If you’ve been blogging for a while, or even if you just recently started, I’m sure you’ve heard people say that having a graphic or two on your blog post will allow more traffic to flow through.
People enjoy looking at pictures and it also entices them to read your post. Twitter is a place where Tweets are more likely to get clicked on if there’s a picture. Also, if you have a picture or two on your blog post, you can put it on Pinterest and that’s a huge traffic booster for some.
There are three major ways you can get photos and get them legally for your blog.
Use a generic background
Some people just create backgrounds with nice color palettes or have a solid background with the text over it. It’s plain and simple and gets the job done.
There are two ways to do this. You can find random photos on Google to use as long as you find the original source and give the owner full credit. Stealing is bad, artists work super hard. Don’t do it.
The other way is to just Google “free stock photos.” A few websites will pop up and there are plenty of photos on those websites that you can borrow for free
Your own photos
I assume you have a smart phone, right? You can take your own pictures. Photo-ops are everywhere. I use my phone but I also have a Nikon D3300 that I use quite often to get better quality.
Again, there are so many options out there, most of them are free.
Paint
I can’t do anything in Paint, but I have seen plenty of photo editing or digital art done through Paint. I don’t know how people do it, but they do and it’s really cool. If you can create cool stuff like that, go for it.
Photo editing websites
There are sites like PicMonkey or LunaPic where you can edit your photos for free. I used both of them for a while before I discovered Canva, which was much better in my opinion. It had templates and various photo sizes for certain websites. I believe there’s a paid option for it, but the free one was enough for me.
Photoshop or Illustrator
Once I started using my camera more, I got Photoshop and realized how much more I could do there over Canva. It’s a learning curve and I’m still trying to figure things out, but the pictures come out great, in my opinion. There’s a lot you can do. I have Photoshop Elements 2018 and before I got that, I had downloaded Gimp onto my laptop. It’s similar to Photoshop but a little less and is free.
How do you create your own graphics for your blog? Let me know in the comments below and if you enjoyed this post, please share it around!
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