Go “gif” yourself. Animate gif’s in blog posts are all the rage. Sometimes they slow down the page, take forever to load, and may not fully illustrate the author’s point, however, done right? You’ll wait on them to load so that you can give a hearty belly laugh when it finally appears.

Sometimes that celebrity gif just won’t do the trick. It is possible that only you can illustrate your point properly.  When that is the case, go through your old videos on YouTube or your phone, and use your own expressions, mishaps, dance moves, etc. to get your punctuate your posts. I use GIPHY, and it is free. I most recently did a blog post for the upcoming Ninja Turtle movie, and remembered that I had shown off my ninja moves in a video a few months back.

Here’s what I did…

1. I clicked on “create” on GIPHY.com, copied and pasted the Youtube URL, chose the 3 seconds or so that were epic, and within a few seconds, I was a GIF!
2. I cropped it and added text to it using gifgifs.com/, then reuploaded it to GIPHY. You can add your watermark, your Twitter handle, website, whatever you think will be good for you. They host the GIF on their site, so you don’t have to worry about the 3MB of space that each one would take up on your server and others can use it (reasons to watermark).
3. Once your upload is complete they give you the option to download it, or embed it using iframes or javascript with code snippets to copy and paste.
4. For you do-it-yourself coders, you can also use the “img src” method to embed if your editor strips iframes and javascript.

Here’s how it turned out! http://www.socamom.com/soca/en/reviews/movies/1094-new-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtle-movie-in-theaters-june-3rd

Another great thing about it is that since Facebook supports GIF posts and comments, you can share your gif (branded of course) there too! Just copy and paste the url of the animated gif (ends in .gif) into your status update. Use the download option so that you can use your gif on Twitter. You have to use the image upload to post it there.

Some people may think they aren’t important enough to gif themselves, but you know what? Nobody’s face is better suited to get your point across than your own. Celebrities and cartoon characters do not have a monopoly on gifs…

So there  you have it! Three tips that you can use to spice up your blog today. If you have questions, drop them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them.  What do you think of these tips?  Will you try them out? Don’t forget to come back and tell me how it goes!