Advice (grain of salt here) from a journalistic perspective:
Essentially: less, less, less. "If I had more time, I would write less."
All that said, I am excited to see where this project goes. I will donate when I have the funds. Thanks for sharing. :)
I agree with less words but less pictures is more of a stylistic questions. Also preferences differ here a lot. Many Medium articles use pictures between sections for example. Less links? Come on. Maybe less underlining but we live in the age of hypertext. They should be relevant though.
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.
links take readers away from a page
Whether that's a problem depends on whether your goal is to be useful to your readers or to keep your readers on your page. It will be the latter if you run an ad-supported site and your only goal is to maximize your revenue. In other circumstances, it might be the former.
Indeed many successful blogs provide lots of useful or interesting links. But these links don't take readers away but actually seem to draw them in! Sure they leave the page - but if it is good they come back to follow more of the interesting links!
True. My assumption was that OP wanted readers to stay on his page, but goals vary for respective writers.
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 links and some people hate them, I think that people who are familiar with my blog just learn to ignore most of them. I can see how many links are clicked per view of my posts, it's not a lot. With that said, probably at least 20% of my links are useless and distracting. I'll do my best to rein the excessive linking in :)
All three things are quantised and should take 'fewer': Fewer pictures, fewer links, fewer words. Less is for things that aren't countable; less liquid, less wrong.
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.