A picture is worth a thousand words. If this time-told idiom holds true, shouldn’t you be paying close attention to every photo displayed on your ecommerce website?

Photos sell products. Whether viewers are on your home page or on your product pages, showing clear, attractive pictures of your products converts visitors into customers.

Help close your customers with these basic tips:

1.) Product photos should be clear, appropriately lit, and white balanced. As obvious as this seems, too many sites feature blurry, inaccurate photos. If you cannot afford a professional photographer, check out these tips for taking quality photos for your site:

Professional photographers often manually white balance their photos using a gray card. A gray card is simply a gray piece of cardboard with a flat finish that helps the camera adjust to surrounding light. Using the manual white balance setting on your camera and a standard, inexpensive gray card will ensure that colors are as accurate as possible.

If you flip through a magazine, you will be pressed to find one photo that has not been touched up in Photoshop. The Shadow/Highlight, Color Balance and Unsharp Mask tools in Photoshop allow you fix many lighting or color snafus that can give your photos a more professional look. You don’t have to be a Photoshop expert to use these basic tools to your advantage. If you don’t have Photoshop, Picasa is a great tool for editing photos and unlike the more feature rich Photoshop, it’s free.

If you cannot afford to rent or do not know how to use professional lighting equipment, use natural lighting if at all possible. Using a basic tripod can ensure that these photos come out crisp every time.

If a flash is necessary, be sure to diffuse the light. There are professional diffusers, but even covering your flash with a coffee filter will diffuse some light. If you can take your flash off your camera, you can even bounce the light off a wall or the ceiling. Using any one of these options will ensure that sections of your picture are not washed out.

2.) Try to put your products in context. Setting a good stage for your products can lead customers to take ownership of your product. Ideally, you want a customer to think of that item as his or hers instead of just another item for sale on the internet. Selling baseball gloves? Why not encourage them to play by taking pictures at the park? It’s easier to envision a lamp on your own side table if you see it that way in the product photo. When taking these photos, make sure you know your niche. If you are marketing polo shirts to guys in their twenties, you should not use a stock photo left over from 1986.

3.) Use your additional photos to answer objective questions. How big is it? How is it used? What does the texture look like up close? Answering these questions upfront not only makes your job easier, it prevents customers from having doubts about an item and then forgetting about it all together. Additional photos should remain consistent. The setting, lighting and format (whether a photo is longer or wider) should remain the same.

Take the time to use these tips. You’ll be telling your customers everything they need to know to make the right choice.