Think about the blog posts that catch your attention. Generally they have great headlines (titles), a provocative theme and often include an image that illustrates the content. I confess I'm not very consistent about using images in my blog posts, yet I appreciate when bloggers use them. As the saying goes: a picture is worth a thousand words.
As a contributing author to Social Media Examiner, one of my responsibilities is to include 2-3 images for every article I submit. Today, while working on an article about finding inspiration for blog content, I referred to a post on Copyblogger called 5 Essential Blogging Tips from the Father of Chinese Philosophy as being a good example of using classics and history as a source.
Then, I thought it would be interesting to find a picture to illustrate or depict Confucius. I clicked over to Flickr, the photo sharing site, and did a search on the keyword "Confucius." Over 3300 results were found! I quickly realized I need to refine my search.
The key thing to remember about using images from Flickr is that you must have permission. Photographers indicate which images you can use by assigning them a Creative Commons attribution indicating how much permission you have.
Here's how to find out if you can use an image:
On Flickr you can do an advanced search and find only photos that have Creative Commons licensing. This will save you a lot of time scanning photos!
Make sure to select search By Creative Commons.
Once you find a photo you like, check to see what rights are attributed to its use.
Click through to see the rights and if you use the image, copy HTML in the Attribution field and paste in your blog post. Remember, you always want to give credit where credit is due!
Photo Credit:
Instead of Flickr, yuou might want to get a hold of some pictures from stock photo sites. Some are free services but there are those that charge a minimal fee.
Posted by: Sedation Dentistry | Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 04:34 PM