Stock photos are photos that are available for immediate use. They are cost effective alternative to hiring a photographer to go out and shoot the photos.
If we had to go out and hire a photographer for every blog post, that will be a handsome load of work on our shoulders. So an alternative is to visit a website and download already existing and related pictures for out articles.
There are almost unlimited number of stock photo websites out there offering both free and paid options. Generally, the difference is in terms of size and resolution. But before I give you a short list of some of the stock photo sites I use, we are going to see some important points.
– > Images can be a problem to your blog
Yes! While we love the attractiveness and messages presented by these media objects, they can be a problem to our blogs. A common mistake bloggers make is just pick up a photo (which may be related to the article) and upload without doing the necessary processing. Garen Arnold in this post shows us why your images are killing your blog
Before you upload photos/images to your blog
Be sure to get the image fit in terms of width and height. I know most of the premium templates we have today automatically re-size pictures. However, resizing before uploading does a great job on increasing the load speed of the page.
Set the width and height of every image you use on your widgets. Don’t allow the browser do the calculations. That is going to have a load time issue on your blog.
<img src=”path-to-image.jpeg” width=”103″ height=”103″>
Optimize your image for high speed. There are recommended applications out there that are able to get the best out of your images. SMushIt.com for instance is the best I recommend. It uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality.
Check out the SmushIt WordPress plugin here
Where do you get these images for your blog?
My number one place for free stock pictures is Freedigitalphotos. These guys have made it quite easy to get images from their site without having to be a member. They have free and premium stock photos and illustrations for websites, advertising materials, newspapers, magazines, ebooks, book covers and pages, music artwork, software applications and much more.
The only requirement for using the free images is that you publish a credit to the creator of that image wherever the image is used. If you don’t want to publish the credit or if you want images of bigger sizes and resolution, you have to buy from $3 per image.
Need more places?
My blogging friends have put together some lists of stock photo sites. You may want to check these out for more:
- 3 Of The Best Websites For Free Images by Time Bonner
- 5 Main Sources To Find Images For Your Blog Posts by Theodore Nwangene
Still need more? Search for free stock photos on Google.
– > Conclusion
This is part 13 in our series to create a blog that makes money. If you did not catch up with the other 12 parts, go to the front page here
In part 14, we will be looking at Starting to build a list. Sign up to my feed below so you don’t miss a thing. Leave your thoughts in the comment box and share this post on social media.
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