A great piece of content isn’t complete without beautiful visuals (like a unique blogpost header) to accompany it. Those visuals illustrate important points to the reader from the beginning, and they encourage the reader to share your post, pushing it to the top of the news feed.
But why is this important?
According to a 2012 study by Skyword, embedding relevant images in content meaningfully improves content performance across all content categories.
To be more specific, total views increased by 94 percent if an article contained a relevant photo or infographic when compared to articles without an image.
Also, an intriguing study by the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab found that 46 percent of the people surveyed say a website’s design is the number one criterion for discerning the credibility of a company.
Finally, photos perform the best across all platforms and social networks. Data on more than 1.38 million posts confirms that photos trump text, video, and links in Facebook [infographic], and tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets.
“Indelible, craveable, relatable images have become a high currency in the world of content marketing, and the push for visual content seems to only be getting stronger” – Kevan Lee, Buffer.
Creating A Blogpost Header
Although there are many sources of ready-to-use images available (we love Unsplash, Pexels and StockSnap), you should consider designing unique images on your own. To begin with, stock photos are generic and widely used. If your goal is to create unique content, why top it off with a generic image?
However, not everyone is a designer or has the budget for one. That’s when Piktochart comes into play! It’s ridiculously easy to design a beautiful header for your blog post with Piktochart. Virtually any infographic can be repurposed into a blogpost header in 60 seconds.
As an example, I created a header for Mark Suster’s post on Both Sides of the Table, entitled What Makes a Great Business Partner. Check it out:
This took me less than 60 seconds, too, from start to finish. All you need to do is follow these five simple steps.
1. Pick a Pikto template
Virtually any Piktochart infographic template can be repurposed into a blogpost header. In this case, we picked Recruiting Strategy because we loved the color palette, and the icons are relevant to the article, but you could pick almost any template or style (like Capture The Moment).
2. Replace the text
First, let’s replace the title. We recommend blogpost titles to be less than 55 characters (which suit Google’s title tags nicely, and it’s a great length for a tweet). If it doesn’t fit the infographic though, you can always use a shorter and more concise title.
With a shorter title, you should give more details in a smaller subtitle, like this:
If you feel like adding a few icons or changing some colors here and there, now is the time to do it.
3. Delete all the unnecessary blocks
After you modify the content and formatting, simply delete all of the blocks except for one: the header. This will make it a lot easier to perform the next step.
4. Change the size of your header
If you have a specific size that your header or hero image needs to be, now’s the time to change those dimensions. Click the gear icon to adjust the canvas width and block height. Make sure to check the “Resize content” box. This ensures that your text and images are scaled down appropriately. Type in the new dimensions and hit Return!
5. Download the infographic.
The last step is to download the infographic from Piktochart and upload it to your content management system (like WordPress or Squarespace). To do that, simply click on the Download link in the top right corner as shown below.
We recommend you download it as a .png or a .jpeg, as nearly all CMSs support them.
Interested in creating beautiful blogpost headers in no time? Try Piktochart for free!
This post was originally written by Gonzalo on
