Adding Pizazz to Your Blog Posts

Dale Hogan    Design and Development     Blog Design, Blogging, Blogging Help, Fotolia, Images, iStockpoto, online, Plugins, Stock Photography, web, WordPress

Making your blog posts snazzy can be a chore when you’re an active blogger.  With all of life’s demands, it’s hard enough to just find the time to string together a few coherent sentences and get them published to your blog with any consistency.  What’s needed is a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ solution for adding great, legally licensed images to your posts.  Adding the right images to a post can really make it pop!  Well placed thematic photos and illustrations can aid in garnering the type of attention and traffic you want.

Enter Microstock Photo plugin for WordPress.  The plugin helps you “easily add professional licensed photos to your blog posts without leaving WordPress… The plugin automatically searches from over 13 million photos from the portfolios of iStockphoto and Fotolia to find the photos that match the tags you’ve added to your post. Simply select the photo you want to use, purchase a license to use it from $1, and the plugin will automatically add it to your blog post. It is also added to the WordPress Media Manager so you can use it again in the future.”

With a dead simple to use interface, you can be setup and ready to go in a very short time.  In fact, once you’ve installed and linked to your account at either iStockphoto of Fotolia it almost does the work for you.  When you add a post tag it automatically searches for images and pops up sample thumbnails.  If you see one you like it’s only a few clicks to download it and add it to your post.  You can even resize, crop or rotate the images for a perfect, custom fit.  Literally millions of photos at your fingertips that are automatically searched for by the post tags you add.  It can’t get much easier than that.

WordPress Settings

Example Search Results

If you’re like me, simple is your friend and this plugin nails it.  Without ever leaving my post window in WordPress I can have fantastic, relevant images that are legally licensed and cost as little as $1.  It sure makes adding zip & appeal to your blog a whole lot easier.

If you enjoyed this article please consider sharing it!