Most blogs still depend on tired old stock photography. But what if you could create unique, scroll-stopping visuals without any expense or real skill? What if you could create content marketing images that made the reader smarter—and made you a better writer?
Every graphic on the Animalz blog was created using free tools (and without any design expertise). Here’s how it happens.
It’s worth considering why featured images have become a standard part of most editorial processes. There are good reasons. Images can:
Crucially: stock images do none of these things.
Most stock images are too generic and overused to hook interest (when was the last time you stopped scrolling to revel in the majesty of “man using laptop in coffee shop”?). When confined to hero images at the top of a page, they do little to break-up long chunks of text. Stock images rarely have any bearing on the article’s core idea: take the writing away and the image probably means nothing.
We still use stock images (they look pretty on our blog homepage), but most articles on the Animalz blog are also accompanied by simple diagrams. They typically fall into one of three categories:
If you’ve ever seen an Eisenhower box, you’re familiar with the humble 2x2 matrix. It’s a way of organising qualitative data into two simple variables—like market growth rates and market share, or in the case of the Eisenhower box, urgency and importance—and exploring how they interact. (You can think of it as two spectrums, overlaid one on top of the other).
We’ve used a 2x2 matrix to highlight the different characteristics of library- and publication-style content:
(Although this matrix would be more convincing if we had named categories for Volume/Depth and Quality/Breadth)
We also used a 2x2 to explore the strengths and weaknesses of GPT-3. We used GPT-3 to generate articles, a type of content which is generally long and factual. But there are obviously other types of content. The opposite to long and factual might be short and creative, like poetry. There are intermediary states: content could be long and creative, like novels, or short and factual, like news stories.
These different states can be plotted on a 2x2:
The 2x2 matrix is a potent tool for thought. It allows you, the writer, to take a vague question—like “how good is GPT-3 at writing content?”—and make it more specific, providing a framework for exploring how the model interacts with core variables—in this case, length and factual accuracy.
At their heart, graphs are a way of representing the relationship between two elements, like pageviews and time.
There are two types of graphs we use on the blog. There are those that show real-world performance data, typically showing how some desirable element—pageviews, backlinks, revenue—has changed over time. You probably know about these kinds of graphs:
(Read to the end for a quick process for making these graphs.)
We also use graphs to show the hypothetical relationships between less concrete things, like performance metrics and audience sentiment:
Or value delivered and stage of the buying process.
Like the 2x2 matrix, this process requires you to distill your topic into two core variables, and ask yourself: if I change one variable, how does the other respond? Graphing the dynamic turns an abstract relationship into something visual and intuitive.
Many articles describe processes: sequences of events that lead to a useful outcome, like search-optimizing a blog post or creating a dunning sequence to prevent involuntary churn.
Flow diagrams are a simple way to illustrate these processes, showing the sequence of events and the relationship between the different elements involved. We used a flow diagram to illustrate the thesis, antithesis, synthesis writing structure:
We also used simple flow diagrams to help illustrate different types of content arbitrage, ways to turn low-value content into something more lucrative:
And we used them to highlight the different ways search engines could operate:
If you're struggling to piece together flow diagram, it can be helpful to think of your topic as a journey: where does it start? Where does it finish? What needs to happen along the way? And what would happen if we took a wrong turn?
There are two parts to creating these images: knowing what to draw, and then being able to draw it. Here’s the workflow that I use to create images for the Animalz blog:
I keep a pen and paper handy to sketch quick ideas as I’m writing. These rough sketches function as thinking aids, providing new ways to approach the topic as I write.
When I’m finished drafting, I use a free sketching tool called Excalidraw to quickly digitize my sketches. Exporting as an .svg file creates a vector image—something that can be scaled up or down without loss of resolution—which makes the next stage easier.
If I want to include a graph of real-world performance data, life is even simpler. I view the data I want to include in Google Analytics—filtering to whatever timescale and view I’m interested in—and export the data to a Google Sheet. From there, I create a chart using Sheets' built-in tools, and then export the graph as an .svg file.
I use Figma to tidy-up images and help them conform to our company branding. That typically means adding in our fonts, recolouring the image with our brand colours, and exporting the image in dimensions that will work well on social media. It’s a quick and free process:
Stock images, for all their ubiquity, do little more than blend into the background. They tick the “featured image” box found in so many content workflows, but do little else.
Great diagrams however—2x2 matrices, graphs and flow diagrams—do more than just break-up long sections of text: they are powerful tools for thought, helping you to refine your ideas and helping your reader to understand them.
