Images drive a lot of engagement on social media, particularly on older networks like Facebook and Twitter. There are also networks like Instagram and Pinterest where you can only post images and videos.

Using the right images can also increase the conversion rates of your landing pages, ecommerce stores and even help your blog posts get more shares.

Finding images that convey the right message and suit the online brand you want to project is extremely easy now. As there are so many stock photo sites that can help you find the best images in seconds.

To make it easy for you to find these sites, here is a list of the best free and premium stock photo sites in 2020. Whenever you need an image, just visit these sites and type in keywords in their search fields and they will locate the most relevant images in their databases….

Best Free Stock Photo Sites:

Let’s start with the best free stock photo sites.

#1 Pixabay

Pixabay is one of my favorite stock photo sites as they have over 1 million+ free stock images and videos. When I need an image for a blog or social network, this is usually where I go. There’s no need to ask for permission from the creator before you publish the photo and you don’t have to credit them either. Before you begin using their images, read their license. It will help you understand what you can and cannot do with their images.

#2 Pexels

Pexels is one of the most used stock photo sites as you can find hundreds and thousands of free images here. You can use the images for commercial and non-commercial purposes. You can also modify the images and you don’t have to credit the creators. To learn more about what you can and cannot do with their images, check out their license.

#3 Unsplash

Unsplash is another popular and free stock photo site. They have over 850,000 free photos. Their license is similar to Pexels’. You can modify the photos and use them commercially or non-commercially without providing any credit to the creator.

#4 Burst

Burst is a stock photo site which is run by Shopify. You can use the images here not just for online marketing, but offline marketing purposes too. The pictures from here can also be used to create products like mugs, t-shirts and more.

To get a clearer idea on what you can and cannot do with their photos make sure you read their terms.

#5 StockSnap.io

StockSnap.io is a great site for finding free stock photos. They display the number of views, favorites and downloads the images on their site get. This makes it easy for you to find the most popular images. They also have a trending section where all the top performing photos can be found.

#6 Getty Images

Getty images contains a huge library of millions of stock images, videos and music. But many people avoid using them as they are quite expensive. But there is a way to get many of their images for free. This is by embedding them. When you search for an image through the above page, you can click on the embed icon and then copy and paste the code they provide onto your site.

If you want to use their images you have to meticulously follow the rules they have set. You have to always embed. You cannot download and upload the image.

#7 Kaboompics

Kaboompics has a great selection of stock photos, but one amazing feature you will find on this site is that you can search images based on color. After you make an initial search from their home page, it will take you to a results page where you can select a color and further filter images.

When you click on each image it will also show you the color palette of the image. This makes it easy to redesign the image. You can work with the palette they have already provided for you instead of wasting your time experimenting.

#8 FoodiesFeed

If you run a food blog, FoodiesFeed is a stock photo site you will love. All you will find here is high resolution photos of food and drink. The photos here are licensed under creative commons zero. This means that you should be able to modify, copy and distribute the photos for commercial and non-commercial purposes. You can learn more about their license here.

#9 Flickr

Flickr is a social network where you can find billions of images. Some of these photos can be downloaded and used for free. Rules on how you can use the image are set by the person who uploaded the image. So, make sure that before you use the image, you check out the creative commons license set by the creator.

#10 Google image search

That’s right, you can use Google itself to find free to use stock photos. You can modify the ‘Usage rights’ settings on the image search page to find images to use in your marketing. To learn more about how to do this read this guide from Google.

Premium stock photo sites:

You can find millions of quality stock photos from the above sites. But many of them have been used several times. Therefore, if you are looking for something more unique and don’t mind paying for it, you could check out the below sites.

#11 DepositPhotos

DepositPhotos is an affordable option to anyone looking for premium stock photos. They also have access to vectors and videos. In total they have over 100 million files.

You can sign up for various types of plans depending on your budget. The most affordable one is the ‘Flexible plan’. It costs only $9.99 a month. You can download 10 photos and vectors with it. If you reach the limit you can download additional photos by paying $1 for each.

They also have a free collection of photos, vectors and videos you can use for commercial purposes. This collection is updated every week.

#12 Creative Market

Creative market is an online marketplace where you purchase and download design assets made by 29,161 independent creators. Products include photos, vectors, fonts, themes, illustrations and more. There are over 2 million photos. Some of them can be purchased for as little as $2. You can even find premade image templates for social networks like Instagram and Pinterest.

