Journey

I never paid particular attention to making my featured images or thumbnails “Facebook or Pinterest” friendly but I definitely noticed the difference in traffic & likes/shares when I did take the time & make the effort.

After merging 3 of my sites back into this one ⁽⁰¹⁾ Site Changes – Merged 3 of my sites into 1 , and having to reorganize my posts and reupload featured-images and so on, I also decided to redesign as many of the featured images of posts as I could (that are not too out-dated to re-promote them to Facebook & Pinterest).

To gather inspiration & ideas, I spent a few minutes in Pinterest, Google Images & the Facebook newsfeed to check out images that “stood out” against the others. What I noticed is that although I liked a few “fancy” images, that the ones that “stood out” the best were those that:

When you do your own research, you might find your opinion/tastes differ than mine, depending on your interests and what you find attractive and what stands out for you, but for me, the above was what “stood out” the most.

I wanted to make my featured images “standardized” in a way where if you are browsing my site, Google Images, Facebook wall/newsfeed, or pinterest, you can tell ‘at-a-glance’ that

1.) it was from my website (unique branding) &
2.) the type of post it is. (recipes, book summaries, graphic downloads, podcasts, videos, and so on).

But with all these good intentions, I’m not very graphic-savvy and they came out .. the way they came out. And maybe one day I’ll stick to my plan above. I also get confused about all the image-size suggestions for facebook – o.m.g. they have a different rule for everything, so I’m just sticking to what I’ve got for the time-being and will update this post when I have used it a lot more and have figured out the best “safest” size for both platforms.

I own Photoshop and even though I have other ‘lighter’ programs that could probably do the job quick & easy (SnagIt Editor, LogoCreator, even Paint), but I decided that I’ll most likely be using Photoshop for this task because the end-product should look much nicer. (Maybe down the track if I lose a bit of my gung-ho motivation, or realize how much time I’m wasting, I’ll slip back into those programs for the same job, but I’m hoping that if I create psd templates for my different blog posts, that I can keep up the momentum.)

My graphics-skills suck, I can use Photoshop but that doesn’t mean I have ‘design-blood’, so I decided to purchase some PSD elements to help make the task less daunting from people who “do ” have graphics skills.

I headed over to GraphicRiver.net and grabbed the following to help me in my quest:(“nice to have’s” not “need to have’s)
(Time Taken: 2 hours to browse, select, purchase & download)

The good thing about Graphic River, is that they are high-quality graphics, yet extremely cheap.

The bad thing is, that even though I purchased stuff, I pretty much only used the base templates because I lost momentum quicker than I thought I would :)

So final result?

I created the following featured images, and will be slowly redesigning my older blog posts when inspired to do so, and then re-promoting the older blog posts via social media.

Just a few of the completed featured images that I’ve done so far (but there are many more throughout the blog)