{photo by: burnt out Impurities}
I have to thank Laura Spencer aka @TXWriter of Freelance Folder and Natalia Sylvester aka @InkyClean for their Twitter conversation last week. It inspired me to put together this post.
Do You Despise Looking for the Right Photo for Your Blog Posts?
While I didn’t save the actual conversation, I can tell you the basics. We were chatting about the difficulty of choosing photos for blog posts. In this situation, I was definitely the minority since I L-O-V-E perusing sites like Flickr for just the right picture to match my posts.
But I wanted to know if I really was the only one so I took the conversation to Facebook and LinkedIn.
LinkedIn proved to be the champ! I learned a lot from the members there and wanted to pass on a few valuable tips that I got.
Three Tips to Help You Find Photos for Your Blog
1. Consider outsourcing. Hear that? That’s the sound of money dropping from your wallet. If you’re spending oodles of time clicking through sites for the perfect photo, you’re sacrificing time you could be spending on other things…like writing. It may be better worth your time to hire someone else to do it for you.
2. Do it all at one site. I’m a Flickr lover and often find the perfect pics there. But if you like to increase your odds of finding the right photo, you might want to search multiple sites. The problem? You just don’t have the time to go through every single site. A LinkedIn member recommended Cutcaster.com, which is described as “The Image Marketplace” and that it is. There is a cost to use the photos, but you can use the image more than once and there is a lot to choose from.
3. Find ze photos with Zementa. I’m thankful for the LinkedIn members who brought this tool to my attention. I hadn’t ever heard of it before. Have you? Zementa describes itself as a Blogging Assistant. It has several tools that can help you find relevant links for your posts as well as look for images (usable ones taking into account copyright) based on your text and tags and helps you with the design of the image. Oh and it’s free too. Pretty cool huh?
Do you know of any services that helped you find the perfect image for your site? Share them here. If you are considering hiring someone to help you find photos and blog for your site, contact me at bauyemura (at) gmail (dot) com.
I use Zemanta for both of my mail blogs and it is such a time saver! It is easy to find relevant pictures that you know will be legal to use on your blog. It has a few other nifty features like choosing keywords for you and if you are an Amazon affiliate you can configure it with your Amazon account so that some of the suggested links will be to Amazon products and you can create text links to products.
Danielle McGaw recently posted..“If You Build It They Will Come” – 6 Ways to Make Sure They Do
Thanks for the feedback Danielle! It’s good to know someone else who uses it and finds it helpful. I might just have to look into it. I didn’t realize it helps you with Amazon links as well.
Great post, having never heard of Zemanta before the LinkedIn conversations, I too think I will give it a go.
Thanks Brenda! Let me know if you do. I always like getting feedback/opinion from others on difference services for writers and bloggers.
I’ll definitely have to check out Zemanta; sounds like a great tool!
I use the Photo Dropper plugin for WordPress, which lets you search creative commons images from Flickr and drop them into your post. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s slow and I end up sifting through countless images only to find nothing I like, so it’s very hit or miss (but worth a shot). Thanks for writing this post and suggesting alternatives!
Hi Natalia! That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know wordpress had a plug-in for that. Will check that out too. I’m getting so many great tips here. Thanks again!