Not all files are in PNG or JPG format, some of them will only work on advanced design software like Photoshop and Illustrator. Therefore, you should make sure you check the format of the products before purchasing them.

They also have a free goods page on their website where you can download 6 products for free. This page is updated every week. The products listed in the previous week are removed and new ones are added. So, you can make it a habit to download the free products every week.

#13 Freepik

Freepik is another great site where you can buy millions of photos and vectors. You will find some of the most beautifully designed stock photos here. They have a free plan and a Premium plan.

When you go with the free plan you can use the images on your website, but you need to provide attribution to Freepik. If you have the paid plan you don’t need to provide attribution and you also get access to an extra 3,396,000 premium resources.

It costs just 7.50€/month. But remember that if you want to make the most of their vector images too, you need to have access to a vector editing software like Adobe Illustrator.

#14 ShutterStock

If you are looking for a massive library of premium stock photos, clips and music tracks, ShutterStock is the best option. They have over 263 million images and 150,000 new ones are added daily.

If you use a lot of images in your marketing this will work out best for you. As they have some plans that can reduce the price of each image to $0.33 ($249/month for 750 images). They have some smaller plans, but they are on the pricier side.

#15 StockUnlimited

If you are interested in a more affordable stock photo site, you should check out StockUnlimited. You can download an unlimited number of images from their website for only $19/month. The annual plan works out even cheaper as it is just $79/year.

Their library includes 1 millions+ of stock photos, vectors, icons fonts and templates. It might not be as big as ShutterStock’s, but if you are looking for a more affordable solution, this is for you.

#16 Death to the Stock Photo

Death to the Stock Photo initially started off as a free service where you could sign up for their newsletter and they emailed you 20 free images every month. But they later transformed into a paid service. Their cheapest plan starts at $12/month. When you join, you get instant access to 3,500+ photos and videos. They also keep adding 20+ new premium images every month.

#17 Adobe Stock

If you are in search for some top quality stock photos you should check out Adobe Stock. It is on the expensive side, but you will find some of the best photos here. Their cheapest plan is $29.99 and you can download just 3 images with it. If you opt for the annual plan where you are charged $29.99 monthly, you will be able to download 10 per month. They also have a plan that lets you download HD and 4k videos. If you have a larger budget, you can give this a try. You can always upgrade to much bigger plans later as they can get the rate down to $0.26 per asset.

#18 YAY Images

YAY Images is a small group of passionate people who are on a mission to simplify and improve the way we all use stock images online and offline. They offer 11 million amazing royalty-free stock photos, vectors, and even stock video too! YAY Images covers a wide range of categories and has some great pricing options. Single images only cost $4.99 and there’s also some excellent monthly subscription options as well.

Conclusion:

These are 17 best free and premium stock photo sites in 2020. Whenever you need a photo to use in your blog posts, websites or social media, visit any of these sites and start searching. You can then narrow down on the one you like most and upload it to your favorite online editor, modify and publish it.

If you want to simplify things even further, check out Stencil, the fastest way to design images. You’ll find 20,000+ free images and icons to use and many millions more on a premium plan. Use Stencil to create professional looking images in seconds and share directly on to your favorite social networks or download it. And oh yeah, it’s free to use!

Have you used any of the above free stock photo sites? Which sites do you use to find the best stock photos? Please leave your comments below.

If you found this post on the best free and premium stock photo sites in 2020 useful and feel your followers will too, please share it with them by using the share buttons. I

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Several businesses are working hard to build a presence on this network. But while doing this they are making some mistakes. Therefore, today I am going to write about the common mistakes businesses make on Instagram and how you can avoid them…

1) Being too salesy:

Posting pictures of your products can help on Instagram. Several businesses regularly make sales this way. But most of your posts shouldn’t comprise of these photos only.

Social media is all about building relationships with people. The best way to do this is by sharing useful and/or entertaining content.

When you share content that isn’t trying to force a sale you will gain the trust of your followers. Therefore, when you post pictures of products later more people will buy from you.

You can also try creating useful and entertaining content that contains your products.

An example of a company that understands the importance of sharing useful Instagram content is Morrison’s, a supermarket based in the UK.

When you browse through their Instagram feed, you will notice that they share useful content like the below recipe.

Posting recipes like this will build trust and get more people to engage with product posts like the below one.

