Pictures don’t just say a thousand words, they drive in thousands of visitors to your blog as well. If you want your content or website to stand out from the thousands of others out there, you need to use pictures – CREATIVELY. Whether you use the most resourceful graphic design software online Canva, or prefer to take advantage of royalty free stock images, you still need a powerful tool to enhance or tweak those images. And what better tool than SnagIt.

Making the Right Choice

When you first start out as a blogger, content writer, or journalist, you paying for hosting, domain, office space, software, laptop and other essentials and probably have little money left in hand. One of the easiest compromises to make on further spending is to search for free tools to get tasks done.

You may prefer to use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office for your documentation needs, or MailChimp instead of Aweber for email marketing. Similarly, when it comes to screenshot software, Jing or Fast Stone Capture will seem sufficient. The result is plenty of time and effort lost to come out with a half baked product.

Investing in SnagIt is like investing your money on a goose that laid a golden egg everyday - you can spend the rest of your work life reaping its benefits. In this post, I’ll show you the various benefits you can derive from using the most feature-rich screen capture tool in the marketplace SnagIt.

The Screen Capture Tool That Does So Much More

Despite the wide range of commands at its disposal, SnagIt features an easy-to-use interface that makes it a breeze for anyone to use. There is a wide range of video tutorials and tips available, but you’ll hardly need it once to see the app interface. I have been using this screenshot software for over 4 years now and it’s a tool I simply cannot live without. If in your line of work, you expect to be doing any of the following activities, don’t hesitate to pick up SnagIt.

Create Informative Images for Your Content

You can use a wide range of commands to create informative images to complement your content. Here are some of the things you can do:

Create Video Tutorials, Help Files, Feedback

Videos are all the rage today. If you owned SnagIt, you will be able to effortlessly create simple videos to share with your audience. You can create video tutorials, review a document and add your feedback via video, create videos to capture a problem you are having with your PC and dash it off to tech help so they can help understand the problems you are facing and so on.

You can also add audio to your SnagIt video from an MP3 recording, YouTube, or via the microphone. SnagIt’s easy to use editor lets you also trim away unwanted bits in your video …the ummms and the aaahhs and the accidental noise recordings.

Create Animated GIFS

GIFs are a popular screencasting option you see today on sites like wikihow and on social media platforms like Twitter and Google +. With the SnagIt accessories, namely the SnagIt app and the SnagIt extension for Google Chrome, you can turn all your screen recordings under 20 seconds to an animated GIF. You will find the GIF file saved to the TechSmith folder on Google Drive and you can quickly grab them on to your Desktop version using the Import functionality.

Manage Your Income/Expense Proofs

Today, we make most of our payments through online transactions. You can capture all your payments or receipts using this screenshot tool and tag them under a relevant label, so that when its time to pay your taxes, you can go to the Search pane on the left of the screen and instantly find all your tax proofs under one head.

Send Cool Texts with SnagIt Captures on iMessages

If you love sending GIFs or humorous memes on iMessage, you can capture images on SnagIt, add some photo effects or captions and drag them onto the iMessages window on your Windows or Mac. Then hit Enter and you have just become a cool texter in your inner circle.

Create Handouts from Videos

SnagIt lets you capture screenshots from videos and use the graphics as handouts when you’re doing a presentation. Once you have captured the images, simply drag them from the SnagIt window onto your MS PowerPoint or Word document.

Create Thumbnails for Blogs

If you have a bunch of photos from your digital camera that you want to convert to thumbnails for your blog or website, just use SnagIt’s Convert Image feature to scale down the images to about 125 pixels. Add some effects and SnagIt will prefix “thumb” to the file name. All the batch conversion happens super quick, so you have a ton of thumbnail images generated in no time at all.

Transfer Images from your Smartphone to SnagIt

Just download and install the free TechSmith Fuse Android, Windows and iOS app and you can easily move your photos you capture on your smartphone or tablet to your PC via Wi-Fi.

Share Detailed Maps and Directions

If you often share directions to your office or a location where you are planning an event, you can use SnagIt to capture a screenshot of the directions from Google maps and add some annotations to indicate important landmarks before sending them out.

It won’t take more than a few minutes to pinpoint the directions and the result is a happy prospective customer who is impressed with you and is more than willing to share your content, promote your product or give you the attention your business needs. All this simply because you have shown them that you care about their travel convenience and comfort.

Create Simple Infographics

Infographics are big today. While SnagIt is not the tool you would turn to for stunning professional tools that come with their own templates, you can still design some creative reports by inserting various shapes and objects to create one master infographic. And its completely free.

Capture Screenshots from Webinars

If you attend a lot of webinars and often regret the fact that you did not capture key input from it, you can make use of SnagIt to take screenshots with timestamps, and then tag them appropriately so you can add them to your presentation or documentation later on. This is handy when you are preparing for a team discussion or presentation.

Collate and Compare Data

If your work has you pulling together data from a number of online sources, then SnagIt can make your job easy. You can capture screenshots using the tool, open up videos and do a comparative study of all the key data so that you can use the materials to structure your content.

Similarly, you can download images from your digital camera or smartphone, throw them up on the canvas for comparison, and place annotations or notes to call out points of interest or differences between the items to show your readers. You can always go back to the reference websites from where you pulled the data using the Search pane.

Create Interface Mockups

When you are working on visual designs, you’ll always want to know how the images look like on the desktop or how they scale up on a mobile device. SnagIt makes your job easier by letting you use the standard controls for iOS, OSX, and Windows interface mockups.

Capture Contents of Folders

If you need to capture the entire contents of a folder, even the files that are beyond what you can see on the screen, you can use the Scrolling Capture feature in SnagIt to do the job for you. In fact, this even works when you want to capture screenshots of entire webpages or an infographic. Just click a button and the whole image is captured in a second!

Copy Formatted Text

There may be times when you need to copy Rich Formatted Text from a window or a web page. For example, lets say you want to copy the names of the files on Windows Explorer. The usual copy and paste functionality won’t work in such situations. With SnagIt you can select a Text capture mode, select and copy away. Once the data is added to the editor, you can apply the appropriate formatting and copy and paste them into your documents.

I could go on and on about how you can use this screenshot tool to accomplish versatile tasks.

SnagIT Features and Pricing

SnagIt is a little pricey when compared to its counterparts, but when you consider its rich features, flexibility and ease of use, the benefits easily outweigh its costs. Here’s a quick look at some of the screen capture tool's impressive features.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Sites like Buzz Feed and Pinterest generate massive traffic based on a simple concept  - empower content with creative images and a hard hitting headline. If you are serious about making your content stand out and if you want to stay one step ahead of your competitors, a powerful screen capture tool like SnagIt is a must have in your toolbox.

If you have any questions you’d like to ask me about SnagIt, don't hesitate to drop me a line. I'll be more than happy to answer your queries.