Writing for the web often requires a great deal of self publishing, especially if you run your own blog or news/feature website. Because of this, there is a good chance that at some point, you will be required to find images, resize them, and add them to your articles.

Nothing can fully replace having your own photographer at your side, but there are many photographers who use the web as their digital portfolios and allow writers and website owners to use their images royalty-free. Just because an image is on the web does not mean it’s a free image and you have the right to use it, and if you start making money off your blog while illegally using copyrighted images, you could be in for a world of hurt.

There are several types of royalty-free photo sites out there. Some have their own licenses, and others use copyleft licenses like Creative Commons or GNU Free Documentation License. Still others allow the users to specify the terms such as notification and crediting. The following are several sites you can use to find free images for your writing.

Where to Find Free Images?

stock.xchng – One of the most well-established free stock photo sites, stock.xchng showcases an amazingly large number of photographers. Licenses include the standard restrictions, which do not require attribution, as well as an attribution, permission, and/or notification requirement. All of the images are high-quality, and all are free of charge.

Flickr – Since Flickr itself is a photo sharing site, there are plenty photos with “all rights reserved” that are off-limits to you unless you gain the photographer’s permission. With the “advanced search” feature, however, you can locate usable photos by scrolling to the bottom of the page and checking: “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content”. If you need to use the images for commercial promotion, also be sure to check “Find to use commercially”.

A word of caution: Flickr uses the Creative Commons feature trusting that the person who uploads it will honor its terms. Unfortunately, some are prone to later change the license or upload images that they do not have permission to license in the first place. Therefore, always use your best judgment.

Wikimedia Commons – Created by the same non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia, this free image site has a plethora of usable photos and art. Because of stricter requirements for submission, Wikimedia Commons photos are all reusable under Creative Commons. Most require attribution, so be sure to credit your sources.

OpenClipArt – Although clipart may be the last type of image you want to include in your writing, OpenClipArt has some quality vector SVG artwork that may cause you to reconsider. All of the images on this site are released to the Public Domain and do not require attribution.

Google Advanced Search – Rather than an image hosting site, Google image search is a meta search tool that you can use to find reusable images. Simply click on “Advanced Search” and for “Usage rights” select “free to use or share”. Most of the images will come from Flickr, but it may also find additional ones, and best of all, it relies on Google’s speedy search interface.

everystockphoto – Another meta search tool, everystockphoto searches many of the sites mentioned above, such as Flickr and stock.xchng. Each entries clearly defines the license type, resolution, image source, and more.

morgueFile – An interesting concept, morgueFile is designed specifically for creative people looking for free images to use. The site license does not require attribution, and the collection of photos is quite impressive and high quality.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog – The Library of Congress has tons of digital images, and it would make this article unduly long to list all of the categories. If you are looking for art, historical photos, or things you might not be able to find elsewhere, LOC probably has it. Most of the old photos and art are in the public domain, but be sure to check the restrictions for each collection you use.

Now you have no excuse not to include beautiful free photos and art in your writing. Like you, a writer who shares your creations with the world, there are plenty of photographers and artists who do the same. Enjoy their work, and be sure to give them credit when they request it.

About the Author

Tavis J. Hampton is a freelance writer with over a decade of experience in writing, information services, and Linux system administration, relying on only quality web hosts like server hosting company 34SP.com.

You may also want to read: Where To Find Free Images For Your Blog
Photo credits to Miguel Ugalde

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

A few days ago I received a comment on one of Blogsessive’s older posts on SEO & keywords. That comment got me a little worried about the fact that due to people spreading incomplete information, or just putting out statements like “Google doesn’t care about keywords”, some of you might think that having a keyword strategy is pointless. This is what reader David Housman asked:

I thought that search engines had stopped factoring keywords into relevancy?

The source of this belief is probably a post published on the Google Webmaster Central Blog back in September 2009 in which Matt Cutts refers strictly to Google not making use of the keywords META tag in order to calculate a search result’s relevancy to the search query.

