Writing a well structured, quality post is crucial if you want to share valuable information with your readers. You need to make sure you have done your research, extracted all of the key information and provided your audience with actionable steps. The only problem is that nowadays there are thousands of articles on one topic. Often people don’t give you or your article the time of the day. In order for them to figure out that it holds true value, you need to draw them in. The best way to grab a reader’s attention is with images. Our friends at HubSpot have given 19 great reasons why you need to include an image in your blog post.
The key thing to remember is that,
“90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text”
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This means that if someone is scanning a text, the first (and potentially the only) thing they will notice are the images in your post. Make sure you include them.
Where do I find free WordPress images?
Unless you happen to be an extremely talented photographer and writer, and you have time to do both extensively, you might have trouble finding quality images for free. If you need a constant supply of quality images, and you are happy to pay for them, then Shutterstock is great place to go. However, for most of us this is an expensive option.
Content marketers, and bloggers waste tremendous hours on the internet searching for quality free images. Going on Google images is no longer an option, images are of low quality and by the time you find that one needle in the haystack, you might waste hours of productive work time. The other problem is integrating your image into your post, it often takes precious minutes selecting the right size and aligning it in your post.
Let’s take minions as an example. You have written a post and really need to grab your reader’s attention with a picture of a minion, what’s not to love about them, they are happy, yellow and round. Type it into Google and this is what you get.
Nice, but fairly low quality unsuitable free images for your WordPress post. If you are handy with Google you will know that by going onto Search Tools, you can filter and find specific images, but instead of wasting time on here finding the right image, let me introduce you to a plugin that changed my approach to free image search.
What is ImageInject?
ImageInject , WordPress Plugin, is easy and fun to use. It searches the huge Flickr and Pixabay database for creative commons licensed images related to any topic. It can also help you with your post SEO, by automatically populating ALT and title tags, and the images are saved to your own server and WordPress media library. The best part it only takes seconds for you to find the right image for your post. That means no time wasted on searching dozens of pages for your free image, and no integration issues. Your free image problems for your WordPress posts have just been solved.
How to use ImageInject?
ImageInject can be found on the WordPress repo, you simply install it and activate it, like you would with any other plugin. That’s it really you are ready to use ImageInject to integrate a free image to your post.
For example sake, let’s go back to our post with the minions. This time round we have ImageInject ready and installed. At the bottom of your post you will see an ImageInject box that will ask you to type in any word. Type minions.
Voila! There is a huge range of free images ready for you to use, so instead of worrying about the quality, you can focus on choosing the best suited minion for your post.
Another great thing about ImageInject is that it has all of the image spec, it’s available for you to see just by clicking on any single image.
You can see what sizes the image comes in, who it’s by, and what the original source is. All of the information you need is here, and of course out of respect towards those who work hard to create quality free images, make sure you give them credit in your post. Remember to check out the different types of licenses, there are images for non-commercial use only, and others that allow you to use images on commercial websites. You can add an attribution link to your image, just make sure you select the license you want to use.
Now that you have found the images you need, you can actually select more than one. Select as many as you need, and choose where you would like them added. I wasn’t joking when I said the integration is seamless. You can insert them normally, align them left, right or centre. With one click they will appear in your post.
Wrapping up
Rather than wasting time on finding free images, you can now spend that time in a better way. Maybe you can go and watch a minion movie, I hear they are great. One important thing to remember is to make sure that you have an image friendly theme. It’s no good having a great plugin that searches for free images for you unless you have a WordPress theme that supports multiple post layouts that let’s you show your images in the best light. I recommend you test out a few, one of my favourite is the Herald theme that has over 500 post layout combinations.
Get free image searching for your WordPress posts!
