Fortunately, there are free stock photo alternatives, and Jason Moffat has listed them on a recent blog post.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net :: Free Photos – Free Images. Royalty free photos. Thousands of royalty free photos for instant download. For commercial and non-commercial use. No registration required.
http://FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Free Images
The best free and paid royalty-free stock photo sites on the net. Clipart and Web Graphics Sites The best free and paid clipart and web graphics sites on …
http://freeimages.com

PD Photo – Free Photos And Pictures (public domain, stock pictures …
I have thousands of royalty free pictures here. Please use and enjoy them. To view the photos: Click on a category below, or use the search interface for …
http://pdphoto.org

Bigfoto.com :: Pictures Free Download
Free pictures: bigfoto.com, the royalty free photo agency offering free download of all pictures (with link or reference). See copyright for details. …
http://bigfoto.com

FreeFoto.Com :: FreeFoto.com – Free Pictures
FreeFoto.com is the largest collections of free photographs for non-commercial use on the Internet.
http://freefoto.com

Free Royalty Free Stock Photography – Home
designer portfolios. Free Royalty Free Stock Photography: Unlike other sites with free images, these are also royalty free. …
http://adigitaldreamer.com/gallery/

Free Clipart, Images, Photos, Fonts, Icons, Backgrounds
Royalty-free Photos Thematic Image directories Image Search Engines Free Image Hosting Free Animations Free Backgrounds Free Icon directories Fonts …
http://freebyte.com/clipart_images_photos_icons/

Free Stock Photos – royalty free with no usage restrictions
FREE digital photo images for web, dtp, and design. Royalty and cost free stock photos. Free stock photo library.
http://freephotos.com

Check out his blog for more good stuff in the comments section.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Set up free account on BlogTalkRadio
2. They give you some place to schedule your upcoming shows
3. They give you a blog
4. Use 1 & 2 to announce upcoming shows and make it your keyword! Very high likelihood that you will rank for that keyword on page 1 in google.

And then check your rankings – this is a very valuable addition to your SEO campaigns.

If you have 500 MySpace friends, then your article will get published on all those 500 bulletin boards! And it is really easy to get 500 MySpace friends.

Also, remember that MySpace also has a blog function, so you can publish your article on your MySpace blog too. It will stay there forever, as opposed to the bulletin which gets deleted after ten days. But then, your bulletins will get distributed too all your friends, so don’t skip it, it is really powerful! And remember that you can add video too!

As with everything – this can be outsourced too.

First of all – the number one article directory to post in is Ezinearticles. There is no doubt about that. It is by far the most visited and powerful article directory online. So make sure that you get your articles published there first, before submitting you articles to any other directory.

But before you even start writing your article, decide which keyword you want to target. Most article marketers simply chose a keyword where they think that they can get rankings for, because it is not overly competitive.

But rankings do not always translate into money. That is why you want to make sure that the keyword phrases you are optimizing your articles for are phrases that can be profitable! And one of the easiest ways to judge whether a keyword will be profitable or not is to check out the AdWords competition.

Just go to the Google keyword tool and type in a related keyword. Then you get a whole list of keyword phrases that are related to that keyword. Of course you want to look at the search volume – there is no use of optimizing for a keyword that gets 20 searches a month.

But apart from sheer volume, also look at “Competition”. Now, competition is not about competition in the Google results pages. It is about how many AdWords advertisers are bidding on that keyword phrase. And in general, the more competitive a keyword phrase is, the more commercially valuable it is. Meaning, it converts better, and if you can rank for that keyword highly in the search engines and get traffic from people searching for that keyword, than you have a much higher likelihood of making money. After all, your final goal with article marketing is not to get eyeballs, but to make money.

The bigger the green bar in the "Competition" column, the higher the commercial value of that keyword phrase

Of course – you still want to do a SEO analysis to figure out whether that keyword is possible to rank for. The term “car insurance” might have a lot of AdWords advertisers, and thus a high commercial value, but it is so competitive SEO-wise that you will not be able to generate traffic for that term.

Again, the main takeway from this article: check the commercial value of a keyword phrase by looking at the Google AdWords competition bar in the Google Adwords tool.

Check the test out for yourself.

I guess the ultimate answer to this question (as with all in marketing is): it depends upon the product, the market, the prospect, and you should test it.

If you have any kind of product, or want to develop a product but don’t have the expertise or time to do it yourself, and lack the money to outsource it too, then you really want to read his post.

If you never heard of the website WormFarmingSecrets.com then this is just one more reason to check it out. If you look at it, you’ll probably think: “Oh, another website that somebody threw up half-heartedly”. But this website is a huge financial success. I don’t know how much money he’s making with that thing, but I’m sure it is a lot. And it’s all from SEO.

