Did you see the links in OP's post? As I clarified, links take readers away from a page. Who knows whether they will then become distracted by a link on that new page, etc., etc., and then you lose readers unnecessarily. Links should be purposeful, meant to verify data/claims.
Pictures, like links, should center around the main purpose of the post but again, purposefully. The pic from Elf, for example, added nothing to the post (that's not even a quote from the movie) and said something we already know: OP wants us to donate. No new information. I said something like the hedgehog would be more acceptable given it adds a bit of personality while the hedgehog hails from the area being discussed--a weak connection, but something light people can enjoy.
Again, from my experience in journalism, very few articles need more than one picture, and if you're going to put a picture in it better add to the point, not just stand as something pretty to look at and get distracted from the piece.
Intuitively, I'm mostly optimizing for having readers come back to the blog. With that said, I'm making no money off it (just today I paid $80 to remove ads from Putanumonit) and I'm trying to keep readers by being interesting and educational and not by being clickbaity or controversial.
Regarding pictures, there this piece of advice by Scott (number 2) to break walls of text with pictures although one does notice that Scott doesn't follow that advice himself. I think I'll stick with that, I don't think the pictures are that distracting.
Some people like lin...
I have resisted the urge of promoting my blog for many months, but this is literally (per my analysis) for the best cause.
We have also raised a decent amount of money so far, so at least some people were convinced by the arguments and didn't stop at the cute hedgehog pictures.