How To Select Images To Illustrate Your Articles

This looks like the easiest thing on earth after you find the place where to find good images... is a pretty simple deal to find a good image to put there and illustrate, augment the value of the article, but in fact it's so not at all and if you have been looking a little bit beyond the surface you may have noticed that some images are really powerful inside some article while some others are just decoration , nothing more.

You can make a car or a woman or a house just more beautiful by adding decorative items around it... if you really looking to select images in a way that they are really impactful on your content, there's needs to be more of some aesthetic superficial beauty to them, there must be something that connects the image with the thing your communicating at that moment so that the message and the image go "CLACK". If the message and the image go "CLACK" you get a super powerful effect, because the message, the title and the image reinforce each other continuously and they broadcast, they communicate the message at once to the people who are looking at your content.

So the message goes out more rapidly and more effectively in the eye of the reader.

But to find those images it's not easy at all, it's difficult for me and for even anyone who is worked long time doing pictures or photo research and or to who even does this professionally. It is very difficult. The people have learned how to do it can tell you that it really takes understanding and some good practice... and the more practice the better it works.

So let me give you an initial help on how you can select better images:

a) First of all don't look for images that illustrate the concept that you try to convey. Don't try to do that because that often leads you in ways that are just too decorative and the images you think up are very not useful.

So the most practical thing to do is really to note down the titles or the name of concepts that you want to illustrate with you picture, that you want to reinforce to give more impact to your pictures. Just note them down on a piece of paper and then close you computer, look at those words and think what is a visual element, an object, an icon, a symbol, something simple, something that can be immediately recognizable, that you can thing of and that makes "CLACK" with whatever concept or idea you have.

You have written it there, so if you are trying to illustrate a different concept in an article and this concept are associated to a title of a section, well write down the title of that section and then think what is something that when you see it, makes "CLACK" with that. Something that actually explains more than illustrates, something that brings out that idea. Something that the moment you see it, you think the same thing that is written right there in the title, so that they match together strongly.

b) So to do that well, you do this: you write down those titles, those concepts, OK?

c) You then write down next to them the name of the objects or visuals that you perceive would be the best visual matches for those.

d) Then when you have done this you go to your images sources: StockXchange, Stockxpert, Google Images, Flickr - it depends on what you are looking for - but one of these it's going to be good for most of them. So you go there and research for the solution, for the visual idea you have already noted down.

You are not searching for the words that are in the title of your section that you need to illustrate but you are searching images for the visual concept you have already identified.

e) OK, now you start searching for those and then you... while you are browsing the pictures, while you are looking at them, to help yourself understand which is the right one, you keep reciting inside your mind the title of the section or the name of the concept you are trying to picture and communicate yourself . You just running link a mantra in your head, YES. You run those words continuously as you look in different pictures. You keep looking at different pictures and you run those words.

f) You are going to see yourself that at the certain point you are going to see some pictures where you stop and you say "Ah-AH! This is a good picture for these words that I am running in my head" and so you put it outside, you Control-click it and you put it in another tab, ...you save two or three of them... you do this for each one of them... and at the end you have some "finalists"... you go through the process again... and there you go: You are going to get some very good selections compared to what you probably have gotten until now just by using this simple approach.

Maybe next time I'm going to show you, if you follow and subscribe to this video, or to my newsletter or just come back to the site exactly how to do this visually with real examples so that you can understand more in practical terms, how do I do these when I do it.