I’ve updated my list of free stock photo resources here, but if you regularly need graphic content for your small business, you have to check Envato Elements out.
For about $200 a year (~$17 a month), I have access to hundreds of thousands of all kinds of content that a small business might need:
- Images
- Video footage
- Illustrations
- Presentation templates
- WordPress website templates
- WordPress plugins
- Audio files
- And more, more, more
Envato Elements is the very first place I look when I am creating anything that needs a graphic element. Searching for the word “nerd” yields 244 photos, 49 graphics (including illustrations, stickers, etc.), 48 graphic templates (logos, business card templates, icons), 26 stock video files and even 3 3D images. This is pretty cool because “nerd” is actually a tough search word.
The site pays its contributors for adding to the pool, so you’ll find a ton of stuff. Envato also offers a marketplace where you can buy presentations, websites, templates and more individually, but with Envato Elements, your fee pays for anything you find. (Read more about how I use the Envato Marketplace.)
The drawback is that sometimes these are the less-than-bestselling offerings from the providers, so some of the stuff is kind of, well, bad. But most of the time I can find something I can work with, and this has saved me money on the traditional paid sites and also sparks my creativity by encouraging me to spice up all kinds of pieces with a little extra multimedia.