In other words, you could type 300 keywords of your liking there. Google will just skip them entirely and rather decide if the result is relevant only based on the content itself. This doesn’t mean that the Google bot will ignore your keywords. It means that it will consider only those keywords present on page, in the content. That’s why it is extremely important to write your blog post from both the perspective of a human reader and a search engine bot.

I’m not going to get any deeper into the topic of writing SEO friendly content. Just remember that it’s a must if you want to rank high for certain keywords and phrases. For more information please read some of the articles I have published here in the past:

• Using Keywords for Blog Optimization
• Advantages of Long Tail Keywords Optimization
• Top SEO Mistakes to Avoid
• SEO-Friendly Content is the Key
• How to check and improve your WordPress SEO

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

Depending on the type of corporate blog you’re targeting, you can then put together an editorial team. To make sure you correctly appoint those in charge of content generation and blog management, you need to consider the following criteria:

1. Criteria to help build the editorial team

The future bloggers needs to be/have:

1. Experts in the filed they are going to cover;
2. A good communicator, able to manage potential communication crises arising from dialogues and feedback generated by the blog;
3. Concise, clear and explicit when they express themselves, as they will not target only those who are in their turn experts and are acquainted to the field’s jargon;
4. Believable and genuine in what the provided information is concerned;
5. A human touch and a pleasant manner of writing;
6. Ready to face a reduced level of privacy in their lives, at least in what the online world is concerned.

2. PR department involvement

Most communications through the corporate blog usually abide by the general public relations policies within the company, thus it is strongly recommended that your blogger(s) work together with your PR department. Their collaboration helps:

1. abide by the general communication tone imposed by company standards;
2. prevent or, if needed, manage possible communication crises;
3. develop the bloggers’ communication skills and ability to generate valuable content.

3. The blog’s tone

Depending on the type of blog and target audience, the tone and style of the blogger may vary.

Usually, a relaxed, human voice and an openness to communicate and interact with all those providing feedback or reactions within the comments section or on other blogs guarantees your blog’s success.

Staying clear from “corporate speeches”, what is communicated through the blog should have an equivalent in day to day life, such as:

1. A relaxed conversation with one or more friends;
2. A conversation with in a larger group comprising both good friends and recent acquaintances;
3. A first meeting with one or more persons that you have never interacted with.

To find the right tone or voice, the term “conversational” should always be your reference. Using words such as “I”, “you”, “us” adds more personality and openness and, thus being highly recommended.

Further reading recommendation: Finding Your Reader-friendly Blogging Tone

4. Content generation

Generating content for a blog is an activity that uses up a lot of resources, from time to information. The most common sources used to generate new debate topics in your articles are:

• your own area of expertise;
• news and events related to your company;
• the evolution of your products and services;
• industry events;
• industry press releases;
• debating your own opinions with other industry representatives;
• the analysis of industry statistics and forecasts;
• analyzing pieces of news published by the media;
• attending fairs;
• guides to success – tips & tricks;
• lists of preferences and recommendations, etc.

Mashable.com has published a comprehensive article providing over 40 sources you can use to generate content: http://mashable.com/2008/08/11/topics-for-corporate-bloggers/

Other chapters of the Corporate Blogging Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction to Blogging
Chapter 2: Critical Questions Before Launching a Corporate Blog
Chapter 3: Setting up Goals and Blog Positioning
Chapter 4: Types of Corporate Blogs
Chapter 5: Blog Editors & Editorial Policy (current)
Chapter 6: Blogging Tips to Get You Started
Chapter 7: Blog Performance Tracking Tools

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

A few months back I was invited to attend, as a speaker, an event on corporate blogging where the people in the audience were mostly PR Managers for different companies in my country. Along with the PowerPoint presentation, I have decided to also give those who attended the event more information on corporate blogging through an eBook I wrote at that time.

The following post is the first chapter of that eBook, translated into English. The rest of the chapters will be also published, over the next few days, except for the weekend. Now, let’s see what corporate blogging is about and if it is the right tool for you and your business.

