Ahh, the age-old question: what image should I use to accompany a blog post? A stock image? A screenshot? Any old thing you find from Google Image Search…? (No, definitely don’t do that last one.)
When people ask me, I usually send them down the Flickr Creative Commons route, as I hate stock imagery and Flickr images often feel more genuine. But sometimes there are some good alternatives you can use that you mightn’t have thought of…
Let’s start with the really obvious one, and work our way to the more… odd.
1) Take your own photo
Ok ok, so this one’s not that unusual (going by the title of this post), but with Google Image Search, Flickr, etc. being so ingrained in our minds as the go-to resources for images, it’s easy to forget that you can always just do it yourself…
Even if you’re not a professional photographer (and if you’ve ever seen any photo I’ve ever taken, you’ll definitely know that I’m not a professional photographer), with smartphones it’s easy to take a good, high quality photo by yourself that can be decent enough to go with a blog post. The question however: what do you take a photo of?
I’ve gone down this route when Flickr Creative Commons – and other avenues – have come up short. Obviously it’s topic-dependent, but I’ve often found something lying around on my desk that I can turn into a half-decent image. When I struggled to find a good photo to go with a post talking about my thoughts on DA (Domain Authority) for example, I grabbed my Roger Mozbot bobblehead figure and artfully positioned it in front of a computer monitor displaying Open Site Explorer data.
Of course, that photo looks dreadful, so I took it one step further…
2) Take your own photo (and run it through Prisma)
The iPhone app Prisma ‘artifies’ photos. I’ve blogged about it before and used it a stupid amount of times on this blog:
- 24 Hours of Selfies: My Challenge for Red Nose Day 2017 (main pic)
- The 3 Biggest Takeaways from Kelvin Newman’s Reddit AMA (pic of Kelvin)
- Moving SEOno to HTTPS: How Using Cloudflare Caused a Duplicate Content Issue (main pic)
- Changing a Blog Post’s Title – a Before vs. After Data Comparison (main pic)
- …To share just a few
And even guest posts:
- The State of Digital Marketing Events – 3 Things I’d Like to See – for State of Digital (pic near the bottom)
- Collaborative Link Building: Tips and Tools for Working Better with Clients – for State of Digital (main pic)