A picture does paint a thousand words, so it's nice to add images to blog posts to give them more eye appeal and help sell the message. But stock photos from places like Getty Images or Corbis can cost an arm and a leg. Even low-resolution photos can end up costing hundreds of dollars.

There is now an alternative: istockphoto.com, an online stock photo service that enables you to buy images for just $1.50 or less. And these aren't cheesy looking images either, but professional quality. Their catalog of over 115,000 images is surprisingly good, and includes low-resolution photographs for Web use as well as high-resolution images for print applications.