I’m sure you’ve done this. The blog headline grabbed you – you clicked through. And then – despite your best high-school effort – you clicked away after only 3 paragraphs. Bummer, that blogger just lost you. That’s where embedded media can help. Sure, it’s eye candy and it’s not really the bright, insightful content we came for…but it works. Grab any magazine off the shelf and look at how images are used to draw you in and keep you reading. We process images some 60,000 times (of course I measured that) faster than the written word so it makes sense we will be drawn to what we can process fastest. via GIPHY Adding media makes your blog sexy (well, sort of). Adding media makes your blog sexy. Click To Tweet To get you started, let’s look at the options you’ve got. This list is from (Darren Rowse’s excellent Problogger podcast).

• Video – YouTube etc. easiest and best way to add audio and visual
• Slides – Slideshare easy way to turn list post into slide deck (I explain how here)
• Tweets – Every tweet can be embedded in a blog post
• Facebook – posts, status updates, videos and images
• Audio Files – Anchor – file to quickly put thoughts out and reply
• Cartoons – Andertoons
• Live-Streaming or Replays – Periscope, Blab
• Instagram – Pictures and videos
• Slideshows – Flickr and from other photo sharing sites
• Infographics – am
• Bookmarks – Pinterest and pins
• Google – Maps or Google Earth
• Polls and Quizzes – Qzzr
• Mindmaps – MindMeister
• Google – Docs, forms and PDFs
• Podcast – Podcast players
• Animated Gifs – GIPHY

Some of these are simple to insert into your blog, like a link to a document, or an image. Others you have to do a bit of monkeying around to find the html code to insert (like with Slideshare or GIPHY). Wordpress has made inserting YouTube videos a snap – here are the instructions. Like everything, the best way to get started is to experiment!