blogging

How To Use Flickr Photos On Your Blog

April 8, 2010 By Sherry Tingley

Using photos from flickr.com on your blog can make your writing come to life and provide your readers an exceptional experience. The photo above taken from the seat of a motorcycle, heading for the Eifel Tower, is just an outstanding photo. It makes you wish you were there. The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words really is true.

To get started, you’ll need to go to flickr.com and sign up for a free account. There are paid accounts with a small yearly fee of $24.95 which will allow you to upload your pictures for distribution.

Once you have signed up with flickr, you will find that there are over 139,726,734 photographs available for your use in the area called the Creative Commons.

These photographs have been given the CreativeCommons.org license which gives you permission to use these photos with a few restrictions. You receive worldwide, royalty free, permission to use the photographs indefinitely.

There are restrictions to the way you can use the photos that are reasonable and that you must agree to.

Here are the rules you must follow:

1. You must attribute the photograph to the owner in the manner that the owner sets on the photograph. You can find that information on the bottom right hand side of the page that the individual photo is on. Basically you use their name and title of the photo.

2. You can’t use the photos for monetary gain. For example, you can’t download the photos and make calendars out of them to sell.

3. You may not collect any royalties on the photos.

4. You may not distort the photo in anyway. So Photoshop editing is not allowed.

5. You must include the URI for the license with every copy of the work you distribute. This is the copy of the license so that you can read the license in it’s entirety: Creative Commons License.

In your search for the right photograph for your story, you can see the most popular image topics that people have been posting in the past 24 hours, 7 days and since the beginning of flickr.

There is also a service called “Blog This” where you can find a photo and just click on blog this. Type your story directly on the same page that the photo is and push a button and it will post it to your blog. You’ll need to register your blog with them so that logging in to your site and posting can be done quickly and easily. The photo will be inserted into your post like the photo in this story was inserted.

Make your blogging more interesting by adding photographs from all over the world. You’ll learn what type of camera took each photograph and you’ll be adding a little BAZINGA to your story.

Blogging Tips From The Experts

July 3, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

While listening to Tim Ferriss on WordPress.tv I toke some notes that might help people with their blogging projects. Here are some of Tim’s best tips to make your blog better. Of course watching the video is ultimately the best thing to do, however reading this short digest may give you that extra “push” you needed to take your blog to the next level.

1. If you use the Category widget on your blog, change the name of the header to “Topics.” This dramatically changed the click through rate. It’s easy to do in WordPress 2.8. When adding that widget, just put the name you want in the form. Tim reports better responses with the title – Topics.

2. Sometimes an older post doesn’t have as much appeal as newer ones do. To fix this problem, you can display the dates on the bottom of your posts. To get this done, you need to change some coding on a file in your theme. You will have to look at the index.php file in the theme you have and find:

[php]<span class="time"><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?></span>[/php]

You’ll need to comment that out by replacing that with:

[php]<!–<span class="time"><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?></span>–>[/php]

Then you need to find this:

[php]<div class="date">
<div class="dateleft">
<p><span class="time"><?php the_time(‘F j, Y’); ?></span>
</div>
</div></blockquote>[/php]

and cut that (that means copy it and delete it) and paste it after:

[php]<?php the_content(__(‘Read more’));?><div style="clear:both;"></div>[/php]

Save that file and upload it to see the changes. If doing that scares you, ask someone to do it for you. 🙂

3. List the total read time for your reader. 250 words = about one minute. This helps prepare your reader for what you have written.

4. Write about what makes you angry without being negative about anyone in particular.

5. Write your post and then do SEO research after. Then make your keyword insertions or changes.

6. StumbleUpon is one of the cheapest sources of traffic there is. One post that ranks well can bring 40,000 to 50,000 page views.

7. Flickr has a section of photographs that you can blog about by going to the advanced search and then choosing Creative Commons, then most interesting. You can actually blog about a photo right from Flickr.

These are just some suggestions to make your blog better. Tim Ferriss has some great blogging tips!

