All factoring consultants, brokers, and agents must run a business blog if you’re serious about your business and lead-generation. The relationship between your recently authored interesting blog articles and the posting of links to those articles on social media is one of the quickest ways to build networks of referrers. Blogging is not only easy and a great way to build your business, it’s also fun. To post enticing articles to build your networks, you must not only have good content, you also need a supply of great images to make those articles “pop”. But articles can be costly if purchased from companies like Getty Images or Shutterstock. There are some great sources of stock images, however, that are completely FREE and here’s a sources for your first posts.
PXhere
PXhere is a FREE stock photo website with thousands and thousands of photos ranging from jaw-dropping natural landscape images to great close-up shots of families, children, and pretty much anything else you’re looking for. You can search for images using their tag system or their search bar. You can also click on one of 3 pre-searches they have set up for you that include: new photos, popular photos, and random. All of PXhere’s photos are covered under the Creative Commons Zero license (CC0) and under this licenses you can download, publish, alter, edit, and pretty much do what you want with the photo absolutely free. (View PXhere)
Flickr
Flicker hosts billions of photos on their site but there’s a catch…Flickr hosts free AND paid photos. So if, for example, you’re hobby is kayaking and you run a blog on that subject, you can type “kayaking” into the search bar, Flickr will return pictures covered under the FREE Creative Commons license, along with copyright images and a host of other types of licenses. For your blog and if you just want FREE images, simply make sure to modify your search by selecting “all creative commons” from the dropdown bar that appears after you start your search. (View Flicker)
Pixabay
Pixabay has well over 1 million high-quality photos, illustrations, vectors, and videos. And for your great blog articles, they also created their own license which allows you to use the pictures without attributing anyone, without permission, and you can even use for the stuff you want to sell (commercial use). It’s pretty much the least restrictive policy out there for free images to use in your blog.
StockSnap
The owners at StockSnap sift through tons of photographer submissions and select out the highest-quality images from each group. Then they organize all these images into categories arranged by “tags” so you can browse images that are perfect just for your prized blog content. Every photo you click on is linked to the original artist’s profile so if you if like one, you can check all the others they’ve produced. Finally, they make it crystal clear that you can do whatever you want with the photos under a CC0 license that covers every image on the site.
Don’t Turn Your Back on Blogging
Blogging is a powerful tool for lead-generation and one of the most delicious characteristics about blogging, is its absolutely FREE. There are dozens of other articles for brokers on the magazine with more and more ideas how your blog can help you generate leads and build relationships. Too many brokers (and especially our new agents) feel they can’t write or author interesting articles for business owners. In today’s inflationary environment and $6.00 a gallon gasoline, anybody can author interesting and informative articles just like the pros.
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