduce the size of some images

Note that these Adobe Stock pictures will be very large and therefore slow down the speed at which your website opens.  So, to avoid losing viewers, use GIMP to reduce the size of an image.

If you have a 3 MB picture and drag a corner to make it smaller, it will still be a 3 MB picture.  So, go to GIMP and use used Image > Scale Image to reduce the size of a picture.

Today I had a 1.3 MB picture that was 700 pixels wide.  I used GIMP to reduce it to 400 pixels wide.  It was only 400 kB.

Social media marketing

Cliffs from below 400

I rarely make a social media post without having a photo that grabs people’s attention.  I’ll take the best picture from a blog post and have an image upload with that same picture in my posts on

  • Twitter
  • Facebook page
  • Google+

Each social media post will link back to the blog post.  The picture with a “wow” factor helps people to stay on my social media post long enough that they end up going to the blog.

The fold

The fold is the position on a web page where the majority of browsers viewing the page will begin to scroll.

Megabytes & kilobytes

A Mb is approximately 1000 times larger than a kB.  Specifically,

  • 1 byte = 8 bits
  • 1 Kilobyte = 1024 bytes
  • 1 Megabyte = 1024 Kilobytes

 

bit.ly/nocostimages

The Bitly address, bit.ly/nocostimages is an easy-to-remember web address for the Dreamstime website. Dreamstime has a collection of tens of millions of photos, illustrations, video snippets, etc. The lower quality images are free. The higher quality ones cost money. Dreamstime can be a very good source of free images.

In the above screenshot, someone searched All Content for pictures that represented designing websites.  What if your designing websites picture must match the blue colour in your header. Then you would add the word blue to your search term.

 


Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of the free YouTube video-creation tutorial called 7 Day YouTube.

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Google Plus for Your Social Media Marketing

You must have social media

google plusYour business cannot afford ignore social media marketing these days.  You simply need Google Plus and other social media to increase your engagement and sales.

If getting started seems overwhelming to you, start with the major ones, one at a time.  They would include LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.  This page talks about your Google Plus page.

Privacy

google plusGoogle+ makes it simple to connect with a wide variety of people.  The variety of people are called circles.  For instance, you can have a circle of your workplace colleagues, another circle for the people in your Friday night band, another for your family and another for your customers.  You can choose which circle(s) can view a post or connect with you.

To get a better understanding of circles, watch the one-minute Circle video.

One at a time

As you can see from the Google+ menu on the left, this is a complex social medium.  It is best to learn one thing at a time.  Let’s start with Pages.

Pages

When using Pages for your business, you can start one Google Plus page for each aspect of your business.  In the example to the right, one page is about social media and the other one is about dogs.

The business purpose of the social media page is to sell software.  Each post links to some valuable information about social media.  Within each post the visitor has the opportunity to buy some software.  The promotion is done in such a way that it does not excessively distract from the social media message.

On the page about dogs, each post links to interesting information about dogs.  Occasionally there will be a post that promotes granite pet memorials.


Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.

Setting up a Google Plus page

Before you set up a page, set up your profile as described below. Then click on the Pages tab in the menu followed by the Get your page tab near the upper right-hand corner.   Then choose your business type.

After you choose the business type,  customize your public profile.  Add a tag line of 10 words that best describe your page.  Add an easily-recognizable profile picture.  It is common for the author of the page to add his/her own photo.  However, it could be something such as a logo.

After you have added your Create a Google+ page information:

  • Add more photos to represent your business & your brand
  • Add an introduction to your business.  Keep in mind that the first 50 characters will appear in Google+ search results
  • Add contact information
  • Add some links to your other social media and to your website
  • Click Save

You are finished.  Add Google Plus posts regularly, daily if possible.

Add animated GIF to Google Plus page

Click the red circle with the pencil icon in the lower right-hand corner. Drag the animated GIF from your Finder to the space that says, “What’s new with you?”

Initial sign up with Google Plus

It is simple to sign up with Google+.
If you don’t have a Google account yet, create one.
You must make sure you have a Google profile.
Following the prompts above, you will be able to start using Google+.   If that does not help you to set up Google+, go to the Dummies Google+ page.

Related Links

The Social Media Examiner website says: Follow these steps to set up your company page on Google+ and check out these examples of other businesses on Google+.    More

The Baer Performance Marketing website says: As we mentioned in our last article, most people think Google+ is the social media network they can forget about. However, Google+ is a great network with many benefits. G+ is the one thing that ties all of Google’s services …   More

A re/code news interview with Google’s head of social media says: Our users love Circles. They love that Google+ has privacy built in as a
feature from the very beginning. That nuanced sharing that we’ve led
with, and others have added to their products which I think is
wonderful, has been a big improvement to the industry.
   More

The ProgrammableWeb website says: The social media market shows no sign of slowing down, with the top networks solidifying their leads. But we have also seen some of the smaller social media networks grow and new ones emerge. Another interesting trend …   More

Wikipedia says: Google+ launched in June 2011. Features included the ability to post photos and status updates to the stream or interest based communities, group different types of relationships (rather than simply “friends”) into Circles, a multi-person instant messaging, text and video chat called Hangouts, events, location tagging, and the ability to edit and upload photos to private cloud-based albums…  Read more

 


Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of the free YouTube video-creation tutorial called 7 Day YouTube.

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