191: Tools for Creating Great Visual Content for Your Blog

Making the Most of Tools, Apps and Services to Create Visual Content for Your Blog In today’s lesson, we’re going to talk tools for creating great visual content for your blog. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been exploring different types of content that you can use on your blog. In episode 187 we talked written content, in 189 video content and back in 180 we talked about live video. Each are important types of content to be able to create for your blog - but one that is increasingly important today is visual content. When I was looking back at some screenshots of my very first blog from 2002, recently, I was amazed by how boring it looked. Not a single post in the first few months of my blogging used even an image - it was purely text. Today, the web is a much more visual place and I can’t remember the last time I published content without at least one form of visual content in it. Visual content helps you to stand out from the crowd, it gives your content personality, it makes it more useful and it increases the chances of it being shared. The great thing is that we’re operating in a time where there are so many great ways to create visual content. There are so many tools and services available to us - so many that it can be overwhelming to know which ones to use. So in today’s episode, I asked Peg Fitzpatrick to come on the show to talk to us about her favorite tools, apps and services. We talk about apps and tools for creating great content, great sources for free stock photos, a tool that will help with the sharing of your visual content and one for organising all of the visual content you create. As you listen you might want to have today’s show notes open where I list all of the tools, apps and services mention. Resources and Tools for Creating Great Visual Content for Your Blog Join our Facebook Group Adobe Spark Canva Ripl Giphy Skitch Adobe Draw Adobe Color Eye Dropper Chrome Extension Libre Stock Unsplash Big Stock Photo Stocksy Trello Social Warfare Plugin Peg’s blog Peg’s post on visual style guides Peg’s post on using Trello Is written content dead? How to create great video content How to create great live video How to Life the Quality of your Blog with Embeddable Content Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to grow the audience to your blog, to create content that’s going to change that audience’s life in some way and hopefully make a profit from your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about tools that you can use to create great visual content for your blog and for your social media. Over the last few weeks and episodes of this podcast, we’ve been exploring different types of content that you can use on your blog. In episode 187, we talked about written content, perhaps the most obvious type of content for a blog. In 189, I talked about video content and had a great interview with Justin Brown on how to create great video content. Even back in episode 180, we talked about live video and how to create a live video particularly for Facebook. Each of these types of content is really important to be able to create for your blog today. But one that’s increasingly important today is visual content. It can actually be used in a lot of the other types of content as well. I looked back the other day at my first blog and some screenshots of it from 2002 and I was amazed at how boring it looked. Not a single post on the front page of that blog in 2002 had even any image in it, it was purely text. Today,