Stock photos for your online business
A few weeks ago, I shared about how I use stock photos for on my Instagram feed, and my followers went bananas. So I asked them in a poll on Insta Stories if they'd be interested in me sharing my fave stock photos for your online business on my next blog post ... and overwhelmingly the answer was YES! One person answered no, but I have no idea why they follow me 😂.
While I'm a recovering perfectionist and try not to have everything perfect, there's no doubt that beautiful pictures on your website and social media DOES encourage people to follow you and stick around to read your content.
It's one thing to chase followers and clicks to your website, but to make money you have to turn those people into email subscribers and leads to develop a relationship with you first!
And since you own a business and not an expensive hobby, you don't just chase simple numbers like followers, you actually want to make a profit, right?
That's what beautiful pictures do: they entice people to stay around a little longer, read another post or two, and start to like and trust you. Hopefully they opt into your email list so that you own their information forever and aren't at the mercy of perpetual algorithm changes on social media.
It’s been studied that you have about 50 milliseconds for a website visitor to form an opinion of your business (source). You could say the same for social media or anything public facing. You only have 50 ms to communicate something of value, and think about how much information someone can absorb by reading for 50 ms versus looking at some pictures.
It's true when they say "a picture is worth a thousand words".
It seems superficial to focus on pretty pictures, but studies show that babies look at the faces of attractive people longer than unattractive ones. It's literally built into our brains and DNA to want to see pretty things.
That doesn't mean you have to look like a model or have a perfectly styled house to succeed in business, but having beautiful pictures isn't going to hurt your business growth. Plus with how saturated the online business industry is becoming (or just life in general, everyone is B.U.S.Y), you need every advantage you can get.
The BEST news ever is that you don't even have to take the pictures yourself! There's no need to buy a fancy camera or props to style your pictures with. No spending hours on editing. No co-ordinating colours or figuring out a content calendar months in advance. No paying a photographer thousands of dollars, either.
You can just buy stock photos for your business (or find great ones for free!).
I repeat, you can buy beautiful images already done for you. *Mind blown*. And with the rise of online businesses, there are so many people providing this type of service for you, so much so that some have finally niched down into stock photos just for health & wellness businesses, website designers, and many other industries!
I wanted to share my favourite stock photo sites because there are so many of them out there. Some are free but require more time for you to sift through the garbage to find the hidden treasures, and some are paid but the content is top notch.
If you want to save yourself hours of time scrolling around stock image websites, keep scrolling to get my curated collection of beautiful images for your online business!
Here are my favourite stock photos for business to use on your website or social media:
Pre P.S. This post contains affiliate links. When you click on an affiliate link and make a purchase, I receive a small commission at no cost to you. Affiliate links are marked with an asterisk (*).
1. Unsplash
PRICE: FREE
COLLECTION SIZE: THOUSANDS
Unsplash is a completely free photo database that has no strings attached. Everything is completely free! It's not like other stock photo websites that say they're free, but they're just links to other websites that actually host the photos where you have to pay big bucks (upwards of $30 per image) to use them.
You'll set up a free username and password so that you can download as many free images as you want.
This website might take some digging to find photos that fit your brand and feel of your business, but there are some beautiful images. If you've done any branding exercises, you'll know what to enter into the search bar to see images that fit your brand. The more specific you can be, the better chance of finding photos that match your brand.
In the past, I've searched things like "woman on phone top view" or "modern desktop" to find flat lays. That being said, so many photos in Unsplash aren't properly labelled, so searching terms like "kale" or "peonies" will bring up beautiful, feminine, modern photos that don't have those particular subjects in them (they're just popular terms many people search for nowadays).
I like to use the 'collections' option when I find amazing images to save them all in one spot so I don't have to search for them later. Once you find some pictures you love, click on the author name to find more pictures by them, because chances are you'll love the style, feel, and colours of those pictures as well.
Here are my favourite pics in the bonus download!👇🏻
2. Élevae visuals (formerly Social Squares)
PRICE: $39+ US/month
Collection size: thousands
Élevae Visuals* (formerly Social Squares) is the stock image service that I’ve used for years. At times my Instagram feed was 25-30% filled with stock images from them!
Since these images are also high resolution, you can use them for images on your website or pins for Pinterest.
I love this service because the $39 US/month price point makes it affordable when you want more than 2 images per month. I try and post 3-5 times per week, so if I was purchasing individual stock images, I'd be spending upward of $100 US a month.
There are no limits on the number of images you can download. I repeat, you can download an unlimited number of stock photos for your business! The images are clean and modern, light and bright with some pops of colour.
Élevae Visuals is constantly asking their customers about their needs however they're always feminine and are perfect for a female entrepreneur or any online business where the ideal clients are women with great taste. ;)
In the past year they’ve also introduced stock video which makes their assets even more useful with the evolution of video in social media.
3. Haute Stock
PRICE: $139 US/quarter or $399 us/year
Collection size: 7,000+ photos and videos
Haute Stock* is my new favourite stock photo service who also provides high quality videos to use on your website or Instagram.
These stock photos have a high-end feel, with some neutral colours, some colourful images, and women of all different skin tones (fantastic for an online business who is striving to be more inclusive!).
What sets Haute Stock apart from the rest is their high end video clips. My husband is a videographer, and I can confidently assure you that other businesses pay thousands of dollars for these short video clips to use mainly on social media. However, more and more websites are using video (including mine), and it’s been shown that visitors on websites with video spend 88% more time viewing than websites without video (source).
Just like Élevae, you get unlimited downloads each month.
4. Wellness Stock Shop
PRICE: $149 US per quarter or $399 US per year
Collection size: 8,000+ PHOTOS
I love social media for introducing you to new things! That's how I found out about Wellness Stock Shop. This is one of the only stock shops that I've come across with modern, clean, beautiful images for wellness entrepreneurs!
Categories on this stock shop includes:
- crystals
- essential oils (including doTERRA specifically)
- nutritious + healthy foods
- meditation and mindfulness
- business and desktop flat lays
- iPhone and iPad mock ups
- body therapy and medical practitioners like naturopaths
I've never seen this many stock photos for JUST wellness entrepreneurs in one place, especially with essential oils!
5. Creative Market
Price: $5+ US
COLLECTION SIZE: THOUSANDS
I use Creative Market* ALL the time for fonts and other design aspects, but I've never really looked at their photo collection ... turns out, there's thousands upon thousands of beautiful stock photos! Duh.
Just use the search bar for a specific topic, and then change the category to "photos".
Like, just LOOK at some of the amazing pictures below! Seriously, all the 😍 on some of those. I just might print a few of them out for my new office when I get moved in in a couple of months!
Here are my favourite pics from Creative Market that I share with you in the bonus download!👇🏻
Now the topic that I got the most messages about when I shared on Instagram is my system for storing and sorting my stock images. When you start downloading hundreds of them, your computer folders can quickly become a big black hole of beautiful images that never see the light of day because you can't find them.
That's why I recorded a video for you showing exactly how to organize your stock images to be able to find them quickly and use them more easily on social media.
It's one thing to store them on your computer, and a totally other thing to have them accessible on your fingertips on your phone in seconds so you can actually share them.
Included in this download are my curated collections of free images from Unsplash (100 photos) and paid images from Creative Market (50 photos).
