Photo By: Matthew Bowden
All the experts will tell you that blog photos in your articles will make them more search engine (seo) friendly, more appealing to readers, and frankly more likely to be linked to, tweeted, forwarded, etc. – and they are right. You need to incorporate some form of multimedia element such as blog photos in your articles for all these reasons. Which leads me to a common reader question…
Q: Where do I find photos for my blog? I am on a limited budget and cannot spend a lot of money.
A: I’ll never forget, one time when I was at an internet marketing seminar when a “platinum member” of the group stood up and said that all people needed to do was to go into Google’s image search and swipe photos for their newsletters, blogs, etc. Even way back then I knew she was wrong. It couldn’t be that easy. NO, just like your articles there is something called copyright law which may be protecting a lot of the images you find in the Google image results. So that is NOT the way to go. Maybe for your kid’s book report at school:) , but not for anything you are going to present as your own work online.
So Where Should I Go To Find Good Blog Photos?
Well, there are a few spots that I visit to grab images for my articles or information products. One is Wikipedia because most of the images on the site are in the “public domain” and can be used for any purpose. Just make sure to check the “permission” section for each image. For the image I used above from Wikipedia, I was permitted to use it but had to give the photographer proper attribution.
The second is Flickr and that is because this site has a pretty large assortment of images that you can use for any purpose. You will have to check each photo’s attribution though, as some images are copyright protected or they are not available for “commercial” use. If you use a WordPress blog, there are plugins that can help you search and use only blog photos that are available for commercial use. You can search for one in this list of Flickr WordPress plugins.
The third place that I visit (and my favorite) when I need marketing or business type images is iStockphoto. I choose this site because they are flexible on how you can buy photos (with individual credits or a subscription package) and I find their images to be the most economical for the quality. *Hint – If you go with iStockphoto, you can always choose the xsmall images to save yourself some money because they tend to be pretty large. Large enough for articles, blogs, and infoproducts.
Great tips. I agree that using photos on your blog makes it more appealing than a lot of text. I have found iStockphoto to be an excellent source of graphics for my health blog as they are harder to find elsewhere . I also look for the xsmall ones that only cost 1 credit. (some are 2 now!) I'ts great value.
Thanks Sandy – you're right. They really do have a great variety of
images for a good price. Thanks for dropping by:)