Images and video have always played a role in the success of a website. However, this importance has increased dramatically in recent years. The emergence of blogging systems, social media websites, image sharing websites and video sharing websites have led to images and videos becoming the most popular ways to communicate with others online. Millions of images and videos are uploaded and shared on the internet every day. This huge amount of online activity matters to people who market websites and these are the main reasons why.

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Images and Video Drive Traffic to a Website

Internet traffic is the lifeblood of any website. A website without internet visitors is like a shop without customers. Many people who view an online image or video will visit a website that’s mentioned in the image or video, so long as the website address is mentioned. This is an extremely powerful way to leverage the popularity of images and video and has the potential to greatly increase the number of visitors to a website.

People Respond Better to Images and Video

Our vision is one of our most important senses. People respond better to images and video. Unlike text, it takes less effort to view content in these formats. They also make it easier to understand the content contained, which also makes it simpler for website owners to communicate with their customers and potential customers. When you can achieve this, it’s easier to ask visitors to carry out certain actions such as subscribing to a list, visiting a webpage or buying a product.

They Are Easy to Distribute and Share

You can upload an image or video in a matter of minutes to an image sharing website, video sharing website or your own website. This means other people can view your images and videos as soon as they are online. The most popular image and video sharing websites attract huge numbers of visitors every day. Within a couple of minutes your content can be placed in front of them. If they like what they see, many will visit your website afterwards.

Once uploaded to the net, images and video can be easily shared with other people. This in turn creates an even bigger audience who are interested in your images and videos. If you publish high quality content, there is then a greater likelihood that more people will eventually visit your website.

Search Engines Love Video and Images

The world’s leading search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! love content in the form of videos and images. Videos and images rank highly for many competitive and lucrative keywords which is something website marketers should be aware of. Optimising high quality videos and images has the potential to send large numbers of visitors to your website.

Mobile Devices

Developments in the mobile industry have increased the popularity of images and video even more. Mobile devices are perfect for viewing content in these formats, with many more people accessing the web through their phones than traditional devices such as computers and laptops. This opens up huge markets to website owners who combine the power of images, video and mobile technologies.

Images and Video Are Relatively Cheap Advertising Tools

Traditional marketing methods are often extremely expensive and required huge budgets. Creating marketing images and videos is an affordable option. The cost of video creation tools, image editing software and hiring professionals to create this type of content is much cheaper than many people think. Once the image or video is created and uploaded to the internet, other people do the distribution for you by sharing. This means you can concentrate on creating more great content while others continue to share the images and videos you previously created and it doesn’t cost you anything.

To cut costs even more you can learn to create your own videos and images. There are many useful courses that show you how to edit a photo, how to make a video, how to make a cinemagraph and much more.

Unfortunately, many website owners don’t realise how powerful images and videos are in the online world. Investing a little time, effort and money in image and video creation could have a huge impact on the number of visitors your website receives and how popular it becomes.