All language subtitles for 10 - Sourcing Images English

Okay.

So as I just said, I want to take a moment here just to talk about images in general.

Now, the key point here, the key takeaway here from this lecture is that in order to create a great

looking site, images are of extreme importance.

They are the initial impact.

That's what's going to impress your customer.

Now, I know that sounds really, really obvious, right?

But at the same time, with all the reviews that I do so often, I see a site where somebody has spent

no time thinking about the images and the site just doesn't look professional.

It looks very amateur, and therefore people just generally won't buy from it.

You know, think about it from your point of view.

If you went to a site where the images looked a little bit unprofessional or just looked like they'd

been taken from anywhere, you wouldn't necessarily feel confident in buying from that site.

So images are of paramount importance.

Now we can get images from all over the place.

And I'm going to show you a bunch of different sources here during this lecture.

And we can pay for them or we can get them for free.

All right.

Now, there are lots of great image sources for free.

I'm going to show you those as well.

But I do want to start off with the paying images now.

You might think, well, if there's a bunch of stuff available for free, why do I even want to look

at the paying?

Well, there are three main reasons, in my opinion.

The first one is choice.

Typically speaking, on a paying site, you're going to have a much wider range of images available

to you.

So that's the first one.

The second one is the quality of the images.

There's no question that you can get good quality images on some of the free sites, but on paying sites,

you're always guaranteed images of the highest quality.

Now, a third reason is the question of royalties.

Royalties are always associated with images, and royalties is basically whether you can use their image

or not for yourself.

Now I'm going to show you some free sites where you can get royalty free images so you can use those.

But of course, on the paying sites, you own them.

You don't have a problem with royalties.

That's the whole thing.

You buy it, you own it, you keep it forever and you can use it for whatever purpose you wish.

Now, it probably sounds like I'm trying to push you towards the paying option.

I'm really not.

I'm just want to make you aware.

There are some great free options.

You can.

No problem.

You can build out your site with all kinds of free images.

You're going to see that.

But I just want to make you totally aware of the advantages of paid images, should you want to use

them?

Okay.

So let's have a look and see where we can get images from.

You've been looking at this for a little while.

I stock istockphoto.

Com and absolutely enormous database of paid images.

Okay.

So we're going to start with the paid image sites and there are two in particular that I recommend.

So these are very simple.

You just have the search thing here.

If I wanted to search for dog related images, I could just type in dog and I get absolutely tons of

images popping up.

1.2 million.

Hope you can see that dog stock photographs.

So an absolutely enormous choice of very, very high quality images.

Now, in terms of cost, you're probably looking at about $5, something like that per image, maybe

up to ten.

It sort of depends.

Right.

But it's that kind of ballpark figure that you want to think about, I think.

I believe that as a long term, we're talking about building a long term business here, that spending

five or $10 on an image is well, well worth it.

Okay.

I consider it to be a very, very good investment.

But at the same time, I do understand that not everybody has a budget for this kind of stuff, especially

in the beginning.

So don't repeat myself too much, but I'm going to show you some free stuff as well.

Now let's jump over to the second one, which is Shutterstock, exactly the same principle.

We have a massive database of things we can search.

So if I type in dog here and search their database, this time I get a 3.1 million dog stock photograph.

So absolutely loads of photographs as well.

Okay.

So two really, really good paid image sites where you're literally never going to run out of ideas.

So let's now talk about free image websites.

Now, I've kicked this off with Google.

You can see here, I've done a search on images for dog.

And the reason for showing you Google at this point is basically to say that Google sadly, is not a

brilliant source of free images.

I know there are many, many images and of course you can download them, but most of them these days

come with some kind of license associated with them.

It didn't used to be like that a few years ago.

You could pretty much take images as you wanted, but these days it's a little bit more complicated.

Just to illustrate this, if I click over here on tools, you can see here usage rights.

If I open this up, I've got all and then I've got two other options Creative Commons licenses and commercial

and other licenses.

Now, I'm not going to go into the details of those, but suffice it to say that the word license is

on the end of both of them, which implies that there may be some usage rights.

So sadly, as I say, Google is not a great source for images that you would use commercially on your

own site, which of course is exactly what we want to do.

But fear not.

I have plenty of other options for you.

So this one, just for example, is called free range, free range stock.

It's the same principle I can type in here, dog, for example, and click on search.

And I'm going to get, of course, a bunch of photos that I can use on my site, royalty free, and

I don't have to pay for them.

So if I scroll down here, any of these, for example, I can use on my site with no issue whatsoever.

Now there are many, many sites like this, and I could show you each one as part of this lecture,

but I don't think that's a very efficient way of doing things because they're all basically exactly

the same.

Right.

You get the idea very, very quickly.

So rather than do that, what I've done is in the next lecture, I put together a list of at least ten

image websites where you can go and find completely free images that you can use on your site.

So I really hope in this lecture I've given you some great sources where you can find your images either

paying or free.

And as you can see, there are many, many places where you can find free images, particularly when

you're getting started.

I totally understand you may well want to go down that route, but whatever you do, please take a little

bit of time to think about this.

That initial impression, that professionalism, if you like, is so important when somebody comes to

our site in the first place.

So skipping over images just any old image will do is definitely not the attitude you want.

You want to apply the best images you can to your website so that you continue to build out your incredible

business.