A friend of mine who has a blog called Frohardy.com asked me today how to turn a picture into a hyperlink. He has some fantastic pictures you should check out by the way. More specifically though, he asked how to make a picture in the sidebar of a WordPress Website become a hyperlink.
I tried to explain it to him over the phone but instead decided to do a quick tutorial so he could learn, I could become a better teacher and if anyone else is wondering the same thing, this might help them as well.
First I think we should address the question of whether this is a good linking strategy or not. In my humble opinion it is not as effective as typed keyword hyperlinks are. One of the main reasons why it is not as effective is that the visitor does not always know if the picture is a link or not. They will have to roll over the picture and notice the cursor transition that indicates a hyperlink to know whether it is a link or not. Then you need to make sure the picture is explicit enough to tell the visitor where they are going if they choose to click the picture link.
The typed hyperlink is obvious, keyword rich and if the visitor wants to follow it there is no question about what they need to do. With that said, creating picture hyperlinks can add color and be another gateway to your funnel. Most of all – they are cool.
#1 You need a picture to upload to your WordPress Media Folder or your images folder.
#2 If you need to shrink the picture down in pixel size to make it work a little easier with WordPress here is a fantastic free photo editing software you can use called photoscape.
#3 You either upload the picture to your wordpress blog via the Media / Add New option in your sites dashboard. (See Below)
I use the Ozh Drop Down Menu plugin so my dashboard might look different then yours but the menu items will be the same.
You can also move the picture file over to your site via your ftp program like FileZilla or whatever you might use to upload files to your site.
#4 If you uploaded the file to your media library you can just go to the media library and copy the url there or if you used the ftp option you need to figure out what the path is to the file you moved and put it into the link code.
#5 The link code will look something like this.
<center><a href="http://6b7afr1gsljx3n0isemdr6u2bw.hop.clickbank.net/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.sagaciousnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/wplandingpage.jpg"></a></center>
This is a live link for the picture I have in the right sidebar. I actually have this in a text widget in my dashboard of wordpress. The result is exactly what you see in the sidebar now.
![http://www.sagaciousnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/wplandingpage.jpg"](http://www.sagaciousnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/wplandingpage.jpg"){kind=link}