1.1 Blog, Blogging, Blogosphere

The term blog, contracted form of weblog, defines a certain type of website where texts, photos, audio or video content are published in chronological order, much like an online diary.

The first blogs date back to 1993 when the term was first introduced, but they only started to be used more frequently in 1998 when the first blog community, Open Diary, appeared.

The true hit of the online mainstream happened around 2002-2003, when the first blog reactions regarding the Iraq war were published and when Google acquired the Blogger.com platform, which allows any person with Internet access to create and maintain their own blog.

The Blogosphere comprises all public blogs and is defined as a community based on the theory that all existing blogs are somehow interconnected, often through blogrolls or links inserted in their content.

A blogroll is a list of links, commonly displayed in a blog’s sidebar. The links usually point to blogs the author deems relevant to the content of their own blog or simply wants to recommend to their readers.

Therefore, through blogrolls, it is believed that any two blogs can be connected through one or more intermediary links.

Blogs allow publishing content in a wide range of types and formats, and these types of content lead to a first classification of blogs:

1. a. Classic blog – text content
2. b. Photoblog – publishes photo content
3. c. Videoblog – publishes video content
4. Audioblog (podcast) – publishes audio content

Microblogs and tumbleblogs, both defined as blogs with extremely short entries, are two other blog formats gaining more and more popularity in the past few years.

Regardless of information format, the online publishing of content through blog platforms is called blogging, and the author of a blog is called blogger.

1.2 Corporate blogging

Once they have hit the spotlights, the blogs’ potential to communicate effectively was immediately noticed by companies.

Initially seen as a mere tool to promote products and services, blogs gradually became part of a company’s brand. Aside from placing a name and a logo on them, blogs granted companies a persona they could be associated with. In short, they made them human. The corporate blog managed to break the barrier between the “inaccessible company” and its customers.

The true value of a company is undoubtedly fueled by its employees’ individual values. But how exactly can these values be expressed? How can they be best presented to the world?

Blogs allow companies to position their employees as industry leaders through the opinions they publish, through the breakthroughs shared on the blog, all in a human, personal form that eases communication with customers.

A few companies that have successfully adopted the concept of blogs are:

Adobe – http://blogs.adobe.com/
Microsoft – http://www.microsoft.com/communities/blogs/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/
Google – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

The benefits of a well crafted and maintained blog are plenty, but is it the right tool for companies? Find out in the next chapters.

Other chapters of the Corporate Blogging Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction to Blogging (current)
Chapter 2: Critical Questions Before Launching a Corporate Blog
Chapter 3: Setting up Goals and Blog Positioning
Chapter 4: Types of Corporate Blogs
Chapter 5: Blog Editors & Editorial Policy
Chapter 6: Blogging Tips to Get You Started
Chapter 7: Blog Performance Tracking Tools

Photo credits to Peter Nielsen

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

As some of you might already know, on September 3^rd, 9Rules published a list of the newest network accepted members. Out of over 70 blogs in the list, three of them caught my attention (one I already knew) due to the quality of their posts. These are all blogs on blogging and tangent subjects as SEO, writing, social media and internet marketing. Here they are:

Congratulations to all four (BloggingTips.com included) for all the work they’ve put into creating and maintaining such amazing blogs!

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

In the early stages, blogs were mostly online diaries sharing girlfriend/boyfriend gossips, personal photos and experiences. As times passed, blogging evolved into a mass phenomenon. The more people getting caught into this blogs galore, the more experiences shared by different personalities. New trends emerged, niche blogs appeared and blogging became what we see today, a hard to perfectly define, segmented concept of online information sharing.

Whether people perceive it as an alternative to classic forms of journalism, tools for self-help, an online job or the simple morning coffee reading, nowadays, blogging has a massive educational value.

Premises of educational blogging

By educational blogging I’m not only talking about edublogs – those blogs maintained by teachers or people involved in the educational system – but also about blogs that provide helpful information on different topics.

