An image is worth 1,000 words - even on Milyin. As a Creator, if you are not leveraging images to your advantage, you are losing out.
Humans are visual learners, and regardless of what creation you publish, you should leverage images. While Milyin is still a predominantly written-content-driven platform, images can still help enhance your Creations.
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Note: At the end of this Creation, I will be telling you a secret trick that less than 3% of Creators use that can help you boost your viewership.
Hello, I am Aditya Agarwal, Co-Founder at Milyin, and this is Becoming Creator, a new series for every Creator who wants to grow at Milyin.
Why You Should Use Images
Reading text gets boring and monotonous; only reading enthusiasts can go on and on reading. That's why I try to keep my Creations engaging and more appealing through the use of headings, images, lists, and various other types of blocks.
Images make Creations more welcoming and friendly. You want something eye-catching to grab the attention of casual scrollers and make them actually read your Creations.
Here are some key advantages of images:
- Attraction: Images can visually stimulate the audience and make them more compelled to open your Creations
- Search Engines: People may find/view your Creations if your images get ranked by search engines like Google on their images page.
- Engagement: Ideally, you want your audience to spend a lot of time on your Creation; images help improve retention and make sure people stay on your Creations for longer durations.
How to Find The Right Images
I know a lot of people would have read till here, and spam their Creations with images. Hold on!
Images are critical. Bad images do more harm than good. Having the right image becomes even more critical when choosing the thumbnail, but I am getting ahead of myself. This Creation will only focus on Images in general.
Test: I have devised a test for you to help you better decide whether an image is good or not. The test is simple - Just look at your image in isolation, and think, what would be the most appropriate caption for this? If the caption matches your Creation title or the specific topic, you are good to go.
Let me explain with an example:
Take these 2 images:
Image 1
Image 2
Now, apply the test, you might think for Image 1 "A man tying a tie", whereas for image 2 you might think "A man wearing a suit" to be the appropriate.
Let's apply the test, so we have 2 captions, now let's say if our Creation was about "How to choose the best tie for work", image 1 will match, but image 2 will not match.
Similarly, if your Creation title was "How to look good in a business meeting", image 2 might be ideal, but Image 1 will not be as relevant.
So, what have we learnt? No image is definitively good or bad, but every image has a varying degree of relevance based on the topic.
Use this test to always find relevant images for your Creations.
Always remember to:
- Keep your images relevant
- Ensure images are visible and sharp
- Try uploading images that are not too big, ideally less than 1 MB, so that people with slow internet can also enjoy them.
- Space out images. In the end, images are like supporting actors in a movie; they are vital but not your lead actor. Your written Creations should independently be enough.
Also, keep reading because I will tell you a valuable insight that less than 3% of Creations at Milyin are using.
How To Make Images?
Copyrights and Intellectual properties should always be respected. Searching Google might give you great images, but most likely you will be breaking law by using those images.
You largely have 3 options:
- Search on Google for copyright free images (using filters)
- Make your own images (generally too time consuming and hard)
- Redesign existing images so that they are very distinct. You can use some images under a Creative Common license on the internet and then edit them using tools like Canva, which are easy and beginner-friendly.
Yes they are time consuming and none them are ideal. Hopefully some day in future we will build tools in Milyin itself for image finding, but now's not the time for that.
Pro Tip: Use The Right File Names
As promised, I am sharing a rarely used pro tip for improving your images. Do you know how search engines and image-searching tools find relevant images? They use Alt-Text.
Alt-Text is a text associated with every image. This is used to provide textual context about an image to ChatGPT, Google Search, etc. In addition, visually impaired people may use screen reading tools to access your Creation, they can use alt-text.
So, Alt-Text can help bots understand your image better and thus more prominently display the associated Creation in search results. But how do we specify alt-texts? Well, at Milyin, we use the filename of the image as Alt Text.
Use proper filenames. I often see images with filenames like aouhroeihtoiba.jpg instead of A Red Car.jpg. Let's say your filename is A Person Sitting Under Tree.jpg. We will automatically set Alt-Text as "A Person Sitting Under Tree"
This can be hugely consequential if done properly.
Time For Questions
So, that's about it for images. Hope you got to learn from it. Everything I say here is suggestive and based on my own understanding, it's not compulsory to follow it.
Feel free to reach out to me in Comment section for any doubts, suggestions, or thoughts.
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