Your blog is unique, and it has a personality all its own. Right?

We also know from last week that blogs with pictures are more engaging, and tend to have higher readership than those that are just flat text.

Those things being true, it follows that you’ll want to have pictures on your blog. So many blogs, however, settle for generic stock photos that you’ve seen a hundred times already. This week, we’ll look at some examples on picking images that aren’t blasé or cliché, or any other words with an accent mark.

Our philosophy here at MWD Web is to use unique images that capture the spirit of the post, and convey its message in an interesting and perhaps unexpected way.

Sometimes this is informed by the title of our post. For example, “You’re Not Too Small to Fight Back” features an angry, scary-looking spider. For “The Impotent Web Site Owner,” a cute little caged kitten seemed a good metaphor.

Sometimes the analogy requires a little more thought. For example, for “Choosing the Right Web Hosting Plan,” our first idea was to have a cross section of a crowded apartment building with noisy neighbors, to illustrate the drawbacks of a shared hosting setup. That particular image didn’t seem to be available, however, so we hit upon the idea of the grease fire, which we explain in the post. It’s a striking image, and there’s no immediate connection between Web hosting and a grease fire, so you naturally want to click the Read More link to find out what the heck we were thinking.

In “Thou Shalt Not Steal (a parable),” which is written like a Bible passage, we took the idea and found a good stained-glass window shot. When was the last time you saw a stained-glass window on a blog about internet marketing?

Perusing the available photos online can be a bit of a minefield at times. For the post “Mobilize Your Site or Suffer the Consequences,” we did a search for ‘punishment’ and got some, shall we say, inappropriate results.

If all else fails, go for a picture of a cute kid. Just don’t overuse that idea, or it will quickly become stale.

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A well-written, interesting blog post will use allusions, metaphors, and other similar devices you learned about in high school English class. Draw on those for inspiration for your photos, and you’ll be amazed at what you come up with to illustrate your posts in a unique and interesting way.

Next week: where does one find these pictures? How much do they cost? How do I not get sued?

Photo Credit: sidewalk flying via Compfight cc