Quality images are a vital element in effective blog posts. People are visually oriented, and including a compelling image in your posts will help entice people to read your blog,
I’ve known many bloggers who simply do a Google search for images rather than paying for images. The problem with that is some images that show up in the Google image search results are not labeled for re-use. This means, you may be held liable for using an image that you don’t have rights to use. Some image-rights companies have code embedded into their images, and they have bots searching the web, looking for sites that use their products without proper licensing. If you get caught violating the image use rights, you may receive a nasty letter informing you about it as well as a request for compensation for using their property. Yikes!
One way to avoid such issues if you are using a Google image search is to click on Search Tools > Usage Rights > Labeled for Reuse. (See screenshot below.) The default setting is “Not filtered by license,” which means the results will include images that are not royalty free.
The best way, however, is to use royalty-free images from a reputable stock photo service. I use and recommend BigStockPhoto.com for a lot of reasons, which I discuss in the following video:
As I mentioned in the video, you can get a FREE, no-obligation 14-day trial to BigStockPhoto right now and download up to 70 royalty-free images to use on your website. Download them and use them now or save them in your account dashboard to use later. Take advantage of this offer while you can! Here’s the link: FREE 14-day trial to BigStockPhoto