I create a LOT of content marketing for myself and my clients; blog posts, ebooks, presentations, webinars, infographics, charts, etc… All of these require an enormous amount one particular resource; images. There are lots of sources for images and here are my top three in decreasing order:
- By far, the most common source is Creative Commons licensed images on Google, Flickr and Wikipedia. The license for most of these allows for their use as long as the owner is given proper attribution. This probably accounts for at least 75% of the images I use in my blog posts, ebooks and presentations.
- The other source is Shutterstock. This is an expensive option and so I use far fewer of them. I’ll typically purchase them for presentations and ebooks, then reuse them for blog posts where appropriate.
- Finally, copyrighted images can be used if permission is granted from the owner. I rarely use this option and only do so in presentations or ebooks – never blog posts. The reason is that ISPs and other hosting companies are shooting first and asking questions later when it comes to copyright infringement and I just don’t want to risk that. The vast majority of sites on the web are covered by blanket copyrights and so their images can’t simply be copied and reused in your content.
Therein lies the challenge and opportunity. Earlier this week, I was developing an ebook for one of my inbound marketing clients. They’re a B2B company that provides optical alignment services to industrial clients. There were a number of instances in the book that lended themselves to incorporating an image of a particular instrument. Per my typical process, I went to the Creative Commons search engine and typed in the name of some names of tools and instruments.
Nothing! Not one single result. Zip. Zero. Nada. Bupkis. The big donut hole.
And so I went to a few manufacturers’ websites to confirm what I knew would probably be the case. They had heaps of beautiful, high-resolution pictures of their products. However, since the site was copyrighted I could not use them. How silly is that? I was trying to give them free advertising and they were telling me I couldn’t.
So what should these companies do instead?
Creative Commons Catalog
The solution – and opportunity – is incredibly quick and easy to implement. Grab all of your product images and upload them to a Flickr album under a Creative Commons license. Then, any time a blogger or ebook editor needs a picture of your particular device they can grab it and attribute it to you. That’s it!
Content marketing is hard work. The payoff is worth it, but it takes a lot of time and resources to do well. But here’s a case of a content marketing opportunity staring you in the face that will only cost you a few minutes of your time and deliver a number of benefits:
- You’ll be increasing brand awareness by getting your logo and company name seen.
- You’ll be generating more inbound links as many of these posts will include links to your website. This is a great way to increase your SEO.
- Qualified traffic to your website will increase because these are people searching for the product you offer.
So go ahead and jump on Flickr, Google, Photopedia, YouTube and any other Creative Commons outlet that makes sense for you. You’ve got nothing to lose and much to gain.
Image Credits:
“Problems are Opportunities” courtesy of DonnaGrayson on Flickr.