He’s selling it via Clickbank, so we kind of can have a look at his stats. His gravity is a bit higher than 5 right now (keep in mind this is a website he started years ago and he didn’t do anything with it until this recent new product). In his salesletter, he states that his product has sold more than 1300 times. So at a price of 37 dollars, that’s more than $50k in revenue. Of course, a lot of that goes into other people’s pockets (specially affiliates), but hey – it’s not too much work that he put into this, and if he’s making an extra 5k a year from this thing pretty much hands off, that’s absolutely cool.

Of course, there are about a bazillion reasons why people make buying decisions, but in most cases, they can be fit into one of these categories:

They want to end a pain that they experience. This pain can be of physical or emotional or mental nature, but it is a source of distress for them, and they want nothing more than to end this pain.

They want to make money – everybody loves to do that, I think no further explanation is needed.

They want to save money – so that there is more money left over, if they don’t know of ways to make more money.

They want to be comfortable & lazy – if there would be a machine that would tidy up my desk with the push of a button, I’d immediately buy it. I’m just plain lazy when it comes to cleaning up.

They want to increase their social status and get respect (and even envy) from other people.

They want to be more attractive to members of the opposite sex – and they want romance and love and intimacy.

They want to save time. If you can make me get to my favorite restaurant in 10 minutes instead of 30 minutes, I’ll be willing to give you money (unless you drive like a madman).

Simply understanding these basics of human psychology, being able to grasp what motivates people to buy, will help you to sell more successful online.

But there are thousands and thousands of people who are struggling to make a living online. They work like mad, put in long hours, sleepless nights and all of that. To an outside observer, it must look like mania.

But why do they keep struggling?

I know, a lot of gurus usually answer: because they jump from opportunity to opportunity, instead of chosing one method and sticking to it.

And that’s partly true.

But why do they do that?

Why is it that they become opportunity jumpers in the first place?

This is a question that I pondered during many sleepless nights.

And only recently dawned a realization on me.

It’s because of their mindset.

They focus on getting money.

That is all that’s on their mind. “Where is a faster way to get more money with less effort?”

And that’s the mindset of a desperate man, and in some cases it is the mindset of a lazy man. It is not the mindset of a truly successful man.

Instead of focusing on “money getting”, focus on “value creating”.

Notice I am not saying: value giving.

When you focus on value giving, you might be doing a lot of good for other people, but you’ll be broke and used.

But when you CREATE value, then it is something that is there, and it will be a lot easier to make an irresistable offer to people who will in response give you their money because they crave the value that you created.

Being an entrepreneur – and that is essentially what being an internet marketer is – is about CREATING things. It’s a creative activity.
But when you dull it down to “money getting”, it’s simply greed and desperation and monotony, and often mindless effort that leads nowhere.

If you feel that you are spinning your wheels fast but getting nowhere, then stop for a moment and forget about all the techniques, tactics, blueprints, methods, secrets, strategies and whatnot. Focus on the stuff that really matters. Focus on the purpose why you really want to do this.

A lot of people have no idea. They think it’s about the money. But it’s not. They think it’s about “freedom” – but they have a hard time coming up with a definition of what freedom means to them. Many say: “the freedom to do what I want when I want to” – but when you ask them what they would want to use that freedom for, they often have no ideas of their own.

If you don’t have a strong inner compass, a direction in which you ultimately want to go – then how could you possibly get there?
Focus on what matters. Take however much time it will take – it is well worth it. Much more so than submitting another 400 bookmarks or setting up 30 more Squidoo lenses…

She made a quiz out of it, so if you head over to her site, you can check out the exact samples and guess which test won by yourself, which is what I highly recommend you do. It will be a valuable marketing lesson.

The person who is doing it puts a lot of work, time, money and resources into it.

And you can piggyback on that effort.

It’s an old method, but one that still works great (and will continue to do so in the future).

Think about it: a really big launch often gets millions of eyeballs. But only a very small percentage of these people who take notice and follow the launch actually end up buying the product. For them, a $2000 product is simply too big of a price tag.

But they ARE genuinely interested. They want to buy – but just not at that price.

And that’s your opportunity. You can create a small product on the same topic like that big launch, and sell it cheap. $7 or $17 or something like that. All these people who followed the launch and are really interested in that product but could not afford it ARE hot buyer candidates – and if you stick something under their nose that smells just like this big product, and you tell them that they can have it for just about the same price as a movie ticket – a lot of them won’t hesitate to click the order-button on your salespage.

Jimmy D. Brown has written an excellent article about just this very strategy.