A Guide to Sourcing for Website Media Content
The primary objective for every business owner is to ensure that communication towards their target market or audience is detailed and explanatory. While this helps in no small way in catching the attention of the prospective clients and critics alike, it doesn’t go without saying that one of the best ways to hold down the attention of an online audience is via catchy mages that visually highlights the point established in the text copy.
It’s important to say that before understanding where to locate good visual content for your website, necessary information that helps guide the business/website owner is required. Below are some tips to assist you with sourcing for website content.
How to source for media content
The task of sourcing and feeding followers, consumers of your products or services on your blog or website can be quite arduous because there are quite a number of hurdles to scale in order to achieve this feat. Hence, it’s imperative as a blog or website owner to:
Follow trends: Constantly following trends, happenings past & present in the industry of your trade, helps to stand out innovatively or creatively in terms of the images you share on your platform.
Plan properly: You have to carve out a predefined plan of the types of visuals you share for the consumption of viewers, as this will yield two kinds of results, one of which is an increase in the number of clicks or increase in the number of page views which solely depends on how quality & irresistible new visitors and returning visitors alike find the visuals on your platform.
On the other hand, the ripple effect of having images of low quality on your website is the evidential and noticeable reduction of page views for your platforms as well as a reduction in demand or patronage for your business. Hence, it’s safe to say the catchy the visuals on your website, the increased chances of doing more business.
Content marketing agency: Alternatively, if you do not have time to source yourself, you can use a content marketing agency to help you source for images. They usually have a good range of copyright free images in their possession.
Image Terminologies
Like nature operates and is guided based on rules and regulations, every field of endeavour has several universal regulations that bind the operation of every adherent of such profession. Hence, the rule of copyright infringement is binding on the operations of marketers, bloggers, freelancers, advertisers, photographers, business owners. The image terminologies or licenses that guides the activities of the practitioners of the field as mentioned above include; Reference, Public Accessibility, Membership Subscription, Creative Freedom Right, Royalty Pass and Commercial Purpose.
- Reference: It’s of high importance to ensure that the approval of the rightful owner of an image is received and due reference or credits is given to the author of an image or video if it’s to be deployed as a third-party material on your website, as this helps to ward off accusations and liability of facing charges related to copyright. It’s usually a win-win for your website and the original author of the image as it tends to give credence to your capability, standard and expertise as a professional.
- Public Accessibility: Just like it carries the word public, it rightly depicts that the right of usage to visuals has been expressly granted by the original creator, hence as a creative, you do not require any type of approval from the owner of such visuals, which further means that you can utilize such images by instinctively redefining it to suit the purpose of your website.
- Membership Subscription: Websites have different requirements or rules to be satisfied before enjoying the benefits attached to them, Therefore, as a blogger or website owner, your primary consideration should be the constant research and sharing of images that are up to a standard which would necessarily mean more traffic and more money for you. Therefore, one of the prices to pay in order to succeed in your search for quality visuals is registering to become a user of a photo-sharing platform. It’s a strategy deployed by the platform to determine the accuracy of new visitors and returning visitors on the website per time.
- Creative Freedom Right: Every image possesses the terms and conditions that determine its usage. The role the creative freedom right plays is to determine if a third party is allowed to use a visual if it’s unchanged while in some instances the third party is required to give citation to the original author of the visual which could be in the form of a link that redirects viewers back to the author’s page.
- Royalty Pass: Images shared on visual sharing platforms that affords you as a researcher, third-party or blogger the right to utilize the intellectual property of the author of an image without paying license or royalties are widely referred to as royalty pass.
- Commercial Purpose: When an image you wish to utilize on your platform doesn’t require the payment of royalty to the original owner, then it can be used for commercial purposes. This further helps in increasing leads that can be converted after visiting your website for the first time.
Where to find images for your website
Here are a few sites where you can find both image inspiration and/or copyright free images.
- Instagram: Millions of visuals, pictures and video alike are shared on this photo-sharing platform on a daily basis, this goes a long way in aiding the job of bloggers, freelancers, business and website owners to drive home the points for their viewers.
- Pinterest: The web and mobile application deploy images for the discovery of information for researchers around the world, it’s one of the platforms which requires a membership subscription. Users can share, save, sort and manage pictures and videos on the platform.
- Unsplash.com: Unsplash.com is a popular website where visuals of different kinds which suits the need of a researcher can be found. It’s free to access and doesn’t require registration.
- Getty Images: Getty Images is one of the widely known platforms whose images are frequently shared on many websites, individuals who aren’t in need of visuals for business reasons can download some of the pictures for free.
- YouTube: Youtube is a popular video application with millions of subscribers and users. There’s hardly a video content that isn’t on Youtube, this videos can also be downloaded without subscribing to the platform.