Images play a crucial role in capturing and retaining the attention of online audiences. With the growing demand for engaging imagery, many content creators and businesses turn to stock images as a convenient and cost-effective solution. However, while stock images offer a wealth of options, they come with their fair share of dangers and limitations.
You’ll spend many hours a week marketing, doing consults, admin work, and bookkeeping. Some clients will want their money back, or ghost halfway through a project. So your hourly rate needs to cover as much as 1/3 of your work time where you won’t be earning. Just another reality of the industry.
Many social media management tools offer a free tier so you don’t have to invest anything more than your time when you’re working on your small business’ social media presence. Take advantage of these tools and boost your following, improve your feed, and grow your brand’s recognition across the social media landscape.
Canva is a great platform for those with no graphic design background and without access to PhotoShop. It has become increasingly popular over the last couple of years (for those very reasons), and as a result a lot of published content tends to look kind of similar these days.
The imagery you use online is how people will identify your brand, so if you’re using the same stock images as another business how will anyone differentiate? Essentially, you are weakening the integrity of your own brand when you do this. You also risk coming off as generic and unoriginal.
