Free or Low-Cost Image Resources for Your Online Marketing
Adding images to your blog posts, website pages, and social media posts provides visual cues to the reader about the context of the content and makes the information more visually appealing.
Other benefits of adding images to your content include:
- Conveying a more professional appearance
- Greater engagement (articles with images get 94% more total views)
- Helping your written content to deliver the intended message with a bigger impact
- SEO benefits using ALT attributes and carefully-named image files
- The potential for additional traffic through Google Images, Pinterest, etc.
Where do you find great images?
Low-Cost, Royalty-Free Image Sites
“Royalty-free” images are images in which the pricing is based solely on the size of output and resolution required, and not the specific image use. So, you can use the image multiple times for different projects. Most website and online marketing use falls within basic royalty-free licensing.
The images are professional quality, and are both photos and vector art. Many are designed for commercial use, which means that they express a concept, mood or idea economically and elegantly.
Most of the sites listed below offer a “pay as you go” plan, where you can purchase a certain number of “image credits” via a credit card or Paypal. Each image then requires a certain number of credits to download. Generally, “small” or “extra-small” images (with a width of approximately 400 pixels) are sufficient for blogs and websites and cost a dollar or so per image (some more, some less).
