Visual elements are very important as they attract visitors, can make you or your site stand out through layout or typography or images and will help people learn better and faster the messages from your content. A big part of information we intake is visual and a big part of the people are better visual learners. Sometimes an image can send out a powerful message that can motivate, depress, attract or repulse.
Personalized images make a distinction in the eyes of the reader as there are so many sites and sources of information that goes before us everyday that it’s hard to remember the source in case we want to get back and check it again or recommend and share with others.
Let’s see why is it important to have an unique image on your site:
- It’s a SEO advantage since Google’s search engine can detect if an image has been published on other sites and might down rank the site for lack of uniqueness that it tries so hard to promote. Stock photos will not help here either as the web crawler can’t make a difference between them.
- People enjoy unique images. When you see repeating images across different sites all the content with the same image gets blurred and visitors see them as the same content repeating, even if the text is unique on each site. This can lead to a higher ranked site to be visited and others to be ignored based just on the same image that they all shared. By the way, unique and interesting images get shared more often on social media.
- Creating your own images can be for free or at a very small price. You can even skip paying the license for a specialized software like PhotoShop or other photo editing software as there are a lot of tools easy to use and even offered for free.
It’s no wonder that in the age we’re in you can find a lot of online resources, tools or apps that you can use to create your own personalized images without knowing to do that in PhotoShop or other image editing tools that require time to learn to use or even taking time to take a photo. Below are just a few resources that you can use to create your own personalized images to add to posts or articles or other marketing material you want.
Stock Photo Free Download
StockSnap.io — StockSnap offers stock photos that are free to use and you can edit and share them anywhere you want without having to pay anything. They have a search function on site to help you find easier the images you need.
Life Of Pix — Is also a site where you can get free images, just that it’s differently organized. Also you can find here stock videos you can use in exchange for a back link.
New Old Stock — Here you can find vintage photos that most likely were taken decades ago. The images are free, but check the terms for each one as it might require a link back to a certain page or flickr account.
Stock images are great and you can use them as is or edit them. An easy way to edit them would be using one of the tool mentioned below.
Photo Editing Tools
Pic Monkey — This is a great service for editing images, adding effects and text, retouching and cropping and resizing as you need it to be. Making a collage is also easy to do by following their tutorials. It is a free service, but some of it’s features are available for those who pay a monthly or annual membership fee. The free options are more than enough by me. Also the end result you can download to your computer or save to Dropbox and OneDrive. The same goes for images and icons you upload to the editor as you can import them from your computer, OneDrive, Dropbox, Flickr or Facebook.
Canva — This is another great online editing tool that is easy to use. You will have to register to start using it and it’s totally free. A major advantage is that it will offer a tutorial right after you register so you could get used to it and it’s options quickly and also you can search images in the sidebar and add them to your collage. There are free images, but a lot more premium images available will cost you $1.
Here you can create images with the preset sizes for different social media and collages with different layouts and even infographics.
Piktochart — Piktochart is focused on creating infographics. It is free to use, but it also has a paid premium account that will offer more options to create and then share or save the final product. It’s great that you can create charts with data from spreadsheets and there are many layouts you can choose to get you faster on your way.
Offline Apps
Don’t forget that you can use presentation software too. Some will use Google Slides that is free to use and can be accessed in your Google Drive account if you have a Gmail account. Others use PowerPoint as an alternative, but that has it’s own limits and is also available only if you purchased it or the entire Microsoft Office bundle. Mac OS users might prefer using the Keynote app that seems more user friendly and has many options like setting your own slide size, adding various backgrounds and setting layouts that look attractive and also you get to choose different fonts that look great.
All the resources mentioned before are great points to start creating your unique images for your posts and articles or even presentations and marketing materials. Personalized images will give you many advantages and will make your content stand out and get shared more. Besides, Google can give you a big thumbs up for having unique images and direct more traffic to you.
Hopefully this post will inspire you to start creating your own marketing materials and even infographics.