2) Not posting enough original content:

Some people post a lot of useful photos, but they make the mistake of posting content mostly created by others.

Posting these photos can help, but they shouldn’t make up most of your posts. As to get maximum engagement from Instagram, you should create original content.

Original photos stand out more. They will also better reflect your brand.

So, from today onwards begin creating original content. This shouldn’t take up too much of your time as quality content can be prepared in seconds.

All you need is some good Instagram background photos and an image editor to help you modify your images.

You can take these photos yourself or purchase them online.

Some image editors like Stencil provide access to quality photos within their dashboards itself. You can search for images here, quickly add in filters, icons and text and create unique images.

Content that does well on Instagram includes quote images, photos with tips or facts, interesting photos from your life, images promoting a blog post, etc.

For inspiration on how to create unique content check out Royal Caninus’s Instagram photos.

They regularly share photos of dogs and cats with facts added as overlay text.

They are fun to read.

3) Not writing better captions:

Photos aren’t the only component of your Instagram posts. Another important part is the caption. A lot of people either leave this blank or write some filler text. But if you want your post to get the highest engagement, you should accompany it with a well-written caption.

In this caption, you should mainly start off by describing the photo. Write the story behind it. Include things like why you took this photo, why are you sharing it and what it means.

After you describe the photo, you should write a call to action. If you are looking for engagement, ask followers to like the post.

For questions, you can ask a question. And for traffic replace the link in your bio to the page you want to send traffic to and ask people to click on it and visit your website.

After you finish adding all the above details you should end your post with several hashtags. Track Maven found that posts that contain 5 hashtags or more than 11 hashtags got the highest engagement.

If you want to find some hashtags quickly, you can use this list of the 100 best Instagram hashtags for likes.

This is a well-researched list. Pick the most relevant ones from here and add them to your post.

If you have some extra time you must conduct research and add in extra less popular, but highly relevant hashtags along with these.

4) Not posting regularly:

A lot of people aren’t certain about how often to post on Instagram. They don’t want to spam their followers with too many photos. Hence, they post once every few days or once every week.

But you shouldn’t be afraid to post every single day as a study from Tailwind found that Instagram accounts that post 7+ posts a week get the most likes.

That’s about 1 post a day.

If you’re still reluctant to post daily, you should check out NatGeo’s Instagram account. They post several times a day.

Their photos drive a ton of engagement and this has made them one of the top followed accounts.

5) Not building a community:

As I mentioned earlier, building relationships with your followers is a necessary step on Instagram. Posting less salesy photos and more original content can help.

But there are other steps you need to take along with these. These include…

Responding to comments: I have seen a lot of accounts post quality content every day. This results in a lot of comments. But they make the mistake of not responding.

When you respond to comments, your followers will get closer to you because it shows that you care about their ideas and thoughts. So, set some time every day to respond to Instagram comments.

Post user-generated content: Another fun way to build a community is by sharing user-generated content. These photos can be original photos they have taken just for you or they can be photos they have already published.

If you post photos that have already been published make sure you get permission to post this photo.

Also, when you publish the photo you should tag the owner of the photo and add a message thanking them. Asking your followers to follow their account will also help.

Run contests: Contests help increase engagement and followers, therefore, running one every month or 2 can help. These don’t need to take up too much of your time as there are contests such as ‘like and tag contests’ that can be set up quickly.

A company that understands the importance of building a community is Buffer.

They not only post user-generated content, but they also respond to the comments people leave on them.

Now stop making these Instagram mistakes:

These are the 5 common mistakes people make on Instagram. Always keep them on your mind before you post an update. They should be easy to remember.

Once you stop making these, you will see an increase in engagement and sales.

Which of the above mistakes have you noticed on Instagram? Did I forget to list anything important? Please leave your comments below.

The post 5 Mistakes You Are Making on Instagram appeared first on Stencil.

In 2019, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to $3.53 trillion. But the competition is immense as there are over 12 million ecommerce sites and only 650,000 of them make more than $1000 a year. Hence, if you want to beat these sites and make more, you need to implement a powerful strategy.  

This strategy should include the application of visuals as they can increase conversions on landing pages. They can also drive traffic.

You might already be adding visuals, but are they optimized to drive more traffic and sales?

To find the answer, read all the tips I have shared.

