hosted by: AskPat 447 Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here. Thank you for joining me in Episode 447 of AskPat. We have a great question today from Ted. But before we get to Ted's question, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is AWeber.com.
This is the first ever email service provider that I've used and I still use them for a lot of my websites. I would recommend them for people who are just starting out for a number of different reasons. One, it's just really easy to set up. Great pricing, especially for those of you who are just starting out and building your email list. If you're not building your email list, what are you doing? Oh man. You got to build your email list. This is Email Marketing Month on SmartPassiveIncome.com. I recommend you check out the blog, actually, for a lot more information on that. But I do recommend AWeber. It is a great tool. It's helped me build my list to over 120,000 people and it can help you, too. If you want to check it out for 30 days for free, you can check it out by going to AWeber.com/askpat.
Alright. Here's today's question from Ted.
Ted: Hey Pat. My name is Ted, and I run a website called BeersInSac.com. It's a resource for the craft beer scene in Sacramento, California. We publish articles on our website but I always get hung up on what to name our images within the articles. Do you recommend a certain naming convention for images within an article? Thanks for all you do. Cheers.
Pat Flynn: Hey Ted. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it. I think it's cool that you're talking about beers in Sacramento. Maybe if I'm up in that area, we can hang out and have a beer one time. But anyway, let's focus on your question.
Images in your posts, great idea. Why? Because they add some visual to your post. They make it more interesting. They make it easier to break that content up and just not have it look like an essay, but actually something very interesting. Also, another cool thing about images is people can see those images and kind of remember them over time. We are sort of a visual species, if you will, and it's much easier to remember things that we see. So, first of all, great job.
Secondly, it's really cool that you're asking about the file naming convention . . . Actually, there's two things. I already gave away a little bit of what I was going to say, but there's two components of this. There is the name that you . . . The sort of the description of the image, the metadata, the stuff that you . . . Whatever you name the image behind the scenes as you're uploading it, for example, into WordPress or any other web platform. There's also the filename, too. The filename used to be a thing that used to work a lot better.
And when I say work better, what I mean is you kind of get ranked higher in the search engines. A lot of you know, Google has its own image search and people type in what keywords to lookup those images. So you can get quite a bit of traffic. I know some people in the past . . . I haven't heard this in a while, but I know a few people in the past who've gotten a lot of traffic, not through regular Google search, but through Google images search, which was really interesting.
Again, best practice is to stick with keywords that relate to the content of that post and make sense for what that image is. It's just like anything else. You want to make sure that that name makes sense to a human being, but it also is something that includes a couple of keywords, at least one, related to the particular type of content that you're sharing. Now, if there's, for example, multiple images in a particular post, talk about whatever that visual and that image is talking about that supports those points in your blog post. Again, make it completely natural. In terms of the filename, you could include those keywords in the filename as well. It's not going to make a huge difference, but again, it makes a little bit of a difference and every little bit helps as well. Plus, what happens is if for whatever reason that image, that link is broken, it will share the description and/or the filename. If the filename has those words that describe that image, well at least people, maybe they think something's wrong with their computer or browser, at least they'll kind of understand what that image was about and potentially make something up in their head that can fill in that space instead of random numbers and characters and all those sorts of things. That's what I would say about using images.
Now, there's another thing I would want to recommend and that is SumoMe.com. SumoMe.com is a great tool. Actually, I have an affiliate link for that, although it's free to get set up if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/sumome, you can check this out. It has a number of different tool. It's essentially a suite of tools. One of those tools includes an image sharer, which when people hover that image in your blog post, it enables this little button that shows up on top of that image, in the lower right hand corner. Actually, I think you can specify where that button shows up. When people click on that button, it makes it really easy for people to share the image on the platforms that you choose to have people share it on. So it could be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. You can have them all set up in there. That will help you get additional traffic and shares to your particular posts. Hopefully that answers your question and gives you a little bit more of an actionable tip on top that using SumoMe. Again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/sumome.
There you go. I look forward to hearing more about you, Ted, and what you do and I look forward to sharing a beer with you one of these days. Probably a cheat day, because I don't normally drink beer unless it's a cheat day, because I'm doing triathlon stuff. But anyway, Ted, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate it. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page, thanks to the widget from SpeakPipe.com.
I also want to thank AWeber, A-W-E-B-E-R, which is really cool because they make it so easy for you to start building your email list. Like I said, they've helped me build my list to over 120,000 and they are perfect for beginners, especially because they just make it really easy for you to put forms on your website. They connect to virtually every other third-party tool out there that can help you build your list from LeadPages to OptinMonster to Optimizely and all these other things, or OptimizePress, excuse me. Optimizely is a split-testing tool. But check it out. AWeber. 30 days free trial by going to AWeber.com/askpat. Again, that's AWeber.com/askpat.
Again, as I always do, here's a quote to finish off today, and I love this quote from my good buddy, Jay Baer. He said, “Focus on how to be social, not how to do social.”
Focus on how to be social, not how to do social. Cheers. Take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thank you.