If you are a blogger, one thing that you know is uber important to your blog is graphics, especially if you plan on sharing these on social media sites to attract readers. But creating stunning graphics shouldn't take you hours! And your graphics should give your brand a cohesive look. Luckily for you, I have created some awesome templates to help speed your workflow along and have given you a behind the scenes on how I create my blog graphics.

Find Inspiration

First I find a photo that just screams, "Look at Me!" on a site that offers royalty-free images. Now you will need this amazing photo and your templates ready for the quick and easy part of creating all of your blog graphics in under 10 minutes in PhotoShop.

For creating a cohesive brand, you should already have a few things ready to go, your brand color palette, and font palette. You will find that by already knowing what colors and fonts you are using that takes any guesswork out of designing your graphics.

If you are struggling with what to put on your graphics, remember that less is more in the design world. Take the focus away from a photo and make sure the emphasis is on your title. Unless of course, you are a food blogger, then just make sure your food porn does the post justice. Keep the background simple, limit your color choices and keep your fonts to a minimum. Easy to read will always win over a cluttered mess.

A great place to start when it comes to being able to create stunning blog graphics is by scrolling through a site like Pinterest or Instagram and making notes of why a particular photo caught your attention.

Create Stunning Blog Graphics In Minutes

The Main Shebang

Blog Post Hero Image or Featured Image

A blog post hero image is usually the first graphic that someone will see in your blog post. If you use a home page and a slider to show recent or popular post, this image could also be shown here (but you may need another depending on your sizes).

Grab your hero image template and let's get to work. I like to open both my color palette and font palette so that I can easily grab these as I need them.

Load your amazing photo into the template and start to add your blog post title to the image. With everything in place, you will find it much easier to adjust colors or positions of text to get maximum results. Tweak a little and when you are pleased be sure to "Save for Web" this will help to keep your file sizes small and keep their fantastic quality.

With the hero image completed you are now ready to move on to supplemental graphics, such as those for social media. I like for all of my graphics to have the same look and feel but are sized optimally for each platform.

Let’s Get Social

Facebook Image:

Load the Facebook template and let's quickly pop the same assets over from the hero image. You can do this quickly by just duplicating and then adjusting. Once you created the graphic for Facebook, you are ready to move on to another.

For all other social media platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, etc. you are now able to rinse and repeat the same process until you have completed all that you need. Once you have finished with all of your blog post graphics, I like to do one more step before uploading them to WordPress, compress them a bit more. There is a magical app that will do this for you, tinyJPG. If you love your readers and want them to keep coming back, you will do everything you can to make sure your site is zippy. No one wants to wait for your luscious graphics to load so that they can finish reading.

And you are done, within minutes you have created stunning blog post graphics and made sure to follow your brand's look.

Just remember that creating stunning blog graphics shouldn’t be difficult or take days. With a system in place, you will be able to streamline your workflow and save time to spend doing other fun things like binge-watching OITNB.

UPLOADING GRAPHICS

You have spent a bit of time creating graphics and compressing them. Now it is time to add them to your blog post. I am using the Divi theme and can set a featured image. From the options given while uploading a graphic to WordPress, it is done with a few clicks of the mouse. This gives my site a cohesive look as the same graphic appears on the front page slider, within the cards for each category of blog posts and at the top of the blog post itself. All of this is done with a just a single image. Talk about a time saver and a cohesive look.

With all of your supplemental graphics, you will want to use them in ways that are not distracting to your readers. That means, don’t put them directly in your blog post. There are ways to keep these images hidden but used when your readers are sharing on social media; this is what you want. For Facebook, Twitter and Google+ I like to upload them into the social setting of Social Warefare and for the Pinterest graphic I add it to the bottom of the post but keep it “hidden.” I recently shared a detailed tutorial on how to hide a Pinterest graphic in your blog post.

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