About Me
Saturday, July 18, 2015
You’re a
writer! So, why is this client asking you to “source” images and input them
into your blog posts? There’s a lot of SEO value in those images, and believe
it or not, in content marketing, images are often a part of the writer’s job.
If you can
manage them, you are more valuable. Some clients will not hire an imminently
qualified writer who is unable, or unwilling to “curate” a few appropriate
images in their posts.
You probably already have the
necessary skills!
In most
cases, the work you will be asked to do is fairly simple. Depending on the
blogging software you may be able to do much of it in the blogging platform,
but it’s better to prepare your images first.
The three main tasks you need to
know are:
- Finding free, or fair use images, or paying royalties for images to avoid copyright infringement.
- Copying and saving images to your computer for processing.
- Resizing and or cropping your photos to the proper size and framing
If you do
much at all with digital images on your phone, or digital camera, you already
know most of this. I won’t attempt to teach it to you, since I am not a pro
myself, although I did once win a blue ribbon for a photo at the Wyoming State
Fair!
There is a ton of software you can
use to prepare your images.
A complete
list would take up more than this blog post will allow, but suffice it to say
there are hundreds of specialty programs to do just that. But here are a couple
that you probably have, and one you can get for free.
1. Microsoft Paint, which comes with
Windows, will resize, crop and do basic editing.
2. Power point and similar programs,
such as Open Office Presenter can resize and crop images.
3. Gimp is an open source photo editing
software that has photoshop quality features and can do even commercial grade
professional editing. You can get it for free, but be prepared to learn the
software!
If you don’t
have any of these, a simple Google search will give you a list of dozens of
possibilities.
Three ways to get the images you
need!
This is
probably the toughest part to learn and there is really not much to it. There
are three main ways to get images for your blog posts.
1. 1) Find them online: the best method for
this is simply asking for permission from the site where you found that just
right picture, if you can repost it. Always offer credit and a link to the
original, unless that is against the policy of the blog you are writing for.
The next best way is to do a creative commons search for images that are in the
public domain. Just follow this link and try it out! Be sure to give credit,
even with open source images.
2. 2) Buy images: you can do this at any of
hundreds of places. There are services that will allow you to buy a single
image for anything from a few cents, up to hundreds of dollars. There are also
sites that sell sets of related photos, or “stock images” which can be useful
if you do a lot of writing on one topic.
3. 3)Take or create them yourself: You can
use any image you personally have taken without asking permission. It belongs
to you. Another option is to use a program to create graphic images, such as
infographics to illustrate your posts. There are many services available for
this as well.
So, there
you have the basics. I will talk more about image usage and creative commons
search in the future, but this should get you started! What about you? Share
your favorite image source with us!
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