High quality images are an essential component of an engaging blog post. The right image can attract clicks from both your website visitors, as well as your social media followers. Why? Because posts that include images produce 650 percent higher engagement than text-only posts.
You have two choices when it comes to sourcing high quality images for your blog posts . You can either purchase them or find free images that are royalty free or fall under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which allows you to copy, modify and distribute the images, even for commercial purposes, without asking permission.
While free images sound great, many bloggers don’t know where to find them. Here are six sources of high quality images that you can start using today for free:
1. Burst by Shopify
Burst is a free stock photo site that was created by Shopify, allowing anyone to download the images found within its library for free. You can use the images for any purpose, as they fall under the CC0 license.
There is no account creation or registration required to download the images, making it extra appealing. While the images are perfect for blog posts, they can also be used by website designers and developers for a wide variety of creative projects, such as background images and visual marketing campaigns.
This resource offers a lot of images that aren’t found on other free images sites, giving it some extra appeal.
2. Pexels
With more than 30,000 free stock photos available and at least 3,000 more added each month, Pexels is a solid source of free images. All images are user-uploaded and hand-picked by their team, or sourced from other free image websites.
Pexels ensures all images fall under the CC0 license before being made available. Every image on Pexels has multiple sizes to select from, allowing you to select the one that best matches your blog’s dimensional requirements.
3. Pixabay
Pixabay has over one million free stock photos, art illustrations and vectors available to download and use as you wish. With a library of this size, there is a very good chance that you will find images that meet your needs.
Use anything you find on Pixabay without attribution, in any form, both commercial and personal use. While you must sign up to download images, it’s free to join.
Unique to Pixabay is their app, which is available in the App Store and on Google Play, allowing you to access free images via your mobile device.
4. StockSnap
With new images added daily, StockSnap focuses on high resolution photos, which are selected from around the internet and selected from photographers that they have hand selected to join their network. If you are having trouble locating the perfect image for a blog post, search based on trending images or downloads and views.
StockSnap respects each photographer, making it a point to locate them and link back to their profile to thank them for their generosity. If you’d like the most popular photos sent to your email inbox each week, sign up for StockSnap’s weekly newsletter.
5. Unsplash
Unsplash is a free image resource that contain more than 200,000 photos that can be used however you wish. It’s free to join, giving you access to search images that have been provided by their active community of 41,872 photographers.
While you can use images that fall under the CC0 license without giving credit, it’s a nice gesture to notate the source and creator in your blog post blow the image. Upsplash’s “Collections” are very popular, available for free download as well.
6. Cupcake
All of the images found on Cupcake can be used without any cost. You are able to modify and alter them in any way, in order to make them suitable for your blog. Jonas Wimmerström, a 28-year-old from Sweden, is the creative mind behind Cupcake. Wimmerström also offers a link to more of his images that he sells, for those wishing to see more of his offerings.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.