If you're producing digital content to drive traffic, market your company or product, or social engagement, one thing that needs to be understood – and often goes under-appreciated – is the power of imagery. I mean, is it any wonder that Instagram is so successful and addictive to use? In this digital age, when so much content is consumed through social feeds, where you'll be competing for your consumer or audience's attention amongst an immensely crowded landscape, and may only have a fraction of a second to grab their attention, you usually only have a title, a brief caption (I'll go into those two in a different post), and a photo to grab that person's attention.

And given that that visual element typically occupies the most physical space on the post, it's triply important to maximize that opportunity with strong, compelling imagery that's relevant to the content you're marketing. But there's a few common mistakes that you should make a point of avoiding as part of your content strategy:

MISTAKE #1: NO PHOTO

[There's something missing here; can you tell what it is?]

When training editorial interns here at Teton Gravity Research, one of the most common mistakes our new folks make is, at the top of a great, compelling post, to start it with text instead of an image (or video). As much can be said for social media posts, where, on Facebook especially, the format of many social media programs prioritizes the placement of the image in a post, and gives text secondary placement. If you can at all help it, make sure every post you make on your website, in your newsletter, or on your social channels has an image involved, and that the top of the next page you're driving your audience or consumer to also has an image.

With so many options to click onto the next thing on the internet, you need to constantly think about "selling" your audience to dive deeper into your content, click around, or move further down into your content and keep reading or watching. Here at TGR, we use a strategic structure in our posts that involve regular breaks in the text with headers, pull quotes, or images to make the pieces visually interesting, break up the story so it doesn't feel as daunting to get through as a giant, single block of uninterrupted text, and use images to speak to the different parts of the piece.

Don't have a photo library to pull from? Chances are, with a little effort, you can use your smartphone to capture something close to the ideal image you'd like to have that closely relates to the content you're trying to get people to look at. Barring that, with a basic understanding of how to use keywords to poke around on Google to find freely available images that anyone can use – Wikipedia is a great source, as is Flickr's Creative Commons – you can probably get close. Just be sure to credit the source, and hyperlink back to the address where you found the photo.

Find out about the two other most common mistakes when it comes to imagery in digital content on my website, ryandunfee.com.