Finding Royalty Free and Totally Free Photos and Graphics

Graphics make a great draw for your site. However, finding good graphics to use can sometimes be a problem. If you've taken a photo yourself or created some graphics, you can use them with abandon because they are yours. You own the copyright automatically.

That's the crux of the issue: copyright. If you are serious about your business, you do not want to have anyone coming after you for copyright violations. So, if you haven't taken the photos or created the graphics yourself, what do you do?

If you plan to use the graphic long term, the best thing to do is to purchase some royalty free photos or graphics. Royalty is something you pay monthly or annually for the use of some copyrighted material. Royalty free means that you purchase the rights upfront and do not have to pay royalties. But don't let the thought of the cost scare you off from looking at this. Depending on where you go for these graphics, the cost can be as little as a few dollars.

Awhile back, SmashingHub.com put up an article, "25 Best Website Resources of Free Royalty Stock Photos," which has links to these resources. I've used the first one, Stock.xchange, for quite some time. Most of the rest were new to me. You can probably find completely free graphics to use on these sites as most have tons of free ones. But occasionally you'll see one for sale that is exactly what you need. If so, put out a few bucks to get it. Then you'll own the rights to use it for as long as you want and in just about any way you want. (Always check the fine print.)

Frustrated about the copyright issues? Do you feel that you should be able to use anything you find on the web without considering that? Think again. There is a whole field in the law profession that deals specifically with internet law. But think also about the photos you have taken or graphics you have created. As I said above, you automatically own the copyright to those. Would you want just anyone to have the right to drop by your site and use them without notifying you? This law cuts both ways. It not only protects the other guy, it protects you as well.

So, get creative on your own or use someone else's work. Either way, be sure to respect copyright issues.

Tips:

• If you want to file a copyright with the US Copyright office, you can now do it electronically at http://www.copyright.gov/eco/.


• 25 Best Website Resources article

My name is Jennifer Rush and with my 20+ years of internet and marketing experience, I know how to use the internet to reach more prospects at a lower cost than traditional advertising. Simply put, I save businesses both time and money while improving their bottom line.

If you want to know more about internet marketing, please drop by http://www.Enabled4Success.com. Be sure to check the upper right corner for my current free offer.

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How to Get Photo Stock to Make Your Projects Look Attractive

Today, good designs attract the masses. There is an old adage that says "Don't judge a book by its cover." In actual fact, appearance and first impression do matter. Suppose you are at a bookstore, and you see two books of the same title and author but with different cover designs. You would most likely get the one that features a better looking cover art, even if it is slightly more expensive.

We need to make an innovation for everything we do or make; be it for business presentation or even a school project. If you want people to appreciate your work, you have to stand out from the rest. Good ideas are nothing without a good design. If you want to show a 50 slide PowerPoint presentation, for example, your audience will get bored easily if you do not include any pictures or artworks in the slides. In order to capture your audience's attention, you should consider sprucing up your presentation with free photo stock.

A decade ago, people used to use clip art to make their projects look more attractive. These days, clip art is no longer considered as an innovation, and people prefer using stock photos that they can easily get from the internet. You can find various online photo stock providers that offer high-quality photographs you can download and use. On the other hand, some websites or individuals will charge you a certain amount of fee if you want to use their images. The fees can be very costly; one picture can even cost a million bucks! There are plenty of websites that offer stock images for as low as $10 apiece. These online photo stock providers usually allow you to use their images in personal projects or for commercial use.

However, you can also find plenty of websites that allow you to download photo stock for free. These high-quality stock images range from thumbnail size up to big poster size images. If you are not sure where to find them, then a search engine is your best bet. You only need to type in the keywords "free" and "download photo stock", and the search engine will return a list of websites that provide free stock images.

It would be confusing at first, because different images come under different types of copyright licenses. The most common licenses you will find are Rights-Managed (RM), Royalty-Free (RF), Creative Commons (CC), and Public Domain. You can download the pictures for free only when they are RF, CC, or Public Domain licensed. So, you should pay attention to the license type before you download a picture.

You can make your projects look more attractive with photo stock. You can download photo stock for free from our website.

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Stock Photos - The Perfect Solution For Buying And Selling Photos

I published magazines for a living for years and know firsthand how frustrating it can be to find the right royalty free photo and then buy the right to use it. Likewise, I know a bunch of great photographers who have pretty much given up on trying to sell their images because it's just not worth the hassle. What's needed is some sort of market place for stock photos that simple, easy to use, and fair for both buyers and sellers.

That shouldn't be too much to ask, but it's surprisingly difficult to find something like this. The big stock photography sites are geared towards publishers who buy large numbers of photos at a time and do not mind the often-significant charges and fees. Even smaller sites generally try to lock you in with subscriptions. Those can be a good deal, but not if all you need is a photo or two for a web site or a newsletter.

Another problem with conventional stock photo sites is that there is a big overlap. Sometimes it seems they all have the same images! It's frustrating to spend the time searching through multiple sites just to find the same stuff. A photo market, just like a farmers market or a flea market, always has fresh, new products and a wide variety to pick from.