I have covered my top tips on how to use visuals to drive more traffic and sales on your ecommerce site…

#1 Add social media optimized images:

Driving both organic and paid social media traffic is vital to driving sales on your ecommerce site. But before you drive any of this traffic, you need visually optimize your site for the social networks you plan to drive traffic from because it will encourage visitors to share your pages as well.

The social networks you optimize your site for should be the social networks your target audience frequents. One social network you must definitely optimize for is Facebook as it has the most users and also ads are cheap here.

To optimize your post for Facebook, the basic rule you need to follow is the 1.91:1 aspect ratio rule i.e. the width of the image should be 1.91 times the height. This will ensure that when the image is shared on Facebook, the large thumbnail will appear which will drive more clicks and traffic. You can use this image in your ads too.

Facebook recommends the size 1200 X 627 pixels. But a size of 560 X 292 pixels should do. I use an image with these dimensions every time I optimize a page or a blog post for Facebook sharing. It ensures that the large thumbnail appears whether the page is shared on a desktop or mobile device. Once you add the image you need, adjust page settings to make sure this image is selected every time someone shares.

To get best results from this image make sure the product is clearly represented and there is a message that persuades people to click on the image and visit your site.

A perfect example is the above screenshot of the image Facebook pulls when I share from the Retrosupply website, a website where designers can purchase digital design assets like templates, background images, fonts, etc. As you can see the above image contains text that describes the product and is placed on an image made created using the product. You can easily make sure that Facebook pulls the right image if you build your ecommerce store with a builder such as Shopify (https://www.shopify.com/website/builder). In fact, the above site was built with this platform.

Pinterest is another site you should optimize your ecommerce site for as it is a powerful source of traffic and 72% of its users use it to make buying decisions. They also spend an average of $140 to $180 per order.

To enhance your site for Pinterest, the main rule you need to follow is to add a portrait shaped image. Pinterest recommends you use an image that is 600 X 900 pixels. If you get this right you will be rewarded with a lot of traffic when someone shares this image on Pinterest.

Most fashion sites like Mango.com place tall images of their products that can be pinned as you can see in the above screenshot.

Optimizing your ecommerce site and all the products for these two sites will be worthwhile as they drive ample traffic. But if you want to get better results, you should create extra images for other visual centric sites like Instagram and Tumblr especially if they are already driving traffic to your site.

#2 Use a lot of pics:

Adding the above images will optimize your posts for social media and get your site some traffic, but they won’t automatically drive sales. For that you need pictures that sell your product.

You can do this by adding several images on your product pages that show the product in various angles and in action. For example, if it is a dress, you should show pictures of it in various angles and pictures of people wearing it. If it is a cooking appliance you can show people using it to prepare a meal along with plain images of the product.

An example is this kid’s toy on Ikea, where along with the picture of the toy you have a couple of pictures of a kid playing with it.

#3 Display user generated content:

People share 1.8 billion images on social media daily. Some of these are photos of themselves along with their new purchases. When their friends glance at these pictures it instantly boosts your products’ social proof and more people will want to purchase it.

These pictures can be more effective than your marketing campaigns where you use models as these images appear more natural and generate a lot of word of mouth both online and offline. If you want these images to help you drive sales through your site too and not just on social media, you can collect and display them on your website or you can directly ask customers to submit them.

A company that does this is Burberry with the Art of the Trench campaign. Here, they display latest pictures of their customers in trench coats. This can drive up social proof and provide customers with ideas on how to dress up better. Anyone can submit their photos on the Burberry website itself.

#4 Share images through conversational commerce:

One of the hottest forms of marketing right now is conversational commerce. This where you use closed social media/messengers like Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc. to market your products.

As Corey Bloom perfectly summed up in his helpful guide on conversational commerce, ‘one in every seven people in the world interact with either Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.’ As there are over 1 billion users on each.

Through conversational commerce apps your website visitors can have a quick chat with your sales team if any lingering questions are thwarting them from making a purchase. This process can also be automated with bots.

When people ask certain questions about a type of product, your bots can automatically set to suggest relevant items.

Image Credit: Yotpo Conversational Commerce

An example is the Adoro chatbot which automatically displays products one can purchase based on the messages sent as you can see in the above image.

As images help increase conversions you should take complete advantage of these situations and share many product images. You can use the aforementioned technique and show the product being used and at different angels.

You can even allow in app purchases so that people can view pictures and directly buy them without leaving.

