I’ve looked on several internet marketing forums and I’ve often seen people asking where they can get images for their website and content.
The answer is simple. You can make your own! I know what you are thinking, “no, no I can’t because I have no artistic talent.”
The truth is, neither do I but that doesn’t stop me from gathering usage free images and putting them together over some cool text. Here’s how:
Once you follow my instructions there will be nothing stopping you from sprucing up your content with kick ass images. Your visitors will then share your images via Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, giving you even more targeted traffic.
Google Images Has It All!
The images you’ll create are composed of two or three pictures put together. You got your main image that serves as the background and one or two more images to decorate with.
All you gotta do is go to Google Images and click on the gear then select ‘Advanced Search’. Scroll to the bottom and choose ‘free to use, share or modify’ next to the usage rights section then click the blue button.
Now let your creativity go wild and look for images that will compliment your content. You can find some examples below.
Save the images you want.
The second part of your image creation equation is GIMP! It’s a free piece of opensource software that lets you edit your images into masterpieces.
Go ahead and download it today before you continue with this tutorial.
Editing Your Images With GIMP
First thing you might want to do is remove the backgrounds of your smaller images so that you can easily lay them over your main image.
- Click on ‘tools’ then go to ‘selection tools’ and click on ‘fuzzy select’
- Go over your image with fuzzy select and click it
- Then go to ‘layers’, select ‘transparency’ and click on ‘color to alpha’
- Click ‘ok’ and save the image as a .PNG file, your done!
Open up your main image with GIMP and drag the smaller ones on to the main one and move them to your desired place.
Click on ‘image’ and select ‘flatten image’ so that the whole thing becomes one image.
Now you want to add your text but before that you’ll want to create a space on the image for the text.
Click on the rectangle icon and create a space on the image
Select the color you want to fill the space you created then select the color bucket icon. Hover the bucket over the space you created and click.
Now just the rectangular area should be filled with the color. Click on the ‘A’ icon and start typing with your favorite font.
side note: You can also find more fonts online, just search for ‘free fonts’.
Make sure what you type in is catchy, interesting and keyword related. Once your done, flatten the image and save it as your main keyword, this will help out with SEO further down the line.
Now you got everything you need to make cool images on the fly that your visitors will love.
Your cool images on your site will be shared and talked about on all the various social networks like Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.
There is no reason why you should outsource your image creation. Just create your own and have fun with it, start slowly and build up.
With these techniques, you can also create kick ass attention grabbing thumbnails for your YouTube videos. Have a great day and come back for more!