The article below originally appeared at http://www.psloveblog.com/copyright-free-images and is not the property of 5NorthMarketing.com. We believe, however, that it contains wonderfully written and insightful information worth sharing.
Copyright-free images are not what you need when you're looking for great photos for your website. You need big, beautiful photos, but who can afford a photographer or pay thousands of dollars every year to Getty Images? If you do not do amazing work with a Nikon or Cannon camera then you think you are out of luck for nice photos, right? You are not out of luck.
Instead of looking all over for copyright-free images that are usually awful photography, there is another way. You can get beautiful, professionally taken photos for your website for as little as 16 cents per photo. It is a little known fact that ShutterStock has another website called BigStockPhoto.com. It is here that you can get some amazing deals on gorgeous photos for your website or blog. You can also use them on your client's websites.
The best part of BigStockPhoto.com and the reason I've been using them for so many years, is that you pay only once. Other websites that offer professionally taken stock photos will charge you a huge fee for each image and charge you that fee every year for that photo. BigStockPhoto.com charges only once, and it can be anywhere from .16 to $3.50 per photo. You can download the photo as many times as you want and you don't have to worry about that photo next year – it is still yours to use. These are beautiful photos, too, not at all like those amateurish, copyright-free images.
When you're using BigStockPhoto.com to sign up, it will direct you to their subscription page. It doesn't show you this right away, but there are other options for those who don't use a whole lot of photos. You can purchase packs of credits for photos and you have a year to use them. If you write a small blog, or have a company website, you might only need a dozen or so photos. So, go to BigStockPhoto.com and sign up. When you get to the subscription page, scroll down and you'll see a link to "See All Plans." That is the link you want.
The Image Pack Plans are as small as 10 image credits for $35 and you have a year to use them. There are a lot of different plans for image packs. The more credits you purchase, the less you are paying per photo. Of course, the biggest savings are for the heavy users and that only makes sense. For those who need fifty images a day to get through posting photos on all their articles or the websites they build then they can pay as little as 16 cents per image. These are not copyright-free images, these are the copyrighted, beautiful, professionally taken images!
BigStockPhoto has authorized me to offer my website visitors a two week free trial. Go to BigStockPhoto.com and sign up for your free trial of their beautiful photos. When I signed up about ten years ago, I was on a free trial and I never stopped using them. I have never found this quality of photos for such a low price per photo. I use their services for photos for all my clients that I write for and for the websites that I design. I will receive a commission if you sign up for a free trial, and I am writing this because of that. Otherwise, I would have kept my high opinion of them to myself and just told my clients about them. Of course, every starving writer can use a little extra income now and then, but I do really believe they are a great deal. That's why I've used only them for the past ten years. Check it out. You'll see. And again, this is not the copyright-free images junk. These images are the good stuff.