Writing can be tough, especially if you’re writing for your own business.

Your words need to inform, convince and compel your readers to act. It’s a tall order, but it’s much easier to accomplish if you pair your words with an image that does some of the work for you. An image can speak a thousand words, but only if you choose it and use it carefully.

The most compelling images ask the viewer to make a mental leap to connect what’s in the image to the words you use. Straight illustrations of your topic work, too, but aren’t as engaging.

Here are two examples:

Let’s look for an image to illustrate the headline “The Career Counseling Services Group Will Show You the Way to a Bright Future”

There’s nothing wrong with the image on the left. It’s a good illustration of career counseling. There’s the woman, looking like she’s giving advice to the man across the desk. It’s probably similar to the first image that comes to our minds when we think “career counseling.” But why go the easy route?

The photo on the left is OK, but it’s limited by a couple of things:

• It’s specific to an ethnic group and may cause viewers to feel excluded
• It looks like a stock photo (because it is)

The photo on the right doesn’t illustrate the concept of career counseling outright. It invites the reader to place themselves in the image. They imagine themselves opening the door, and are drawn to know more about the future that awaits them on the other side.

The difference is that the first image is literal, and the second image is conceptual.

Related: The 3 Reasons “Speaking Images” Will Transform Your Marketing

There’s a time and place for literal and  conceptual Images

If you need to show a product you sell, your goal is to use an image that shows your product clearly and in the best light possible. A good, clean, high-resolution literal image is essential.

But if you want to engage your reader in an idea, a conceptual image is the way to go. The way to choose conceptual images is to think about the response you’d like to evoke.

Ideally, you want your reader to be able to engage with the image in a way that resonates with their everyday experiences. You want them to make an emotional connection to your words through the image you’ve used.

Focusing on what’s important

To really make that photo you’ve selected speak volumes, hone in on the important elements, and crop out the non-essentials. Here’s an example of what you can do with an ordinary stock photo.

Look for the part of the image that really tells your story, and crop out the rest. Be ruthless! If it’s not on topic, crop it out.

You don’t need fancy image editing software to do this: you can crop and do some very basic image editing right on the web. Try drpic.com for a free web-based solution that will let you crop, brighten and apply some simple effects to your image, and then download the results.

Finding compelling images

There are lots of stock photo sites on the web. They offer everything from photos that scream “stock photo!” to photos that offer some conceptual possibilities. One way to find conceptual stock photos is to add the words “concept” or “abstract” to your search terms. This will help bring up images that are a little off the beaten path, and may be more interesting.

Great sites for stock photos

istockphoto.com: This is the site I go to first. The search capabilities are great, the selection is vast (and growing) and you can even search by color and composition. (If you want to run your text along the right side of a photo, you can search for photos that have open areas along the right side, for example.)

shutterstock.com: Another excellent (and vast) collection of high-quality images.

dreamstime.com: I haven’t used this much, but it looks promising. It claims to have the least expensive stock photos, and the quality looks good.

Free stock photos

stock.xchng: The granddaddy of free stock photo sites. The free offerings are shown along with tempting paid offerings from a sister site, but if you can resist the urge to upgrade to paid, there are plenty of good images here.

morguefile.com: Don’t let the name fool you. A morgue file, as I learned in art school, is where one keeps photo and image references to be used in the future. This is the Internet’s morgue file, and is assembled by creative people and freely shared.

Questions about using photos in your marketing? Let’s talk about it in the comments section. Ask away!

Design 101

This is the ninth in a series of ten lessons called “Design 101.”

The last lesson will talk about how you can create a “cheat sheet” for your business that will make all your marketing materials more effective.

Want to learn more about design? Check out my Classics: The Design 101 Series of videos on my YouTube channel.