COMMENTS
A personal fave of mine for quick, relevant photos is iStock. For $1, I can pretty much find anything I want for a blog post!
We try to include at least one photo in every blog post. If there is more than one relevant photo, it's placed near the fold to encourage readers to scroll down. istockphoto.com is a great place to find photos as well.
I use
Compfight to find images on Flickr. It's quick, allows you to search by tag or text, and select only commercially available photos. Another free option is Stock.xchng.
I post way too many blog articles without photos. Even with great tools to find photos, it's a time consuming task to find relevant ones. Thanks for the reminder of the importance of taking the time to do so.
I agree. I use pics from http://istockphoto.com/ all the time. They're all on my website and not on my blog but we can certainly change that!
istockphoto has pics for just 1 credit that are around 425 x 300 pixels and you can go all the way up to 4368 x 2912 pixels (I used just 1 pic for those dimensions) for only 15 credits. Depending on which credit package you get the credits might cost you as low as $0.96 for "pay as you go" or $0.24 with a subscription.
Tim
I fully agree that photographs are very important. My blogs are related to land development civil engineering, which can be boring.
One of my recent blogs used a "photo" of an AutoCAD drawing of a 104 lot subdivision and an aerial photograph (from the MassGIS site) to show how the project was completed.
I try to use photographs that my staff take on our projects and therefore do not need to seek out a supply of outside photographs.
Another thing you can do, is if you are a little bit creative, use photoshop to change the photo so that its not always a square/rectangular box. I like photos in blogs too, however, the typical square photo can get quite boring to the eyes. Having a photo that disguises the square format usually makes the image "pop", and can really change the look of your post. (yes, content is more important, but try it and you'll see).
Our website,
www.xnet.com, has some examples of this on our typically rectangular buttons.
I agree wholeheartedly! I just sent this post to all the contributing authors on our corporate blog! People are visual - they are turned off by a page of text - but if you break the text up with interesting relevant images the readers will be more apt to read and remember the post.
I make it a habit of using at least one image per post.
I love the suggestion for Flickr! I never thought of that! We use istockphoto or stockxpert for our images - all very cheap at about $1 a piece.
great post. I've been spending a lot more time on the photos for my community association blog. Need to do more for my personal blog too.
Thanks for the link to compfight, Shari! That link will save me hours!
I am actually shocked it took you this long to figure out how images/photos are so important maybe even more than the text. Haven’t you heard the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words"? People scan before they read. They look for subheads, pictures and your lead sentence. If you don’t get their attention within the first 2-4 seconds you might as well kiss all that hard word smith goodbye.
Good stuff, Rick. I noticed the recent uptick in usage of photos in the HubSpot blog posts. Very cool and smaht!
For awhile, [I got paid to] blog at Creative Weblogging, They required their bloggers to use images. They made it easy by making it possible to find a photo (using an api through a lowe cost stock photo site)
The big reason they did it is to support SEO. A lot of traffic comes in through google image search. Adding a photo with good alt text helps bring in relevant traffic.
you know i never really thought about that, but it is a very good point!
If you use Wordpress, there is a plugin to directly access Flickr search from Wordpress. It will placed the credit link automatically in your post. The plugin is iFlickr http://www.photopreneur.com/iflickr/
It is one of my favourite plugins so far.
yes, I try to put photos on my posts too....Most of the time, it is from my own shots...
I could not agree more!! I always try to add one to our professional site as well as our "hobby". Makes a big difference. After all people are Visual creatures!!!
I totally agree with having pictures on blog postings. I do that every now and then when i write.
They say a picture paints a thousand words....very true indeed :)
Humans are naturally drawn to anything that is visual....so pictures are a powerful tool to communicate my thoughts
A personal favorite site is Getty Images....love it!
I use at least one photo in every post on my blog. I try to use
my own photos when possible, but I always find some creative-commons ones otherwise.
And since I use creative-commons photos, I post all my photos with a CC license. That's how my photo got used in this very blog post! Thanks!
To elaborate on Peter's alt text comment, You could use the photographer's name and your blog's name, in addition to other relevant words,
Great post, I was considering whether I should ad photos on my blog or not. I figured it would slower the page loading of the blog, so to skip the photo option. Thanks for showing me that it gives your blog more life, and thanks for the flikr tip!