People’s constant need for answers to their daily rising questions favored the birth of “how to” blogs. Want to know how to take care of your garden? I’m sure a gardening expert is writing a blog post as you read this. Need some CSS tips and hacks? There are dozens of blogs out there covering the topic.

Our need for information also gave birth to the famous expression “Google it”, and what do we get by googleing our needs? Lots of search results show blog posts covering almost every aspect of topic of interest, more and more with each year that passes; the more people searching for information, the more people blogging about it.

The real value of blogging

Is it the money/earnings factor? Recent polls held by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net and Chris Garrett of ChrisG.com show that only a small part of the blog owners publish content with the “make money online” cliché in mind.

If only a small part blog to earn, then also a small part read to learn about making money from blogging, and even so the make money online niche has a strong self-help/educational factor.

The real value of blogging resides in its power to help people grow their knowledge, beyond the point on our educational systems. Basically, every high-school kid has now access to tons of resources on marketing, PR, programming, business, you name it. The only thing that can make a difference is the reader’s ability to choose and digest the right information.

The wonders of blogging

With blogging, we can be more than what our otherwise natural course of evolution would have made us. Sure, before blogs we still had books, and self-help books were (and still are) best-sellers, but, through blogs, the information access time was drastically reduced.

Why would it be a surprise that what some would consider a simple construction worker (absolutely no pun intended) could launch in a very insightful debate on the current course of the economy or Microsoft’s strategy on acquiring Yahoo? It’s only a matter or personal desire for evolution, for becoming better.

Blogging made me better

That’s why I love blogging and that’s why I joined the blogosphere. I know that my experience could be useful to at least a few people out there. In return, I know I have lots of amazing things to learn from you, my readers, my commentators.

This is what keeps us together as a community, our similar interests and desire to evolve, this is the educational value of blogging.

Photo credits to Sanja Gjenero

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

After reading Kevin Muldoon’s review of PicApp.com, I’ve though about sharing some tips on where and how to find free images to use in your blog posts, like I do.

I know for a fact (and Kevin confirms this too) that many bloggers use Google’s Image Search to find free photos to use on their blogs, which is cool, but not necessarily legal. Let me explain.

The Google bot has a nasty habit of indexing every information and file that is linked from your pages, which basically gives him access to the /images directory of every website. This can be fought by using a robots.txt file to prevent search engine access to directories and files.

By indexing these folders, Google will share through his results copyrighted images used to develop the websites, or images from professional photographers’ portfolios. So, these images are not free. And so says Google:

“Image may be scaled down and subject to copyright.”

So, why risk using copyrighted images when you have quite a few options of free or extremely low-cost photos available? Check them out below.

Free Photos from stock.xchng (sxc.hu)

Until now, stock.xchng has been my favorite tool for free images. Some of the images require a author notification of use, some don’t. They are all big, some have quite a high-resolution. For some topics you’ll find the perfect photo, for others, you’ll need to take a metaphorical approach, but still, they are free.

Free Photos from EveryStockPhoto.com

EveryStockPhoto is a service similar to stock.xchng, but check this out: they have 3,161,661 free photos in their database as I’m typing this. Definitely worth taking a look. Various photos come with various licenses.

Free Photos from PicApp.com

PicApp is a new website, currently in BETA stage, that lets you look (and use) for creative & editorial images. They are all high quality (like you would find on Getty Images), but there’s a downside. When embedding the image on your blog, a small animation produces when mousing over it, making way for some sponsored ads. True, the high price of the image rights don’t pay for themselves, and this is PicApp’s solution to provide high-quality FREE images. I would definitely recommend them if you’re running a celebrity or news blog. Paris Hilton, Geoge Cloney, Hillary Clinton, they are all there!

Free Photos from Photoree.com

Photoree is a service that’s searching Flickr database for images released under the Creative Commons license. After you sign up (free), you have the possibility of creating filters to display only images of interest to you. Thanks CTI97 for suggesting to add this service.