Amazingly, photo markets do exist, and I prefer them to the conventional stock photo places. As a buyer, I appreciate being able to look at pictures from many different professional or semi-professional photographers, or even talented amateurs, when I want to buy an image. I also want instant gratification, which to me means being able to download instantly, without buying a subscription first, and using PayPal so I won't need to enter credit card data every time.

How does a photo market work if you want to sell photos? Again, very much like a farmers market where sellers buy space to sell their products. They do that because for small merchants it's cheaper to rent space than have their own store, and the market is where people go to shop. Likewise, for photographers it's usually cheaper to rent space at a photo market where people come to buy photos than to create their own website and then advertise it to generate traffic. How much to vendors pay? That depends on how much space they rent, or rather how many images they want to have for sale at a given time.

The key to a photo market is to keep it simple. To buy a photo you register so the market knows you will respect its terms of use, but you only pay for images you purchase and download. To sell images, you register as a seller and then decide how many pictures you want to have for sale. The rest is between the buyer and the seller. Like in any other market, sellers decide how much they want to charge, and buyers can then decide if they want to pay that price.

A stock photo market is perfect if you need to quickly pick a picture or three for a project, or, as a seller, if you're handy with your camera and want to make same extra money.

Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web. Learn more about Stock Photos: Perfect Solution [http://www.freephotomarket.com] or Majon's Multimedia directory.

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You CAN Make Money Online for Free - Here's How

It is possible for a person new to marketing to make money online for free; meaning selling products using totally free resources. You don't need a product, website, mailing list, or any of the other necessities of doing business online. Read on to discover how.

The way this is accomplished is by selling other people's products.

The way it works is you sign up to Mr. X's affiliate program, and promote his product for a commission. I'm going to give you a few ways to do this that doesn't cost you a penny. As long as you have a computer and an internet connection, you can make money online for free.

The first thing you need is a market, or people with money that want to buy something. Your job at the start is to figure out what it is people want to buy. This is where old-fashioned brainstorming comes into play.

The obvious place to start is by thinking of all the things you like to do - your hobbies, your job, your travels, favorite foods - the list is endless.

Maybe you're a whiz at video games, or bass fishing. Any of these subjects has a possible customer base so it's just a matter of picking one and doing a little research.

Go to the Google Keyword Tool and type in your main keyword. This would be a broad term to begin with such as "weight loss" or "bass fishing" and then use the supplied keywords from that search to narrow it down from there.

An example would be bass fishing. A broad search for the keyword "bass fishing" returns 550,000 global searches and 368,000 local searches per month.

There is definitely enough interest in this topic for deeper exploration, although there is so much competition for that keyword, it'll be practically impossible to rank on the first page of the search engines, so let's "niche" it down a little further.

Looking down the list of keyword suggestions from Google keyword tool, we find the phrase "bass fishing techniques" that shows 18,100 global and 12,100 local searches with very little competition, so that's plenty of interest, and a real possibility of getting a good ranking.

In addition, bass fishermen are extremely passionate about the sport and spend tons of money every year on tackle and gear, so this is a great niche to look at.

Now, the next step is to find a product to offer them.

First, do we want to sell a hard (physical) product such as lures, rods, reels, and other tackle, or do we want to offer them digital products such as ebooks and reports, or maybe videos?

I say start with digital products because it's so much easier to deliver a digital product than a physical one. You have absolutely NO delivery cost either!

Let's head over to ClickBank.com and see if we can find something to offer our friends, the bass fishermen. You'll need to sign up for a free account if you don't have one already, but it's painless, and there are literally thousands of other products in the Marketplace you can promote as an affiliate.

Once you get your account set up, type your main keyword into the search box in the ClickBank Marketplace.

I typed in "bass fishing techniques" and the first product in line is one called "Largemouth Bass Fishing Tips" that sells for $29.95 and pays you 75% commissions or $20.02 in commission per sale. That's not too shabby, so let's go with that for now especially since he's offering a ton of bonuses to go with it; it should be a good seller.

Get your link from ClickBank and get ready to promote! You may want to get a free URL shortening link such as TinyURL or BudURL to not only cloak your link from affiliate commission thieves, but also so you have some click tracking to see how many clicks you get from your promotions.

Now, this is where it really gets interesting. We have a LOT more options for free promotion now than we did back when I started.

There are social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, social bookmarking, as in Squidoo and HubPages, along with press releases, article directories, blogs, and video sharing sites.

Guess what, we're going to use all of those and more. You're going to saturate the internet with your affiliate link, and you know what? It's not going to cost you a penny other than what you already spend for your internet bill every month.

These are all free resources you can use to promote products that also happen to be high traffic sites so it's only a matter of time before you start making sales.

Once you make some money, you can turn to various paid resources to speed up the process, but for now, you'll concentrate on the free ones.

The first thing you want to do now is write short 400-500 word article about bass fishing techniques.

Now, I can hear a lot of you already saying, "Well, I can't write an article!"

I say you can - it just takes a little focus and here's the easy way to do it.

