By Ron Hutton
Just the right
photo or graphic strategically placed on your website can go a very
long way to achieving the desired effect, whether it's motivating
someone to spend their money, click a link, download a free report
or just keep reading. However, finding graphics that are available
for your use without copyright infringement can be a real challenge
when you don't want to pay a huge subscription fee for access to
professional photos and graphics.
NOTE: This article
has a free companion video tutorial that demonstrates how to quickly
and easily grap copyright-free graphics for use on your website. The
video can be viewed here:
http://www.gothrive.com/snag-a-photo.htm
As a marketer or webmaster you
surely appreciate the fact that original graphics works on your
website belong to you and as far as everyone else is concerned, the
sign says "Hands Off". It's only fair. If your blood, sweat, tears
and moolah went into the creation of your site's graphics, you'd be
upset if you found that someone else had blatantly stolen your
copyrighted work and was using it for their own commercial purposes.
That's just not cool.
So, where can you
go to find photos and graphics that you can use without having to
spend an arm and a leg? Here is a site that offers tons of
copyright-free pictures: http://www.sxc.hu/ I learned of Stock.xchng from another marketer and if I
could remember this person's name, I'd gladly give him credit. I've
found the inventory of photographs available at Stock.xchng to be
excellent, especially consider the cost! Here's what you'll read on
their home page. "Welcome to Stock.XCHNG, the leading FREE stock
photo site!
Whether you just
want to browse our huge image gallery or want to share your personal
photos with others, this is the site for
you!
Browse through the
categories of our huge gallery containing over 100,000 quality stock
photos by more than 9,000 users! Need a wallpaper for your desktop?
Need a pic for your commercial website design? Looking for
inspiration? Have a look around."
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org
The following two paragraphs are quoted from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
"Wikipedia was
created on January 15, 2001 by founders Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger,
and some enthusiastic collaborators. Three years later, as of
December 2004, there were 13,000 active contributors working on over
1,800,000 articles in more than 100 languages. As of today, there
are 700,437 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of
visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and
create thousands of new articles to enhance the amount of knowledge
held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.
All text in
Wikipedia, and most images and other content, is covered by the GNU
Free Documentation License (GFDL). Contributions remain the property
of their creators, while the GFDL license ensures the content will
remain freely distributable and reproducible (see the copyright
notice and the content disclaimer for more
information)"
So, now you've
found a photograph that suits your purposes perfectly, but it's
provided in a high resolution file format that just won't resize
well. You've tried altering the image dimensions in your photo
editing software and the resulting image quality is just plain poor.
Now what?
My favorite
program that solves this problem is call Snag-It. This outstanding
little piece of software offers lots of slick tools and features,
but as it applies to this discussion, the simple screen capture
function is indispensible. More information on Snag-It is available
here: http://snagit.gothrive.com and the following video will show you just how quickly
and easily Snag-It will give you the perfect graphic for your
website. Go here to watch a short demonstration of Snag-It:
http://www.gothrive.com/snag-a-photo.htm
Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran
with a passion for coaching and training. Subscribe to "GoThrive
Online", for Free Video Tutorials for Internet Marketing and big
juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew, bite size servings.
Free Video Tutorial Archives Here: http://www.gothrive.com/free-video-tutorials.htm