Creating Featured Images – More Traffic & Better Engagement

featured images are often the last thing
we think about when publishing a blog
post but they're quite often the first
thing our visitors see sometimes before
they even visit our website so it makes
sense to put in a little bit more effort
to make them look more appealing the
good news is it's super easy and when
combined with what i'm going to show you
towards the end of this video you'll be
smashing out featured images like
they're going out of fashion
hey there affiliate schoolers and a big
welcome if you're new to the channel now
most wordpress themes will require a
featured image if you're using posts but
you can even include a featured image if
you're creating content on pages just by
adding them in yourself and there's a
good reason why you should put a little
bit more focus and attention on your
featured images the biggest reason is
that it confirms the search intent for
the user
if i'm searching online for a dyson
vacuum cleaner and i've served an image
of a guy making coffee
then i'm at best going to be confused
and read on or at worst i'm going to
head straight back to google
the other key reason is that they make
your website look more professional but
only if your images look good now you
can use whatever image editing software
you want i tend to use stencil or canva
we'll look at canva today as you have
plenty of functionality in the free
version to create featured images cue
super quick guide to featured images in
canva from the dashboard you can choose
a pre-made template or create from
scratch for ease let's choose a template
from the non-professional version of
canva
make sure your dimensions fit those that
work best with your theme i tend to use
1200 pixels by 600 pixels for my
featured images the most important part
of the featured image is probably
you guessed it the image so browse
through the images in canva and pick one
that suits although canva has some
really good quality images to use a few
youtubers have recently discovered that
there are some issues with using certain
sizes of images and then publishing them
on the web now i'm not exactly sure what
those restrictions are so if you do have
an idea of that then please leave a
comment down below irrespective of the
canva restrictions on images i tend to
try and avoid using free stock imagery
just because i want my images to be more
unique and to really pop so i tend to
use paid stock images and then make
adjustments to them
in the past i've used adobe stock images
but it is expensive at around 24 pounds
per month for just 10 images per month
more recently i've been using deposit
photos they've got a fantastic library
of images and every now and again like
they have now they have a special offer
that gives you about 10 times the value
of adobe stock images and to be honest
their images are just as good and i'll
leave a link in the description below it
is an affiliate link so if you do use it
thank you very much for that but it
really is great value now i'm going to
show you deposit photos and canva in
action just in a second but before i do
that if you're getting value from this
video i'd really appreciate it if you
could bop that like button the
promotional offer on deposit photos
works out at 39. for 100 images which if
we compare it to their normal one-off
pricing is a massive discount it would
usually cost 239 pounds which is
probably closer to 300 so it really is a
great deal and it's really simple to use
you simply choose the topic that you
that you want you browse for the photo
that you want and then you download it
and that uses one credit then we simply
upload the image into canva we can use
it as the background and make any
amendments that we wish such as making
you darker or lighter
cropping it and so on because we've got
such a high resolution image we really
can be quite creative with how we use
this as a background if your theme does
not add the post title over the image or
if you're creating a featured image for
a page instead of a post then i would
suggest adding the title as the text of
course again this is fully customizable
within canva so include your color
scheme in the design and then download
making sure to compress the image before
you download and including a keyword in
the name of the image file simply upload
to your page or post and you have a
highly engaging professional looking
unique featured image that should help
your visitors to know they're in the
right place when reading your page if
you do want to grab the image pack from
deposit photos for 39 again like i say
i'll leave the link in the description
below i tend to use it for most of my
affiliate sites and it really is a
highly cost effective way of getting
fairly unique imagery that is probably
not used by the majority of other
websites
it's also not going to land you in hot
water with canva or copyright issues
further down the line but if you're not
quite ready to do that right now then
you might want to make sure you're
mastering the rest of your on-page seo
by watching this video here where i
outline exactly what you need to do to
get your on-page seo spot on guys thank
you very much for watching and good luck
with your projects