How to Find Images for Blog Posts

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The most important type of content for marketing your business is arguably the content you put on your website’s blog. But if you want your website’s visitors to stick to your blog and read it more than once, it’s important to make your blog posts visually pleasing.

Putting images in your blog posts will break up the text to make your blog more attractive. In addition, images can help further explain the meaning of the content that you place on your blog. Taking the time to choose relevant images will make your blog look more professional too.

There are many ways you can find appropriate images.

Take your own photos – You can produce perfectly good images by using your smart phone or digital camera to take relevant pictures. If you want to take pictures of products, make a portable light box (check out tutorial #1, tutorial #2, and tutorial #3) or take the pictures outside in natural light.

Get creative – An image doesn’t have to be a photograph. It can be an attractive arrangement of a quote from your blog post, complete with a colorful background and beautiful fonts. This is a great way to add interest as well as call out an important point within your blog post. Bonus – quote images are very popular for sharing online!

Hire someone – Hire a local graphic designer to create appropriate graphics for your blog posts. A professional designer may come up with better ideas than you. If you outsource your blog posts, ask your writer if he or she can help you create the coordinating images.

Look on stock photo sites – The Internet is full of stock photo sites where you can find appropriate images for your blog. Some of popular ones are iStockphoto, Pexels, Shutterstock, and Fotolia. Some of the sites are free, and some are paid. Be sure to check the license rules to ensure that you have a right to use the images on your blog. It’s also good practice to give credit for images you use.

While you want to use images in your blog posts, don’t go overboard. Remember to consider loading time, so use smaller file sizes. And remember to use the “alt” tags on your images. This helps alert search engines about the subject of your website.

Now that you know how important images are, how will you use images to improve your blog posts?

Do you use other websites to find great images? Tell me which ones!