Wednesday, 5 December 2012
When I think of stock photos, I always
chuckle about the Family Guy cut away (http://youtu.be/ynvEwCxNpYM)
where they make fun of them. As funny as I may think this is, it is important
to have that pizazz added to your article.
I have read many of blog posts that the
content is good, but there was no attraction to read the initial article. As a
coder, I am usually only interested in the goods, but there are sites out there
that will add that nice photo at the beginning of the “bore-storm” ahead that
will at least get you reading the first paragraph.
This was recently discovered by me when I
was in a course for social media and found that when we had to do the blog
posts on the ning.com community, I was more prone to look at the ones with a
pretty picture. So I did it with mine, and no matter how interesting or
uninteresting my article was I was still getting readership.
Now for most bloggers out there, they will
not go out and jump on a million-dollar membership with istockphoto.com or
shuttershock.com. Although they do have a very nice selection, they are more
for the money making websites and using it where paying the royalties for the
image counts. For us, we are looking at that one time use and are not using it
for any money making branding.
Free of charge, Royalty-free stock images
sites is where we turn to now. Two great ones are stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/) and stockvault.com. not only
do they have a great selection of images to use in most categories, but they
also come in nice high resolutions. And if you are handy with Photoshop, or
even Microsoft Paint (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows7/Resize-a-picture-using-Paint)
you can get them looking just the way you need for your post.
What is great about these free sites is
that it is open to use for purposes such as this. The “free use” extends just
to the point of you making money off it. If you were to use this to create your
branding, sell a product or service, or my favourite is using it as a stock
image in a template that you are selling this is where the red flag comes up
and you need to pay to author some sort of royalty.
So the next time you are making a post,
just make sure that you add something there to make it that little bit more
attractive. In these days of short attention spans, it is a world of help to
keep your readers interested.
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