It doesn’t matter what kind of business you run, a solid content marketing plan is a must if you want to grow quickly.

But once you start putting together a plan for releasing content that will engage your potential customers, you need to do everything possible to make that content attractive.

Taking your blog post and content from good to great is no easy task.

In today’s Social Media Dominated environment, one of the most important things for content marketers is to make their content seem attractive on Social Media.

If you’ve gone through and learned how to do market research correctly, you should be able to write a blog post that targets your ideal consumer. When your writing is hitting the right audience, you should see them sharing the content that you write on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, as well as Linkedin.

When we first started the Fearless Social Blog, we noticed that the images we used as the main blog post image (the one you see at the top of any post on this blog) made a huge difference in the amount of traffic that we got to that post. Not only did we get more shares when we used an attractive image, but we also got a lot more people coming to the blog and reading the post.

While that wasn’t a surprise, coming up with really good images was tough.

Finding a System to Create Great Social Images was Tough

With that in mind, our team started looking for ways that we could put together highly shareable images without much effort.

After about a month of trying everything out there, we finally settled on a few tools and built a system around creating post images that are highly sharable (no matter what subject matter you write about).

In this post, I want to show you exactly how to use that system to create amazing social media images for your blog post that will get you a ton of shares on Social Media.

In this post we’ll cover:

• How to Find the Perfect Image for Social Sharing.
• The Power Behind Creating a “Branding Box” for your Content.
• How to Use a Software called Canva to Create the Perfect Branded Social Image.

How to Find the Perfect Image for Social Sharing (the “naked image”)

Every good blog post image that we use here starts with a what we call the “naked image”. This is typically a stock photo that we have purchased the rights to use that will form the base of our Social Share image. While most people would stop at just using this image, we take it a step further for branding purposes.

Every good Social Share Image starts with the “Naked Image”.

Qualities We Look For When Picking An Image

Every “naked image” that we use meets a few criteria:

1. It has to look amazing.
   The last thing you want on your blog is an image that looks like you pulled it out of a google search. You want images that look like a pro photographer took them. If this blog represents your brand and business, you want to make sure that the image you’re using to represent you is top notch.
2. Contrasting Colors
   The majority of your share based traffic will typically come from Facebook. With that fact in mind, we want images that are going to contrast well against the famous “Facebook Blue“. We want your image to stand out against the blue on Facebook so it catches people’s attention as they are scrolling through their feed.
3. Visual Hooks
   There are certain qualities that just make an image stand out and get clicked.A Few Types of Images with Irresistible Visual Hooks:
   
   Images that have People Looking Back at You.
   

   

   
   Images that have something weird Going on in Them.
   

   

   
   Images that Use Subtle Sex Appeal
   

   

   
   

Where we Get Our Blog Post Images From

The key to getting an image that’s going to stand out and follow all of the rules above is to use a stock photo site. Too many blogs on the internet are using images that 1000 other people have used. This is a terrible way to distinguish yourself in the market.

I am an advocate for always paying for images that we use on our blog just because it ensures that we will be more unique than most. That said, I compiled a list of a few places that you can go get images that will be unique and high quality. You also shouldn’t have to worry about copyright issues when you use these.

Pixabay

The images a Pixabay are free and super high quality. You also get a good assortment of Vector images. The best part is that everything is searchable and you can go in and find what you want based on the topic of your post.

Gratisography

This is a bit of a more unique type of site and you’ll have to do some digging. The cool part about Gratisography is that these images are 100% unique to this site.

Viintage
There is absolutely nothing like this site on the internet. Viintage helps you find old, public domain images that you can use in your content. These are typically very visually appealing and have a ton of bright colors. You’ll have to pay a small fee to access everything but it’s worth it if you’ll looking for style.

The Power Behind Creating a Branding Box for your Content

Now that you have a great “naked image” as the base for what will end up as your blog post Social Share Image, it’s time to add a little personalization to it. To do that we want to add something to your image which is called a “brand box”. If you look at the image that is at the top of this post you’ll see a dark grey box that has our Fearless Social brand logo on the side of it.

While this is something that is super easy to create on your own, we thought that we would save you the trouble.

Right Click the image below to download it to your computer.

Once you download the image above you’ll want to add your own personalize brand graphic to the right corner. You can do this with a variety of graphic design programs, but I would highly recommend you just follow the directions in the next section as it’s the easiest way I’ve ever done it.

How to Use Canva to Create the Perfect Branded Social Image

Now that we’ve got our “naked image” and our Branding Box ready, we just need to combine everything in a neat and clean design. To do that we’re going to use an online tool called Canva.

The best part about Canva is that it comes with a set of templates that are pre-sized to fit the most commonly used types of graphics that you might use online.

For our purposes, we’re going to select the Facebook Ad Template as this should be the perfect fit for most blogs and for Social Sharing.

To Create our Final Social Share Image we’re going to combine:

1. Our Naked Image
2. The Branding Box
3. Your Businesses Logo
4. Some Text for the Post title.

Let’s start combining everything for the perfect social share image.

To start out you’re going to upload all of your graphics to the Canva Interface.

Next, we’re going to Select our base “naked image” and put it on the main canvas. From there we’re going to drag the image so that it’s top right corner is in the canvas’ top right corner. After we do that we’re click on the bottom left corner and drag it to fill the canvas.

Once we get the base image stretched we’re going to add our branding box and stretch it out over the canvas as well.

After that you’re going to add your logo by clicking on it and dragging it to the right corner.

After that we’re going to add our Post title via the text tool and change the color to white so that it looks good over our black background.

And then we’re going to justify the text to the left and then drag it to the bottom left corner of the canvas.

When our image looks like we want it to, we’re going to export it to our computer.

And Finally, we’re going to upload the image we just created in Canva to our WordPress site as the “Featured Image”.

What’s Next?

Now that you know how to create an amazing image that will grab people’s attention and build your brand at the same time, it’s time to start putting what you learned into action.

You should now be able to build amazing, share worthy, images that will make your blog and brand look amazing.

Got a Question or Comment about this Tutorial? Post it Below.