When running an ecommerce site, visuals will always play a vital role as visitors will want to picture themselves using your products before purchasing. But sharing any image won’t do. To gain maximum traffic and sales you need to have a strong ecommerce visual marketing strategy in place. Therefore, follow the above tips and only choose the right images that meet all the requirements.

How do you use visuals to drive more traffic and sales on your ecommerce site? Please leave your comments below.

The post How to Drive More Traffic and Sales on Your Ecommerce site with Visuals appeared first on Stencil.

To get the highest amount of shares that will also increase clicks and traffic, you need to add the right types of images at the right places. Hence, to ensure you get the best results, I am going to show you how to visually optimize your blog posts for more shares in this post…

#1 Add lots of images:

Buzzsumo conducted another study on 1 million articles and found that blog posts with an image to word ratio between 1:75 and 1:100 (where there is one image for every 75 to 100 words) got more shares than blog posts with higher and lower image to word ratios.

Post with this image to word ratio also got more shares on Facebook as displayed in the below graph.

They also got tweeted more on Twitter…

These graphs show that you need to add plenty of images to your blog posts to get more social media shares, especially if you rely on sites like Facebook and Twitter for traffic.

You don’t have to follow this exact ratio each and every time as the first graph also shows that posts with image to word ratios between 1:125 and 1:150 also get plenty of shares.

The images you use can be a combination of stock photos, graphs, screenshots, infographics, etc.

Neil Patel understands the importance of adding visuals to his blog posts.

Take a look at his post Social Media Marketing Made Simple for example. It has more than 25 images. They are a combination of different types of images. He even included a small infographic.

Using several images is definitely helping him attract more shares as the post got 1,754 Facebook shares and 434 tweets at the time of writing this post. Therefore, while writing your blog post you should try and add several relevant images that compliment it.

#2 Add images optimized for specific social networks:

Different types of images perform well on different social networks, Hence, if you want to attract shares and traffic from a specific social network, you should make sure you include images that perform well on that social network to the blog post.

For example, if you want to drive more traffic from Facebook, you will need to add an image that is at least 560 X 292 pixels, to your blog post.

You will also need to make sure that this image is picked by default when someone shares that post. You can easily do that on a WordPress blog by making the image the featured image of the blog post or by using a plugin like Yoast SEO. Yoast has a feature that lets you pick the default image for Facebook. You can also add a Facebook title and description if you don’t want the meta title and description to appear.

When you do this only the chosen image will be shared on Facebook and it will appear as a big thumbnail, instead of the small one. As the thumbnail occupies more space it will attract more attention and traffic.

You can see this in action on this post on Facebook live broadcasts on Iag.me. As you can see in the above screenshot the image is specially optimized for Facebook. When I share it the big thumbnail appears and it also contains the title of the blog post which persuades people to visit the website. Another benefit of including this image is that it can be shared on other popular networks like Twitter, Linkedin and Google+ where it will perform well.

But this landscape image will not perform well on Pinterest.

To optimize your post for Pinterest you need to create a portrait shaped image. You can see a lot of food blogs take advantage of this like in the above screenshot from Pinterest. These types of tall images get pinned and repinned a lot on Pinterest and this drives back a lot of traffic to the website. Again, set your pin it button to pin that specific image to ensure only that image gets shared on Pinterest.

If you want to go a step further you can create an infographic for your blog post too as infographics get a lot of shares on Pinterest. I do this on a regular basis, like in this post on getting more followers on Pinterest. I summarized the entire post in an infographic. It got me a good amount of repins.

#3 Add image share buttons:

Regular share buttons can increase shares by nearly 7 times as found by this study, but as you are looking to get more shares through your images, just adding regular share buttons won’t be sufficient. Along with them you should be adding image share buttons. These are the share buttons that appear when someone scrolls over your image. They remind the person that the image can be shared and this leads to more shares.

Hence, go ahead and add some image share buttons to your blog posts.

Summary:

To sum up this post you get started with visually optimizing your blog posts for more shares by simply adding more images. You can then add images that are specifically optimized for your most important social networks. To get further more shares don’t forget to add image share buttons to remind and encourage people to share your post.

How do you visually optimize your blog posts for more social media shares? Which techniques have worked best for you? Please leave your comments below.

The post 3 Ways to Visually Optimize Your Blog Posts for More Shares appeared first on Stencil.