Article Marketing Strategy: Improve Your Articles With Images

Do you watch television? Do you like art? Do you love the sunrise? Do you like looking at attractive people? Well then you are a visual person, as most of us are who can see. And when you are a visual person, you will respond to images that you see.

For instance, when I see an ad for a cold Pepsi® on a hot summer day, I start craving one. Or when I see a beautiful piece of art, it calls up memories, usually of my childhood. It is visual cues that big advertising agencies and marketers have been counting on since print ads in newspapers and then of course commercials on television. So as online marketers, we should take our cues from these bigwigs. They have poured millions of dollars into marketing which prove that imagery works.

So with that being said, as you write and publish more articles across the web – you can get one leg up on your competition by adding a “visual element” to your articles – add an image.

If you notice, for the last several weeks (maybe months), I have been adding images to my blog articles on this site. Now while I cannot do that for every article directory I submit to – I can do it on my own site and I must admit that they look great! It gives my articles a more polished look, as I also strive for the images to serve as a visual cue for the article’s topic.

Not only do I think they look more appealing to my readers, but reader statistics have shown that since I have implemented adding images to my articles – my site statistics show that people stay on my site much longer then they use to.

Where Should You Get Article Images?

Well, one time I was at a internet conference and one of the “platinum” experts there told everyone how she would go on Google, search for an image, save that image and then put it up on her site or her newsletter, etc. This was her advice to hundreds of people there! It was dead wrong.

Every time you “just grab” an image from a image search and place it in one of your articles, you are taking the chance that you are violating copyright infringement laws. Plus – many times the owner of that site paid a service for the rights to those images – but you haven’t. Now I realize that people do it, but it’s not right.

Go to these places instead…
1. Wikipedia.org – wikipedia had hundreds if not thousands of images that are free to use in anyway that you like. Now while they may not have the most “commercial” looking images, at least you know that when you use an image from this site, that you are safe.

2. Flickr.com – on Flickr which is a photo sharing site, you just need to make sure that you do a search for images that are available to use for commercial purposes – as most of us are running a “for profit” business online.

3. iStockPhoto.com – this is my favorite stock photo site. It’s probably the most reasonably priced one, and there is a wide range of photos, clipart, illustrations, even video and audio available for your use. This is where I tend to go for my more “commerical” shots – especially ones I am using in infoproducts, etc.

4. Last but not least, you can always do a search for “free (your niche) clipart” or “free (your niche) photos” and you may be able to find a lot of free photos available for use in your articles. It may be smart to do a couple of searches for common themes in your articles and save several pics for later use – so you don’t have to do a search every time you write. I like to do this.

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