Improve your (blog) posts - images for successful (small) business marketing
Rawpixel offers you a great selection of fully licensed free photos, vectors, and PSD mockups. As they say, “Stock photos aren’t cool”, and they’re determined to provide the solution for your (small) business marketing. If you are looking for images with a contemporary and ‘real’ feel for your business, then we recommend you check them out next time you’re looking for that ‘perfect’ image to represent your product or service.
Getty Images and Shutterstock are other great resources with millions of high-quality images for the (small) business owner, many of which can be used for free and without any attribution. You can look through our blog posts at all the various (social media) posts and many of the images have come from there. They’re without a doubt one of the first places we’ll (as many other (small) businesses) look for a particular image to help convey a message to you and our market.
Want something more vintage for your audience?
New Old Stock is another favorite of ours when we are looking for something with a little more age and history to it. They offer a great collection of vintage photos from the public archives, free of copyright restrictions. Even if you don’t need a photo for anything, you’ll enjoy taking a trip into the past. Nostalgia is particularly prominent in the culture and with customers right now, so in a way looking back is actually keeping you and your brand up to date.
Free editing software for the (small) business owner
We use Photoshop from the Adobe Creative Cloud package, which is the industry standard and worth the monthly outlay, in our opinion. However, if you don’t feel you need such a powerful tool and you’d rather help your bottom line by using some free software instead, here are a couple of recommendations as alternatives.
GIMP is a free, open-source image editing tool that is both powerful and up-to-date. You won’t get all the features of Photoshop, but you’ll have more than enough flexibility to carry out the vast majority of tasks you will need it for.
Pixlr Editor is another great option offering more than other free web browser photo editors. As well as the sets of filters most offer, it also includes layers, masks, clone stamps, selection tools, and everything else you’d expect from a top-notch image editor. Before committing to another monthly direct debit, it’s probably worth giving Pixlr a try to see if it will suffice.
Online courses
Udemy offers a fantastic free course for any passionate photographer who wants to improve their post-processing skills with Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom to become an expert. As they say on their website, “Bring your photos from “blah” to “WOW!” in just a few hours.”
Youtube offers a range of beginner GIMP and PIXLR tutorials that will help you quickly get up to speed, take your image-making to the next level, and help realize your content marketing strategy and social media strategy.
