What’s a Picture Worth; whether a Lot or Little your Posts need them
What’s a Picture Worth? You’ve heard the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”. There probably quite a few pictures out there worth that and a lot more. However, when it comes to a blog post, that isn’t always the case.
You meed to make your posts visually appealing and attention grabbing. Good pictures are an excellent way to accomplish that.
A Picture Can Help Draw in Readers to your Content
A picture will help draw readers in and make them read your blog posts. Don’t believe me? You don’t have to go any further than some of the major news sites. Big blogs or even your Facebook feed use images to draw in readers. It’s the pictures that grab your attention in combination with the page or post title.
Try to find an image that tells the story of your post. It should tell at a glance (with the help of the post title) what the blog post is all about. Of course you’re not limited to just one image. If it fits the topic, grab a few to illustrate what you’re talking about or show step-by-step progress.
You Need Pictures to Encourage Social Media Shares
We mentioned Facebook already, how important images are there to grab your reader’s attention. Facebook, however, isn’t the only social media site. There are almost certainly other social sites your audience visits or are associated with.
It doesn’t matter if it’s Instagram, Pinterest, or even Twitter. A good image will stand out and draw people in. Without it, your chances to get the click dwindle rapidly. More importantly to have the reader read and interact on your blog become much slimmer.
It doesn’t stop there, however. As you get traffic to your post, those readers will be more likely to share your post on social media. That is if it has a good image or two on it. Obviously making it easy to share with social media buttons doesn’t hurt.
Images Don’t Fall from the Sky so Tell Me More
Now that I have tried to convince you that you need good images, where to get them? You have several different options when it comes to getting pictures. However, you have some choices to make. Many people don’t necessarily think this way, but money can influence your choice of actions.
Below are some choices for getting free images for your blog or website.
- You Can Take the Pictures Yourself – Assuming you’re a decent photographer and can find the subject matters you need, go ahead and take your own images. Photography equipment aside, this is the cheapest and most authentic option. The downside is that it takes time to set up and take the pictures. Step two, you must process it. Then get it in a format you can use on your blog.
- You Can Hire Someone To Take Them For You – Things can get pretty pricey this route. However, you might get lucky. You might find a couple of college kids with decent cell phone cameras. Then convince them to get you the shots you need for a little beer money. More power to you if you can pull that off.
- Buy Some Stock Photos – The most time and cost effective method for most of us is to buy stock photography. Sites like IstockPhoto.com and Depositphoto.com and many others will sell you images. Actually its the rights to use an image on website for around $2. Price can vary a lot, however.Many such sites are huge and have thousands of photos and other images.Search and you can find images on just about any subject you can think of.
If you’re Blogging for Fun or Pleasure
The three ways listed above cover a lot of territory. But what if you are just blogging or have a website for pleasure. Or maybe you’re in the learning stage. Most people are not set up to take pictures themselves. Of course some images can be easily taken with your cellphone.
- You can find lots of free images on websites that offer free images. – For example, many 1000s of free images on Pixabay.com are waiting for you to find them.
All three of the above choices leave out the obvious if one is short of money. Same if one doesn’t have photo equipment already at hand. Use free images. All the images on this blog post except the gif ad image were or started out as free images.
The selection of images on these sites may not be as large as paid image sites. But that is not always the case. However, there are dozens of free image sites.
Some images on such sites may have restricted rights, nonetheless with some perseverance much or most of what you need can usually be found on free image websites.
How do I know? Well, I have been using free images for the past 13 years on my many websites. That’s including this website and even this particular blog post.
Another place you can get free images is by doing a Google image search. You can enter the object you are searching for into the Google search bar. Just add the word image after the object. You’ll usually come up with lots of images, depending on what you’re looking for.
You Can Also Do a Search on Google for Images
There is, however, an additional step you must take. That is to narrow down the images to ones you can use without attribution. For example do a search in the Google search bar for dogs. You would type:
dogs image
A link will show up above and below the dog images. i.e. Images for dogs
and –> More images for dogs
Click either link. That will bring up some images.
Then click Tools on the next menu.
Then click Usage Rights on the new menu that shows up.
You need to click one of the four menu selections.
I usually click Labeled for reuse.
Make sure you select the correct rights for what you want to do with the image.
Once you select the rights you need and click that selection you will have far fewer images left that you can use. Depending on what you are looking for there may be a lot or a few images to choose from.
You can Modify most Free Images
Yes sometimes I have to improvise. Sometimes I do a little bit of artist work and edit or combine images. Nothing fancy, nothing too time consuming. I assure you most anyone can do the trivial image modifications I do if needed to an image.
So if you want to handle your images the free way you can save big bucks and have fun too. 
After posting many hundreds, if not thousands of free images on my many sites I have saved thousands of dollars vs. paying for images.
With paid images you usually cannot modify them. That’s a big disadvantage if you are like me and like unique images. Most of the ads I make for my websites started out as free images. I modify a lot of them. I ad text or change something within the image.
So what’s a picture worth? There is no single answer to that. But if you are creative I’ll tell you free images or pictures are worth a lot.
What’s your view on the worth of a picture?
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