A Great Resource For Membership Eye Candy

Ok so you’ve created some content but “bringing it to life” is another story.

Remember, the more visual your content, the more attractive it becomes.

And if it’s attractive, more people will consume it.

An easy way to “jazz it up” is to add some pictures.

Here’s a great site for royalty free pictures as well as my hard learned strategy for saving a few bucks along the way…


Website:  www.Fotolia.com

There are many royalty free photo sites out there but this one has been a favorite of mine for a long time.  The prices are very reasonable and the quality of the photos are top notch.

The benefit of getting pics from a site like this is that once you purchase them, you have the right to be able to use them without the worry of any copyright infringement.

Remember, you don’t want to just download pictures from any old website – that’s a BIG no no.

Make sure you get them from a site like this.

Here’s a BIG tip when buying royalty free pictures…

If you know what “type” of pictures you’ll want, think about signing up for a 1 month subscription instead of buying them on a per picture basis.

Each site is different but with Fotolia, this will allow you to download 25 photos per day and they’ll end up being much much cheaper.

So for example…

Let’s say you were starting a site for “Dog Lovers”.

First you’d make a list of all the different type of pictures you’d likely need for future articles.

Things like:

- Pictures of a variety of dogs (duh)
- Pictures of dogs on a white background (makes it easy to cut out)
- Dog bowls
- Dog toys
- Dog brushes
- Pictures of dogs playing, swimming, sitting, running etc.
- Pictures of people frustrated (in case you write articles about dogs misbehaving)
- Stains on a carpet
- Chewed furniture
- Puppies

(you get the idea)

Then you’d sign up for Fotolia and get a one month subscription (I think it’s around $197).

Then each day just search and download 25 pictures.

The key thing is to remember to cancel your subscription before the end of the month if you don’t plan on needing any more pictures.

The other key is to remember to download the pictures every day!  LOL

One other strategy you may use if you want to save a few more bucks is split the 1 month subscription with a friend.  So perhaps you download 25 pictures on “odd days” and they download their pictures on “even days”.

I’ve also had great success locating some excellent icons on this site.

You’ll need to “chop them up” after downloading them (because they come as 1 big image containing 10 or so icons) but it’s another effective method to add some quality “eye candy” to your site

Another way I’ve used the site is to download cartoon images or other graphical elements like backgrounds, arrows or diagrams.

Either way, start proactively thinking about how you can “jazz up” your site because people do judge a book by it’s cover and in your case, people will judge your membership by how it looks.

P.S  All the images in this post were from Fotolia

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Do you have resources you like using for pictures?