Visual content can make a big difference to your marketing efforts and website. Articles with images get a lot more shares on social media. People tend to skim online content so you need to get your message across clearly, and visual content is a great way to do that. Articles with images get 94% more views and social media posts with images get 650% higher engagement than text only posts.
Visual content covers a range of different media, including:
- Photos
- Graphics
- Cartoons
- Art
- Whiteboard videos
- How to videos
- Screencasts
- Screenshots
- Infographics
- Graphics and charts
- Instructographics
- Quotes
- Memes
You don’t need to spend a fortune buying content or hiring a graphic designer. There are a lot of sources for low cost or free visual content.
Photos, video, and graphics:
There are lots of sources online for free of cheap visual media. For photos check our guide to the best free stock photography. The links below give lots of other great sources of free material.
- Photodune offers some great professional stock photography at reasonable prices.
- 123RF is another favorite low cost stock photography website
- Unsplash: High resolution high quality photos for free.
- Pixabay: Free stock photography, videos, and vector graphics, and illustrations.
- Pexels: More free stock photography
- PhotoPin.com: Search through millions of Creative Commons photos.
- StockSnap.io: More free stock images from the creators of Snappa (see below)
- Freeimages: Hundreds of thousands of free photos and illistrations.
- GraphicBurger: Free graphics, icons, design resources, and mockups.
- Gratisography: A wonderful collection of free professional photography by Ryan McGuire.
Image creation
- Snappa: Create graphics online with this simple to use design tool.
- Canva: Cloud based graphic design with templates for a range of print and digital projects.
- Piktochart: An easy to use infographic, presentation, and poster editor.
- Greenshot: A tool for taking and annotating screenshots.
- Skitch: An app by Evernote for annotating images.
- Videoscribe: This app lets you create whiteboard style animations easily and with little technical knowledge.
- Powtoon: Cloud based tool for creating animated videos and presentations.
This infographic was created by FastWebStart.