Image Sources: Finding Free Images for Your Next Blog

Our clients often ask for tips and help with finding images for blog posts and newsletters.

It’s no secret that publishing regular content, such as blogs and newsletters, can be helpful in creating brand awareness. These digital publications are used to inform and engage the prospects, and to turn them into loyal consumers, subscribers, or visitors. That’s why most small businesses have incorporated blogging and email marketing into their overall online marketing strategy. However, online marketing best serves its purpose when it not only contains engaging content, but also includes great visual appeal.

The right image can vastly improve the appearance and readability of your content, plus images are important for SEO (search engine optimization) in web pages and blogs.

While most small businesses have a pretty good idea where they can find content suitable for their blogs, they often hit a blank wall when it comes to finding appropriate images. If they are creating regular content, purchasing images can be expensive and time consuming.

Consider the entrepreneur who blogs weekly, sends bi-weekly newsletters, and contributes guest posts on a monthly basis. That’s about 8 images a month. Even if these only cost an average of $5 apiece and take you 30 minutes to find each one, that’s $40 and 4 hours a month, or $480 and 48 hours a year.

A more grave danger for new entrepreneurs is that of using images from search engines’ image searches without giving a second thought about whether or not they have infringed on copyrights. It can land them in serious legal trouble and cost thousands in legal fees.

While this may not be one of the largest expenses or time constraints that you face, it is still a point of stress for some entrepreneurs; yet it’s an easily solved problem.

Image Source Solutions

Cost – There are a variety of websites available that offer royalty free images. Some just require that you publish a credit along with the image.

Time – Locating relevant images, of good quality, is a fairly simple task for someone who does it on a regular basis. If you’re spending more than 15 minutes looking for an image for your blog, you should consider outsourcing this task.

Royalty Free Image Sources

To help you solve both the cost and time dilemma, we have a list of sites with free, quality images readily available for you to use in your next blog or newsletter article.

When searching for images, it helps to be very specific; and try using whatever keywords you are associating with that particular content.

We should note that many image editing programs, such as Canva, Stencil, RelayThat, etc… also often have royalty free image libraries built into their platform for your convenience. This can be very helpful, but we still find that going to the source and produce better search queries.

Finally, don’t be afraid to snap some of your own pictures from time to time.

Have questions or additional resources to share, please comment.