Five Tips To Keep Websites Ranking Well

February 5, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

If you have a business on the internet, then you are well aware of how important it is to keep your search engine rankings for your best keywords. When your rankings drop, your sales drop immediatley. When your website gets dropped from the search engine results panic may set in. Life becomes frantic and you begin to picture your business coming to a screaching halt. You will certainly understand how scary it is to watch your website disappear in the SERP’s (search enine result pages) for the keyword phrase that brings you the most traffic.

That is the dilema I faced this past week and it was one I hope doesn’t happen again. It made me realize how totally reliant an Internet business is on search engines and unfortunately sometimes there is nothing you can do about it but wait and see if your good website ranking comes back.

To help you live through a traumatic experience like this, I have a few suggestions for you in keeping your website running smoothly.

Review all the files on your site to see if there are any files that shouldn’t be there. Look carefully at the ones that raise any questions in your mind.
Use Google webmaster tools. There is a tool there that you can use that will delete undesirable pages from their index. So any unwanted pages that are indexed by Google can be removed. I did that for a lot of pages that were reporting 404 errors because of what I had done to reorganize my blog pages.

In Google webmaster tools there is a blog that you can post questions, complaints, etc. and read about what others have experienced. Many people have experienced the same problems you have had.

Review the page in question that is not being included in Google’s index. Go through the page with a fine tooth comb and get rid of any unnecessary coding, make sure you are using your keyword phrase in all of your alt tags. Rename some of your photos with the name of your keyword phrase.

You can always pay a SEO specialist to take a look at your site. Let them see if they can spot anything unusual.

Hopefully your website business won’t go through this, but because it is on the internet, it is vulnerable to that. Use these tips to help you keep your search engine rankings.

Blogging, Your Free Online Marketing Method

January 5, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

It’s been many, many years since blogging first started.

It was thought to be nothing more than another one of those passing internet fads that wouldn’t last out the year.

It ended up being considered as one of the most addicting internet “fads” that spawned a whole lot of new internet marketing products. It has become way more than just an outlet for peoples emotions where they can blurt out whatever bugs them or whatever makes them feel elated. Savvy marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that won’t cost you a cent.

What exactly is blogging? Blog is the widely used term that refers to web log. Basically, a blog is an online journal. A blog could be set up to no cost at all, and can be used for just for the fun of it or for business reasons.

Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services.

Here are just a few ways to boost your internet advertising via blogging:

1. Keeps your clients or customers abreast of changes to your website.

2. Your new products and affiliate websites could also be announced through your blog.

3. Keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. Your blog content can be easily stored through archives. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web.

4. Air your opinions, advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business. Publishing is a very easy process with blogging.

5. Include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. This could be better executed through putting well-written articles in your website. Affiliate links could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.

6. Collect response through the ability of blogs to fetch comments from your blog readers. You can learn and improve your products and services through with the feedback from your readers.

7. Connect easily with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you have something good in your blog, they will put you in their favorite lists that will automatically link you to their blogs.

So, how do you set up a blog?

One option would be to load a blogging software on your website, set it up and customize it to your needs. A second option, and one that is used by millions of bloggers is to signup with one of the blog hosting service such as LiveJournal, Blogger or WordPress.

Those hosts will provide you with easy instructions on how to put up your blog and are used by blogging worldwide.

**********
Copyright cashway.com
Get more information on blogging and grab 100’s of free downloads
Start getting free traffic – it is time you find out how others are doing it.

Passionate Blogging Works

October 14, 2008 By Sherry Tingley

Have you ever wondered why some blogs become wildly successful while other blogs become ghost towns that no one visits?

In a recent interview on Breakfast Television, expert blogger John Chow was asked what is the biggest mistake that new bloggers make when they start blogging. His response was that it is a big mistake to start blogging just for the money. He recommends doing a blog just for fun.

When people start blogging just for the money, they neglect the passionate side of themselves. People like to read good content from others who are passionate about their topic. Choosing something to write about that you feel a lot of passion for basically makes the job, well, not a job. John said, If you are passionate about it, it’s not really work, is it?