One good method of earning money online is through Blogging. We have talked about that a lot on this site in the past. The methods of earning money with a blog are virtually endless. You can put ads on the site from any of a number of ad publishing companies (Google, Widgetbucks, Chitika, and others). You can earn money through other means – I have one site where I make 90% of my money through Real Estate commissions. Anyway, as I said the possibilities are almost endless.
One thing that you need to do, though, is present your blog in a way that people will actually read it! This means a couple of things. Firstly, of course, you need to write on topics of interest, and you need to write well. Another thing that I recommend is putting some nice images on your blog. Pictures always grab attention.
But, where do you get the images? Do you just go find nice pictures on the internet, “grab” them, and put them on your site? Well, a lot of people do that, but I don’t recommend it. I don’t do that myself, and I think you should not either. Doing that can lead to some trouble for you down the road, and you don’t want trouble.
I recommend four ways of getting nice pictures for your site.
The first method that I will talk about is to take a lot of pictures yourself, and use them on your site! Did you realize, even just one picture can be used for many blog posts? It’s true. if you crop it in different ways, make it different sizes, take out just part of the picture to use, etc., you can get a ton of useful images from a single good picture! I know, because I do this myself. Get yourself a good little digital camera and carry it with you wherever you go! I have a library of 10,000 or more photos that I have taken over the years, and I use them all the time to spruce up my articles online! You can do it too.
The second way that I recommend for getting good images for your site is through Stock Image sites. I like to use a site called “Dreamstime” which sells thousands of stock images. You can often buy stock images for as low as $1 or $2 per image. That’s dirt cheap! You know what? You can even get stock images free! Dreamstime has a section where every day, 365 days per year (366 on leap year!), they offer one or two of the images for free download if you are a member (which is free). I make it a habit to download the free images every day, even if I can think of no use for them. Someday, I will write an article that will have some use for those images! And, if I don’t ever use a certain image, what have I lost? A small space on my hard drive? No big deal!
The third method that you can use to get pictures to use on your site is to check Wikipedia. Most pictures on Wikipedia carry a Creative Commons license, which means that you can use them (just give credit to where they came from). There are some nice images, and usually high-resolution images available for you on Wikipedia. Just go the Wikipedia article for the subject that you are writing about and see what images they have for that particular subject.
And, finally, the fourth way that I suggest for getting images is to use a WordPress plugin called “Photo Dropper.” Photo Dropper will go to Flikr and find photos that carry a Creative Commons license, which meets your keyword that you search for. Any photos found by Photo Dropper can be used with no licensing problems, and Photo Dropper even automatically does everything needed to fit the terms of the license, by automatically adding a credit to the photographer and a link back to their Flikr account. It’s a great plugin!
So, spruce up your blog or website! Add some nice images to make it look better and to grab your reader’s attention!
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