Rocking Your Blog and Social Media with Visual Marketing

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This is a special episode where I sit down for a chat in a Google + HOA with my friend and fellow blogger Wade Harman. 

The topic for the HOA is The Psychology of Images in Social Media - Visual Marketing and we talk in detail about using images in your posts on Google+ and other social media platforms as well as your blog.

Let me Introduce You to Wade Harman

Wade is one of the frequent guest authors featured on my primary blog Basic Blog Tips. Here is Wade's bio:

Hi, my name is Wade Harman. I'm a full time blogger at the Social Media Marketing blog, with a degree in Psychology. I show you how to spark an emotional reaction, get people's attention, and encourage them to take action! Let me help you drive targeted traffic through social media strategies that I have researched and use myself! Let me coach you and see how my strategies in social media can help YOU drive targeted traffic!

Wade is growing his social presence on platforms like Google+ by networking and providing valuable content that gets attention and makes him stand out among the crowd. His latest guest post on the blog currently has over 200 +1 on Google and Wade is no stranger to getting those kinds of results. 

You will here us talking about an image that got a lot of engagement and the post from Google + is embedded below.

During the HOA event, we responded to quite a few questions that came in from some other "plussers" like

• Les Dossey
• Andy Nathan (Andy is also a guest author on Basic Blog Tips)
• Jeff Sieh
• Jimmie Lanley

One of the questions that come up is about creating a Call To Action on a Google+ post. Wade shared one strategy he uses which is to add a "Pin it for later" link next to a link to the image on Pinterest. I think this is a good strategy to test to see if it resonates with your audience. I recently recorded a video about TailwindApp, and it's a fantastic tool you can use to see what kind of results you get by adding "Pin it" as your call to action. If you want to go into more details about using Pinterest, in a future episode, please let me know in the comments below.

Another tool that Wade and I both use for our visual marketing campaigns is PicMonkey.

PicMonkey makes it very easy for you to customize images by adding text, borders, overlays, backgrounds and themes that will really make your images pop! I use PicMonkey to customize just about every image that I post on my blog.

Here are a few additional resources mentioned:

Light Shot Extension for Chrome
Canva (currently in beta)
Pixlr extension for Chrome
Video Blocks