Photos and graphics are a huge piece of the content of your website as well as social media. Here are some tips in case you want to start using graphics on your own on your website and in social media.
Stock Photography
Stock photography is the name for photographs that are for sale. If you’re going to spend money on stock photography, choose photographs with a royalty-free license. Unless you use the photos for resale which is not the case if you use them on your website or in social media, you’ll simply pay a one-time license fee. You can get photos for as little as $6 per photo to as much as hundreds of dollars per photo. The average price is in the $10 to $25 range. The average website we do has about 35 graphics.
You might be surprised to know we pay thousands of dollars in photography licenses per year to illustrate your websites. We also have to pay a special, more-expensive resale license which you don’t have to worry about, but just know, we got you covered. If you plan to provide your own graphics or do your own, site be sure to budget for this expense.
Some of the place we use for stock photography include:
http://Istockphoto.com – We used them for years, then they simply got too pricey.
A few more we haven’t used include shutterstock.com and stock.adobe.com.
You can also get free photography but it often comes with strings. In some cases, you need to provide attribution for the photo or add some copyright text in order to use it. Most of the free sites do not have any search capabilities, so if you’re looking for a red-haired construction owner on a job site, it might get hard to find.
Here are a few free sites:
Download our free guide here to learn eight essential components of lead-generating websites
A couple of quick do’s and don’ts when using photography:
- Don’t use clip art or cartoon graphics unless you have a whole theme going. It looks way too1990s and amateurish these days.
- Do include a lot of people in your photos. People reviewing graphs and charts on paper or screen makes for a better shot that a picture of a graph.
- Don’t use graphics you found off the web unless you understand licensing and/or have paid for it. Most graphics are not free. It’s a copyright violation to use any photos off the internet that you haven’t paid for. If you get caught you will get a cease and desist letter from an attorney, and worst case, may owe years in back license fees. We’ve seen istockphoto.com and Gettyimages.com go after people.
Including graphics in social media is far more popular than just having text posts all the time. This is an area you should begin to learn or outsource to someone that works with graphics.
