Free Images, Free Info For Your Web Site

Free Images, Free Info For Your Web Site by Jane Thurnell-Read

Web sites need content as well as a shopping cart, if they are going to stand out from the crowd and be noticed by the search engines. They also need high quality images to please the eye and invite the visitor in. We’re told newsletters are a must, but do you have news to put in them?

If you’re one of the many people who don’t have the time or inclination to write, and don’t have the creativity or bank balance for professional images, there are some simple solutions.

Free Images

Photos and clipart enhance all our communications with our customers, and though you may need to spend money on photos unique to your business, there are some excellent online sources of good images. Much that is online is under copyright, so it is not ethical just to copy images off someone else’s web site. Fortunately there’s a good legal solution to this. Microsoft has a huge section of their web site devoted to images.

They have literally thousands of images to download and use. There are photos, clipart, animation clips and sounds that you can download and use for free, even in a commercial setting. You can search by keyword (you type a word into the field) or by category (you click on the category name). For example, typing in the word ‘computer’ brought up over 1000 photos and clipart; ‘apple’ gave me over 500 choices; the ‘business’ category has well over 1000 entries, as does the ‘special occasions’ section. There’s also a collection of ‘web elements’. There’s a good selection of sounds too, e.g. dog barking.

You can download the clips, drag them into a document, or copy and paste them.

There are other web sites offering free-of-copyright images for free, but this is the site I always come back to because it usually meets my needs.

Free Copy

So you’ve got some good images and sounds, but what about content? Having good, informative content on your site helps your visitors to build a good relationship with you – they feel that you are not just interested in selling them something – but that you care about them. The same applies to fliers and newsletters that you send out. Providing your reader with useful information that is not going to cost them anything means they are much more likely to read the rest of your newsletter or flier where you explain why they should buy something from you, or make an appointment to see you.

I have three web sites and writing all the content would be very time-consuming, so I write some and use other information from other people. Now people often send me articles hoping that I will include them on one of my web sites (Health & Goodness and Sport & Me are the other two), but when I was starting out this didn't happen, so I found three ways to get well-written free content:

1. Use Content From Article Submission Sites.
2. Use information from web pages carrying the ‘creative commons’ logos.
3. Google advanced search.

Article Submission Sites

Writers submit articles to article submission sites, and these are then posted for other people to download and use. In general the article submission site does very little vetting, other than to check that the article is not offensive or advocating something illegal. However, the standard of most of the articles is surprisingly high. At the end of the article there will be a short bio of the writer with a link to their web site. When you use the articles, you are usually asked to use them in full and include the writer’s bio with a clickable link to their site. This does, of course, mean that some visitors will read the article and then click on the link and leave your site, but there will still be a lot of people who will choose to stay on your site.

There are many of these sites, but here are three of my favourites to get you started:

http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.goarticles.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/

But before you use articles from sites like this, make sure you read their conditions of use.

Incidentally, if you want to promote your web site, submitting articles yourself to these sites can pay dividends. I’ve had articles I’ve written appear on an Australian financial services site (‘9 steps to living abundantly’), on a site selling coffee (‘how to eat less chocolate’), and on other sites more obviously in tune with the content of my health and happiness site. Some people who send out regular email or hard copy newsletters have also used these articles of mine. Each article has my bio at the end and a link back to my web site http://www.healthandgoodness.com, and I get a small but increasing stream of visitors this way. Most of the articles have been previously published on my own site, so there is little extra working in submitting them to these article submission sites.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a relatively recent development. You can read more about it on their web site: http://creativecommons.org/. Creative Commons say:

We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."

The Creative Commons logo is a black oblong. When you click on the logo, it will tell you what rights are reserved. For example it could say that you can publish it in full, but not for commercial use. At the other extreme, it may say that you can copy it, change it and use it for even commercial uses.

To find information that has creative commons licence, search Google or Yahoo! using this page: http://creativecommons.org/find/

This is still early days for this movement, but over the next few years I expect it to become a familiar site on web pages.

Google Advanced Search

I’ve already talked about searching using Google, but not all free-of-copyright pages carry the Creative Commons logo. You can find those that don’t, by using the advanced search facility on Google. On the main Google search page, click on the ‘Advanced Search’ button on the right. Put your search words in the correct field. Further down there is a field named ‘Usage Rights’. Use the dropdown menu to choose the correct usage rights for your purpose. Now click on the search button towards the top of the screen - do not use the one under ‘Usage Rights’. This can throw up a lot of useless links, but in among them there will be some gems.