Free Photos from FreeFoto.com

FreeFoto has been around for many years and has a database of about 115.000 photos, organized in about 3000 categories. While some tech photos are a bit “old”, you’ll always find here nice travel images. They are free to use, but at a web resolution and with a link back and attribution. Higher resolutions are available for a price.

One Dollar Photo Resources

This is a somehow recent type of selling images online. Websites like Dreamstime.com, iStockPhoto.com and Stockxpert.com sell stock images for prices that go as low as one dollar. Basically, anyone can register and start submitting images that would generate revenue. By selling the images more than once, the owner can afford the low price for a very good quality. So, if your online activity generates enough income, these photos probably worth a $1 investment.

Other Resources

Some photographers share their work with the public, releasing their photos under the Public Domain license. You you’re one of them, or know one, add a comment and I’ll add it to this list:

• FreeArtisticPhotos.com

Tight Budget?

No more! Now you can have your free or very cheap, but most important, LEGAL photos to spice up your blog!

Photo credits to Miguel Ugalde.
Post has been updated to include EveryStockPhoto.com and Photoree.com.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

If you’re the kind of reader that’s constantly looking for information about blogging, blogging tips and how to build a better blog, then, most certainly, you’ve come across those articles that say: “Comment on other blogs! You will get a lot of traffic from them!”
Even I have suggested that commenting on other blogs in your niche will get you traffic, but let me explain what I think about it, how it works, when it works, DOs and DON’Ts when commenting.

Short-term Traffic vs. Long-term Awareness

Leaving blog comments is known to generate traffic. In some cases, even significant values. Most of the times, the traffic driven back is almost insignificant compared to my other main sources of traffic, like search results or referring blogs and websites. And guess what? I’m OK with that! Why? Because it generates valuable traffic! It’s enough to look at my stats and see that readers referred by my comments spend more time on my blog, read more posts and have a bounce-rate close to ZERO. These are the visitors that eventually subscribe to my RSS feed and come back to read more of my posts each day.

So, if you ask me, I’m not using comments to build traffic, but to increase Blogsessive’s awareness, in the long run. And since Blogsessive is a new blog, I like to call these comments baby steps.

What’s My Commenting Strategy?

When adding comments on other blogs, I take the following as my posting Bible:

1. Comment only when I really feel I have something to add to the topic. If the post is truly a great one, I’ll congratulate the blogger for the result, but never with a 2-3 word comment like “Great post, X”. A short comment like this makes a statement: “I have no clue what to say! I just want to get my comment here for exposure!”
2. I try to generate questions that can further add to the conversation. A smart question indicates that you’re a thinker. Readers love insightful posts, and some will click on your name to find out more about you.
3. I’m trying to be one of the first to comment, not necessarily the first. Trying to be the first can result in a low quality comment, since you’re fighting everyone else that uses this strategy, and time is short. Whenever I see a long list of comment I’m reading the first 4-5 comments and then jump to the end to see how the conversation evolved.

While the third point is not always easy to achieve due to factors like heavy commenting on the other blog, or even time zone differences, the first 2 points should go hand in hand whenever you want to add your comments.

Don’t Become a Blog Spammer

I hate spammers! Everyone does. So why would you want to be one? Do you care about your online image? Then, don’t do anything of the following:

1. Don’t fill you comments with links to your own posts. Add only one, and only when it’s really necessary.
2. Don’t struggle to be the first one to comment on each and every post on that blog.
3. Don’t be aggressive! Don’t start flames with other readers or the blogger.
4. Don’t confuse smart critique with misbehaving. My blog is my house. I’m not coming to your house and start cursing!
5. Don’t make excessive use of emoticons. Some blog have them active. Many users hate seeing a comment filled with smileys.

Final thoughts

Smart commenting is the key. While it probably won’t get you massive traffic, your image will only have to gain from it. Add value to all conversations you take part in and this value will be transferred upon your blog.
Now tell me, what’s your commenting strategy?

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive