The Quest For Legitimate Images
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 11, 2010
You know, there are times when you battle with ethical issues, and you’re either ready to give up on them or just move on. I don’t struggle with that issue often, but once I think about something that involves an ethical decision, I just have to work my way through it.
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This time, the ethical thing concerns images that I’ve been putting into this blog. Truth be told, for me there were two issues out there. One, those images that you knew belonged to someone else, and two, those that you couldn’t confirm.
Of course, there’s been the debates and the discussions I’ve seen online. My friend Scott, who has a photography blog, got me into a discussion one day on the topic. My point to him is that I have papers filed with the government proving my copyright, that I can put a symbol on any of my work (I’ve got music and my first book copywritten), and that by adding that copyright symbol at the end of my stuff (and, these days, that copyright thing you see at the end of most of my posts), show that I own the copyright. However, with images, if there’s no watermark, or no copyright symbol on a website, or no attribution anywhere, that it becomes very difficult to figure out whether an image has a copyright or not. His belief is that one can always find it; mine is that at times it’s literally impossible.
Regardless, the issue is still out there. Now, I’m not saying that I’m going to do this for every image, because I sometimes get an image from Imagekind, which I’m an affiliate for, and of course there are times when you know someone put together a mashup of sorts that, if there’s a copyright that’s been violated, so be it, but there is a way to help get around this type of thing.
If you notice, today’s image and yesterday’s image has attribution. It turns out that you can get images from Flickr, a site I’d never gone to unless someone sent me a picture they wanted me to send and it was there, and find images you can use. Seems there’s this search function you can select that will find photos based on a description you put in and, most of the time, they allow you to use the image if you give them attribution and link back to their Flickr page with the image.
I’m not going to portray myself as any kind of genius for figuring this out, however. I got the information from Hubspot’s story titled How To Use Creative Commons To Add Images To Your Blog. There’s a video there, and I’m really glad because I wouldn’t have figured it out without that. And there’s one other thing. Something they tell you that you can do in the video is actually something you can only do if you have a Flickr account, which I won’t because I don’t have any photos that I’m ever going to pop up on any site like that. So, I have to do it the long way, write my code and add the image in a much different way. But no matter; at least I’ve found a place where, if I use those images, I know I’m in the clear.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Thoughts About The Images?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 28, 2010
Last November I wrote a post titled Do Images Increase Readership? At the time, I had 7 posts in a row with some kind of image on them as an experiment to see if it increased my visitors any, because I’d read on some blogs that talked about increasing visitors that it helped. I doubted it, but wanted to see what would happen over a 7 day period.
Of course, nothing happened, because I thought it was a pretty bogus recommendation. But the comments ranged from my not doing the test long enough to the images not being really relevant to the conversation. That had been part of my point way back, that just because you put an image on a post didn’t necessarily mean it was relevant. I even remember Dennis and myself talking about it, with him saying he could put any word into Google and come up with an image, and my saying sure, but that image might not match up to the content of the word you put in.
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Anyway, most of this month I’ve had some kind of image in almost every post. Some have been from Imagekind, where if you clicked on it and decided to buy it, or any other pictures on the site, I’d have gotten some money out of it. Those are the pictures with the titles, just so you know. Some have had direct relations to the topic. And a couple were there because I liked how they looked; so sue me.
Has readership, aka, visitors increased? Well, to tell you the truth I don’t really know. That’s because, for some reason, starting around April 13th traffic and visitors suddenly spiked in coming to the site based on that article on cleavage I wrote near the end of January. As you saw in my last numbers report, that post is killing every other post I have, and I have no real idea why. It’s skewed my numbers so much that I hope there’s not a bot that’s locked onto it in some fashion that will end up hurting the blog later on. That page is averaging more than 60 visitors a day even now, and has actually reached 100 visitors a couple of times; outstanding for what I considered a throwaway post of sorts. I’m trying to figure out new ways of monetizing it. lol
So, in lieu of trying to decompress all the numbers, I’ll just ask you what you think. Is it breaking up some of the text at least a little bit, have you found it intriguing, or is it getting on your nerves, or you’re totally ignoring it, because you see the same sort of thing on other blogs?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2012 Mitch Mitchell
Imagekind – ShareASale
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 14, 2008
Talk about a different kind of affiliate program. Imagekind, through Share-A Sale, offers an affiliate program where people can purchase images instead of other types of programs. Frankly, I was surprised by it, and I like the idea so much that I’ve signed on as an affiliate, and at some point I’ll be adding a block ad of some kind to my sidebar.
Imagekind allows people to post their images on their site for purchase, and if you, as an affiliate, get people to go to the site, then you get a piece of their commissions for sales of their images. Because the prices vary so drastically on this site, believe it or not, you could make a commission off an image anywhere from $10 to $10,000; yup, that wide a range. I’m just imagining someone purchasing a print of that magnitude and being able to get a piece of that; nice!
You can go through the gallery and select images that you like and market those specific images. For instance, here’s one that I absolutely love, though I’ll probably never make it to France; click on it if you’d like to purchase it:
Of course they offer banner ads like what you see below, but there’s more. By joining this program, there are other programs you can add to the mix. For instance, Random House publishers is someone you can market for, along with Electronic Boutique, Rugman, Ace Hardware, and about a hundred others.
Anyway, this is another affiliate that adds some diversity to the norm of affiliate programs, and I think it will add a new quality to my blog site. At least I hope so.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010-2011 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
