Author: Zack Stack, Director of Creative & Digital Strategy

With 27 million new pieces of content hitting the web everyday (some good, most you wouldn’t even let your cat sit on, let alone read yourself), we are experiencing the first waves to strike the shore – the after effects of a global quake known as…(dramatic pause)…Content Shock.

Brands big and small are now realizing the effectiveness and gains to be made when they create streams of benefit-rich content. Some are even bringing copywriters into their marketing folds to help pump out the content and build their audience.

As online marketers, we’re all well aware of the importance of including photos in our blog and social media posts. They instantly create an emotional response within the viewer. To reach the same effect with written language can be a lengthy process (read on…), but a well-chosen photo can provide that visual, emotional hook that reels a visitor into your content.

Mat Siltala, in his SearchFest 2014 presentation on Trending Visual in Social Media, underscored this message stating that images receive 50% more interaction than other content, 10x more shares than links and posts with visuals receive 94% more page visits and engagement than those without. So we dare not post without a picture, but are we as content marketers giving proper consideration to the images we use?

The rise of what we call Content Marketing and the well-recognized need for accompanying imagery on a budget has created a deluge of what I have come to call visual crapulence. This is no spring shower, my friend, yet we all find ourselves standing beneath it, arms outstretched and head held high, nearly every time we surf the web or go hunting for stock images.

I think you may know what I’m talking about. Just go to iStock and search for “teamwork” or “business” and let the perfectly-lit shots of handsome white people shaking hands start rolling in! Yet these are the bland images that we stick next to our hard-wrung words post in and post out. If the photos and graphics you’re choosing seem more obligatory than creative and relevant, then it’s time to rethink your approach to sourcing images.

I would say this goes without saying if it weren’t such a rampant problem. Good accompanying post images will expand and expound your message, help capture the reader’s attention, provide a resting place within long-form content and improve time on page and other quality metrics.

Bland or irrelevant post images are a result of the author or editor not realizing that sourcing a quality image can take some time itself. They finish writing the post and slap a quick stock image at the top and call it good. Not so! Be good to your images – take the time it takes to find or create interesting, relevant imagery and your images will be good to you.

We’ve all lost some time rummaging through the Internet’s image giveaway bins, hoping to find that perfect free image with unrestricted licensing, just waiting, like a Vermeer at a garage sale, to be discovered, cherished and clicked on. Yet the reality that often confronts us is that the perfect “free” image is quite often much blurrier, less relevant and way more time-consuming to unearth than we imagined it would be.

So be frugal, but don’t be downright cheap. Never use an image just because it’s free; use it because it adds value to your content. With that in mind, check these 9 free stock photography websites from time to time, but don’t hang your image sourcing hopes too high on them.

The problem with most stock photography is that it looks like stock photography. What does stock photography look like? Bad stock photography is emotionally-flat or hyper-shmaltzy. It’s disingenuous or hardly relevant. It tries to fit every content purpose and so barely fits them all. Good stock photography is professional without being inadvertently over the top. It’s congruent with the concepts expressed in you writing.

So find a source from the list above and get picky. You should know the image that will make your content pop when you see it, because it will give you the same emotional response that you want it to relay to your audience.

Can’t find an image that clearly conveys your concept right off the shelf? Find an image that’s oh so close and, if the terms allow for modification, edit the image so that it better suits your purpose. A little familiarity with Photoshop here will go along way. Crop out the part that doesn’t fit. Add or change some text (see above) so that the concept the image illustrates overlaps more with the idea in your copy. Don’t overcomplicate it – very small edits can often have big effects on perceived meaning. If major image editing is needed to bring the image or graphic inline with your concept, then perhaps it’s time to find a better fit.

It’s a dark subject that many copywriters don’t like to broach. We finish our articles, fat with a sense of achievement and dripping with self-satisfaction. The world is a beautiful place. Then we go and try to find a stock photo to use as a feature image. Suddenly we are surrounded by generically sexy people, shaking hands, pointing at floating numbers, staring endlessly into their laptops and doing yoga. This is not a place we want to spend our day.

The best way to maintain your sanity and soul when browsing stock catalogues is to avoid prolonged exposure. Here are 5 ways to limit your contact…

Not too long ago, one of our Edge contributors sent me an image comp for her article. It was a stock photo of an iPad sitting on a wood desktop with the LinkedIn logo on the screen. Nothing fancy or original, but it illustrated her topic well-enough and was easy on the eyes. It was also kind of expensive for what it was, so I held off on purchasing the image license. Later, when I was eating lunch, I noticed my own iPad sitting on my coffee table. So I put a few chocolate hearts around it to add seasonal context and took a picture. Then I ate the chocolate hearts and used a much freer, better picture to illustrate the article.

Take and catalogue your own images and so you can search your own library first – before outsourcing to a stock website. This assures original work (my example above not totally withstanding) and lets you save your stock budget for when you really need it, like paying for examples of really “stocky” images like this one, because you care that much.

Sure I have a fancy, heavy camera which I reserve for professional shoots, but most of the time I use my smartphone to capture daily life and textures when I’m out and about. More than expensive camera equipment, an eye for light and texture and what could be of later use as visual content is what matters most.

I use Adobe Lightroom to curate and search both the images that I’ve created and ones I’ve purchased or downloaded from online image libraries. Lightroom allows me to make quick edits and search thousands of tagged (or keyworded) images in just seconds to see if there’s one that fits well with my post.

Also, if you have the design chops, or your company has a design department, consider creating an interesting graphic or accompanying infographic in house. An infographic that underscores your point is great for getting more mileage and shares out of your article. It makes your content that much more shareable within social channels.

Sometimes just getting a little more organized by defining and delineating our approach can save us heaps of time. A while back I noticed that each time I finished editing an article I’d plunge willy-nilly into the bowels of various stock catalogues, fingers crossed that I might find what I’m looking for. I eventually would find what I’m searching for, but without a predefined game plan, I always found both my time and lifeforce seriously depleted before emerging semi-victorious from stock purgatory.

To combat this problem and to further avoid prolonged exposure, I developed my own Stock Image Sourcing System, or SiSS, which I outline below. Feel free to take it and modify it to best fit your approach.

One final image sourcing admonishment: respect the artist. Basically, there are 3 ways in which we can do this: paying them, properly attributing their work and abiding by the terms we agreed to when we downloaded their image.

I find that most people don’t wilfully disregard copyrights or break licensing terms maliciously. They just don’t know better and may even think any image they can drag off the web is fair game. They are unaware that images belong to their creator and that the creator of that image has the right to proper consideration for their work, as well as control over how and where their work is displayed. Proper consideration usually takes the form or money or attribution.

So when we license an image, whether it be a free or paid, we do not own that image. It’s more like renting a vehicle. The more specialized the car and the more miles we want to get out of it then the more we can expect to pay for that privilege.

Using the tips I’ve shared above you can avoid visual crapulence on your website. You can also save valuable time and money by developing a systematic approach to how your find images for your posts.

However you go about it, the first step is to care. Why? Images speak volumes and will often form your visitor’s first impressions about your brand.

Be good to the images and they will be good to your image.