Go to the sales letter for the product and scroll down to the bullet points. These are the main benefits of the product, so you just choose 5-6 of the points, and take each point one at a time and expand on it; fill in the blanks, so to speak.

It won't take long before you've got a 400 - 500 word article. Be sure to include a "resource box" or an "about the author" box at the end of the article with your website link in it which we'll talk about in the next paragraph.

Go to Weebly.com and sign up for a free account and build yourself a free website. They have hundreds of cool templates to choose from, so it's not hard to come up with a great looking site in a few minutes. The content for your homepage will be the article you just wrote and submitted to the article directories. In the body of the article, include your cloaked affiliate link for the product.

Next, search Google for "article directories" without the quotation marks. This will give you a list of all the places you can submit your articles online. The reason you're doing this is because Google and the other search engines crawl these article directory sites several times a day, and they will pick up your link for indexing, so get your article uploaded to several of these directories.

Next, go to Blogger.com and sign up for a free blog. So what is your first post going to be? You guessed it! The article you wrote with a link back to your free Weebly.com website.

You see, you want all these free resources pointing to your website which will then point to your affiliate link for the product. Your website may get picked up and indexed by the search engines, but more importantly, it may get discovered on all these other sites you have links on. The more places you have your website link, the better the chances of it getting clicked on.

Search Google for "top social bookmarking sites" and "top social networking sites" without the quotation marks. Once you get your list, sign up for free accounts at each one and include the link to your website in your profile for each one.

On some of them, you'll have the opportunity to have a "page" or article. This is where you paste the article you wrote.

On sites like Squidoo and Digg, people can rank your site. The better the content in your article, the better your site will be ranked, and more people checking it out, so be sure to write the best article you possibly can.

Now, there's a piece of software installed on practically every computer built since 2002 that's so grossly underused, it's almost a crime, and that's Windows Movie Maker! It's been installed on every Windows computer since the beginning of XP!

You need to make a short video to upload to the various video sharing sites.

This is a lot simpler than you may think. You simply take the article you wrote and go to http://sxc.hu and find some free stock photos that fit the theme of the article.

Open up Windows Movie Maker and paste in a photo and read from the article. You probably need 4-5 photos to make a 2- 3 minute video. Once you get your video finished, search for "video sharing sites" without the quotation marks. When you get a list of the top 15 or 20 free sites, open up accounts with each of them and start uploading your video.

Once you get your video uploaded to as many sites as you can, it's time to start over with a new article and go through the process again.

Using free resources, you won't see money coming in overnight, most likely, but if you stick with it, you could start seeing sales within a few days. It could possibly take a couple of weeks, and you may need to go through the process 2-3 times, but be patient - it will come. It's all a numbers game; the bigger your numbers, the better your chances of making money!

Once you start making money in this niche, find another one and set up the same system and establish another stream of income. After a while, you'll have a passive cash flow that you couldn't stop if you wanted to - true autopilot money, and it didn't cost you a dime up front!

Michael Worthington has been involved in direct sales and advertising for over 40 years and has been marketing online since 2003. For a "step by step", "fill in the blanks" video course on how to accomplish the plan laid out in this article, go to [http://TheAffiliateRx.com/af]

Feel free to reprint this article as long as it's unchanged and the author's bio is left intact.

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Getting Started Selling Stock Photos Online

Taking photos, especially for a hobby, is really fun and can be even more fun when you start getting paid for taking photos out of hobby! Is it really possible to get paid for this? Of course it is! In fact, because of the wonders of the Internet, making money from photos is now a lot easier for photographers to reach their buyers. One of the most common ways of making money through photographs is selling stock photos.

What are Stock Photos?

Stock photos are the pictures in the stock of your existing photos that you have decided to sell today. This means you, as the photographer, own the copyright to these photos. As the owner of the copyright, you have the right to give license to the usage of your photos so you can make money from them. Though your photos are being used by someone else, you still retain their copyright, which means that you can give license to them over and over again, thereby making money from the same photos continually. Sounds good? If so, then you'd better learn how to get started.

Getting Started

The first step to selling stock photos online is to collect samples of your work. Most successful stock photography websites have a very strict application process to ensure that only high-quality digital photos and images are sold on their site.

Another effective strategy is to analyze other digital photos sold on the website you wish to join. Getting yourself familiar to the website's standards will help you submit samples of digital images that adhere to the site's standard.

Once you get accepted as a contributor to the stock photography website, you can start posting royalty-free stock images to be purchased by customers.

When choosing a stock photography website to join, it is very important that you first research the website's customer traffic volume and payment structure. It's possible to get away with low prices on stock images if you join popular stock photography websites, since websites with high traffic have more potential for image downloads.

You should also analyze the strategies used by stock photographers on the website you decide to join so that you can have an insight into their best method to make money online by selling stock photos on that website.

Your earning potentials for selling stock photos online actually depend on the quality of your images, the size/resolution of the images, your demand for those images, and the number of images you contribute to the website. Some photographers earn hundreds, some even thousands just by selling stock photos online. In essence, your earning potential for selling stock photos online is limitless.

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