“Where can I find images or clip-art I can use on my blog?”
We hear that question a lot on Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, so we wanted to add some helpful information and tips about it to our design and photography blog.
Most bloggers or authors begin their photo search on Google Image Search by typing in a few keywords to locate images they want to use on their blog. While you will find some creative images, most image searchers find the quality to be not great and in some cases the photos can be copyrighted. Some risk-takers will use them nonetheless, thinking they can get away with using poor quality or copyrighted content.
In addition, there are a number of photo sites and photo search engines that will help you find royalty-free images that include Flickr, Wikipedia and a few others. The quality might not always be great but the sources can be useful when looking for something specific.
Another good place to search for images for your blog are royalty free sites that charge you a few bucks for the rights to use that image for as long as you want like Cutcaster. You pay a dollar or two and can use the image legally in perpetuity which is a fancy word meaning forever.
You are probably asking yourself why you would pay a couple of dollars or microstock prices to use an image for my blog. “There are free photo resources out there, why should I pay?” But take a look at the quality and diversity of Cutcaster’s image library and then you will understand why the images there will help get your point across.
For blogs, the inexpensive images can be used for a few bucks if you download the small to medium sizes. That size will be the perfect size that you will need for your blog post. Bloggers that include images as a part of their blog post engage with their viewers better, get more comments on their blogs and get better search engine rankings if you use the embedded image metadata, which comes with every file you download from Cutcaster, to describe your images. This helps search engines find your posts via text within the post and the text you use to describe your images. It is a double win. Your readers get a visually appealing blog to enjoy and the search engines have another way to describe and find your blog because you have included metadata to describe your photos.
If spending a few dollars is not what you want to do, then Cutcaster does offers free images and free illustrations for bloggers and any other photo buyers. You will find suitable photos there. You can download 10 free images a day or 300 images a month with a free subscription.
For further information on using images on your blog and what the differences are between free and royalty free images are visit Stock Photo License.
This is the first in a series of three articles on how to find good, cheap photos for your blog or website.
