Information Sells

Photos make your posts stand out

Do you want to add beautiful photos to every blog post, without paying a cent and without infringing anyone’s copyright?

Creative Commons and Flickr make it easy to find photos as good as you will see anywhere - for free. If you pay attention to the license terms and chose only the By Attribution license, you can use these pictures in commercial, for profit sites and projects, you can crop or alter them, you can do just about anything you want - as long as you give the photographer credit for the picture.

There are several other types of Creative Commons licenses, but if you stick to the By Attribution only licenses, you are sure to stay out of trouble.

Begin by going to Flickr’s Creative Commons by Attribution license section.

Once there, enter a search term. It can be as broad and nebulous as “snow” or as specific as “Pere-Lachaise.”

To speed your search for the very best photos, use this technique I recently learned from Skelliwag.org: On the results page, look for a small link at the top called “Most interesting.” Click on it to re-order the results according to community votes of what are the most interesting photos.

Whether you want to create a mood or use an exact illustration, you should be able to find the perfect picture for your post within a minute or two. In fact, the difficulty will be in resisting the temptaion to just look at a few more pictures, and then a few more, and then just one more page…

Remember to credit the photographer by name. It’s also good form to use a link back to both the Creative Commons license and the photographer’s Flickr stream.

Photo by ekillian Released under Creative Commons License

Finding the right music for your You Tube video just got a little easier. You Tube has introduced a new feature called Audio Swap. They have licensed music in a variety of genres, which you can overlay on your videos audio track.

The new You Tube music will replace any exisitng audio - so this feature is only for videos with no spoken narration. The selection is limited, but it is certainly an improvement over having your work yanked because of a copyright violation claim.

I made a short (under 3 minutes) video demonstration how it works. Click on the play button below:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

One of the best ways to give your screencast or You Tube video some polish is to add a background music track. It is also one of the quickest ways to add a big line item to your budget - or to get into trouble down the road - since music is copyrighted and needs to be licensed for public use.

If you are a musician, you can create your own background music with applications like Sony’s Cinescore or Acid Music Studio For those of us without that gift, the alternative is Royalty Free music, which is also sometimes known as Buy Out music.

Buy Out music is all over the web - but much of it is of doubtful legality, so buy from a reputable source. Bootleggers will buy a music collection and then resell it - in violation of the license. Although you bought the collection with the best of intentions, you could find yourself saddled with additional licensing payments that far exceed any savings you got from buying the cheap download.

What’s the solution? Buy from someone you trust.

One of the best sources of royalty free, buy out music is Digital Juice’s Stack Traxx. These innovative background music DVDs come with multiple lengths for each track - usually 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, and full length (around 3 minutes). Each volume has between 20 and 40 tracks. The tracks are all recorded in layers. If you use Digital Juice’s free Juicer software, you can easily separate and split off layers.

For instance, if the strings in “Hero’s Journey” are exactly what you need for the introduction to your video, but the drums are all wrong - you can just turn off the drums with a single mouse click.

Would you like to experiment or learn more? Digital Juice offers about a dozen tracks for free - all you need to do is register.

I’d suggest you give a listen to these tracks and see if they suit your production:

• Hero’s Journey adds some drama to your intro, with a quieter middle section.
• Home Cookin’ is a bouncy bango/guitar piece with lots of energy
• Power Sweep is a hard driving track that will help you create excitement
• Would Adminisphere be the perfect accompaniment to your Flip Video reports from eBay Live?

It won’t cost you a penny to give these sounds a try. And your videos will instantly gain a professional edge. If you create and post a video using this tip - please post a link in the comments. We’d love to see it!

If you create commercial presentations, video, pamphlets, brochures, business cards, or just about anything else that requires graphics, you will eventually need to find stock images. A lot of content producers are tempted to just go out on the web and grab a picture and pop it into a post or presentation. After all, if it is on the internet, it’s free! Right?

Well, no.

Photos and drawings and in some cases even clip art are copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without the permission of (and payment to) the creator. No one is going to chase down a one time personal use copyright violation (for instance, grabbing a Dr Seuss illustration and dropping it into a custom birthday card for your 3 year old). But when you start publishing your work - and publishing includes posting it online - or using it in your business, it is time to follow the rules.

Small businesses simply cannot afford to pay royalties every time a photo is reproduced. In fact, most small businesses can’t track how often a photo is reproduced! And yet, that is what is required by law. So how can you use the images you need and not go bankrupt?

Stock photos.

Stock photography has been around almost as long as photography itself. When you purchase a stock photo, you are purchasing a special license (terms vary) that allows you to use that photo without paying for every impression. The cost is usually quite reasonable and the quality can be very high.

The internet has made it easier than ever to find stock photos - as well as royalty free music, art, and video clips. iStockphoto is a great place to start your search. Their prices begin around $1.00 for lower resolution, web-ready photos and increase depending on intended use, required resolution, etc.

iStockphoto also offers free images every month. And they’ve just added audio to their catalog. It’s a resource all product developers should get become familiar with.

In future posts, I’ll show you how to find photos distributed under Creative Commons Share Alike licenses that are not only royalty free but absolutely free. And I’ll show you a treasure trove of historical photos, songs, and interviews that can be used by anyone.