How To Get FREE Photography For Your Marketing
Back in the 1980s B.I. (before Internet) there were just two ways to get photography for marketing brochures, ads and other projects. You could hire a photographer at $1,500 a day and up plus expenses (and usage rights or royalties,) or you could comb through stock photo catalogs, call the stock house and wait for a package of actual photos or transparencies to be shipped to you. The photos you chose would cost up to $2,000 each to use - once. (And you'd have to pay for a scan of the photo to use in your material.)
Today, the Internet has changed all that. Most people now use royalty-free stock downloads from online brokers like iStock. It's smart. The quality is usually pixel-perfect and images are available for download instantly. The cost is very low, like $10 - $20 per image. That's pretty high on the BB Bang4Buck index.
But what if you don't have bucks to start with?
$mart Marketers on a budget need to be a bit more resourceful and look a little deeper. If you do - and you won't need to search long - you'll find a virtual World Photo Gallery in cyberspace where untold millions of images are available for your use - FREE.
In a flurry of seemingly counter-intuitive marketing, photographers are giving away huge amounts of their images via the Internet to whoever wants to use them, for whatever reason. All that is usually required in return is an attribution; a creative credit and perhaps Internet link back to the photographer.
Each deal varies a bit, some give preference to non-profit efforts, but most photographers don't even mind if you sell products using the images.
Are these shutterbugs off by a few f-stops?
No! (Well, okay, some are. Artists, you know.)
Why That's Smart Marketing: Free sharing is the original code of the Internet. To be sure, the last decade has seen the Web redeveloped into the most successful business park in the world, but something about that 1970s, West-Coast University, Revenge of the Nerds DNA of the Internet has remained robust.
People expect to get things of real value for free on the Internet, things like information, instruction, inspiration... and things like photographs as well. So, the photographers and sites that offer free stock photography are meeting their potential customers first in a courtesy trust-building transaction.
- Free = no risk and easy
- Transaction = Start of relationship
You'll notice as you check out the links I'll share with you below, that quite a few of these free photo sites are actually affiliated with a PAY stock photo site. When you search for a free image, you may also see PAY photo options as well.
By upgrading you to PAY (for their best or most popular images) they make money in the long run. They also sell advertising space on their sites to other companies that might be interested in marketing to the thousands of browsers lured to the site by the free photos.
But if anyone wants to download thousands of free images and never pay one dime for them - they can do that too without the least bit of obligation.* Very Authentic Internet. Good PR.
Treat them right and they'll talk you up to their friends, some of whom will end up buying from you. In short, you've established a dynamic online market using your free products as your advertising.
So, though giving away your work long before you have any chance of making money off of it seems nuts, it's actually a viable way to build a business - I'd say the number one way for a marketer on a budget these days.
You might be thinking about things you could give away to start your relationship with your best prospects.
Do The Rights Thing
First, a few ground-rules. MOST photography on the Internet is NOT free to use. Unless overtly told so, don't assume that just because you can slide a jpeg off someone's web page, you can use it publically. (What you do with the pictures in private is up to you.)
For instance, some photographers who post on Flicker don't mind you downloading their images - they even offer a variety of download image sizes to help you. But many Flicker photographers are very strict about further use of their creations.
Will you get popped if you swipe a shot of the Statue of Liberty off an Insurance Company's site for your Powerpoint to the local Cub Scouts? It's doubtful - although some of those precocious little Cubs are getting pretty hip to copyright law. But for anything you create to turn a profit, you'd better be sure its safe to use the images.
I'll introduce some open-rights databases you can rely upon below.
Ready to start the Gallery Tour?
First stop is Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Yes, it does sound like the greenbelt of a Hawaiian college but it's actually the visual sister to the online e-cyclopedia. Here you will find images - photos, drawings, maps, video and so on - that are available to anyone under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia
The Creative Commons License was created to give public domain access to material that could then be freely used in whole or in part (in other words, remixed.) If you see material listed with a Creative Commons License, you are generally free to use it as you wish - WITH an attribution or link to the original creator or owner.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/
There are also dozens of government and private stock image sites you can browse to find everything from NASA images to historic photos to... well, you name it.
Some of the best include:
Stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/
I used free photos from Stock.xchng to illustrate my ebook Write A Smart Marketing Plan in Five Hours. I needed pictures of five different types of interesting-looking clocks - each showing a different hour! (Do you know the percentage of photographed timepieces set to 10/10 so as not to hide the logo on the face? Look at any watch ads.) But Stock.xchng came through for me.
Free Photos Bank - http://www.freephotosbank.com/
Stockvault - http://www.stockvault.net/
And if you want to REALLY browse some free images, Freestockphotos has links to 50+ free image sites: http://www.freestockphotos.com/
Use any or all of these sources - I do. I have found that with a little time spent searching, you can find plenty of useful - and totally free - visuals for your blogs, brochures, ads, Powerpoint shows, emails, posters, reports and so on.
And download them instantly, right onto your hard drive.
Did I mention it was all FREE?
Good days!
NOTE: You know the Internet is built on thin air; it is forever in flux. By the time you try some of these links, they will be dead as disco. Others will have sprung up overnight like a faerie ring of mushrooms. For the good of all, I'd appreciate any feedback about broken links, new resources - and your comments, observations and experiences as well.
Sub-rosa: * Well, not financial obligation. This is actually a very strong persuasion and sales tactic, harnessing the inescapable power of Reciprocity. The short version is: All societies in existence seem to follow one universal creed - you must repay a gift or be in the givers' debt. So, by giving free information, instruction or widgets, we are actually tipping the relationship so the next transaction is to your advantage. The BEST explanation is in one of my favorite books: Influence by Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, Phd.
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