As a marketer I do NOT mean to undermine the importance of good copy on your site. It’s true, good copy can sell, but so can images. Pictures spark an emotional response in people, and since most purchases are emotional, this is a good thing! If you look at all of the major retailers online you will find good, clean, professional photography.

I have worked with several clients who had a tough time with pictures for their site. In some cases the vendor that sold them their products did not have good images in the first place, and since most of my client’s businesses use drop shippers as their primary supplier, this was a big problem. I encouraged many of them to talk with their suppliers and try to get them to take better pictures. Also, some were able to purchase the products as demo models, and take their own quality images.

One of my clients was selling real estate in Costa Rica. He had spent two weeks on the construction site of this new development project and had shot hundreds of pictures. When he sent me the disks of images I was surprised to find very little I could use. I was in a jam because the client wasn’t going back to Costa Rica for months, and the site needed to be done! Furthermore, he was going to be unwilling to spend hundreds of dollars on stock photography when he had just sent me hundreds of pictures he took (that he thought were good). The solution: I turned to IStockPhoto, which provides tons of stock photography for $1 each! It turned out this was the perfect solution. I found tons of images of Costa Rica, and was able to make the site look much nicer. Above is one of the images from the site.