Blogging Tips

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!

100 Popular Questions Asked on The Internet

January 15, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

What are keywords?

On the internet keywords are basically what words the user types into the search engines to find what they are looking for. Keywords can be fun to research. This data is relevant to bloggers because it helps them know what to write about and what people are interested in.

Where do I find keyword tools?

There are a lot of tools on the internet that research the number of times keywords are searched for. One of those keyword tools is provided by a company called Wordtracker. Wordtracker has recently come out with a beta version keyword tool that will tell you what questions people are asking based on the keywords you enter. This keyword tool is very handy and a lot of bloggers will enjoy using it.

How many results for keyword searches are considered popular?

When you begin your keyword research, you’ll see that many questions get less than 100 searches. To be included in this list of 100 popular internet questions, I chose the majority of questions that had been asked over 400 times.

What keywords are people using in the questions they ask?

Being a curious person, I spent some time this morning researching keywords used in questions on a variety of different topics and chose to list 100 of the top ranked questions that people are asking. The number that you see represents the number of times that question was asked over the past 140 days. You may be able to use these statistics to write your own blogging posts. Spend some time using this keyword tool to help you with ideas of topics to write about.

Using popular keywords in your writing will help you attract readers to your blog. Be sure to use keywords that are meaningful to your readers and that provide answers to their questions.

What keyword tools do you use and why do you like them?

23 Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Blog

January 9, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Every blogger wants more people to read their blog, but not every blogger knows how to do this.

Sure, you can get readers to your blog when you have already established some notoriety for yourself, such as writing a best selling book like The 4 hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. Maybe you have somehow gotten masses of people to a website through some special offer like Zac Johnson did. Or you could be a popular blogger like John Chow who now has such wildly successful friends that they sit around discussing how they can’t live on $10,000 a month income anymore.

The question is, how do you get people to read your blog when you are first starting out and you don’t have these incredible stories to tell people?

Well, the answer is given to us by Denise Wakerman, co-founder of The Blog Squad. She has been assisting professionals and small businesses to use marketing strategies on the internet to improve their businesses.

Here are her 23 best tips to get more traffic to your blog

Post nearly every day on your blog; the more you post, the more readers you’ll have.
If you have more than one blog and it’s appropriate, cross post to drive readers to each blog
Write and submit articles to directories with links to the appropriate blog
Write and post news releases online, about onece a week, with links back to the appropriate blog
Provide links to blogs in email signatures
Comment on other blogs
Write posts with links to other blogs and mention the blogger’s name (if they’re watching Google Alerts then they know you’ve posted about them and will usually visit your blog)
Thank people who post comments via email
Put links to your blog in product than-you emails
Put links to your blog on than you pages people see when they purchase your product and services
Encourage people to subscribe to your blog in follow up email autoresponder messages
Put blog links on LinkedIn profile, MySpace profile, Facebook profile and Twitter
Put links to your blog in your ebooks
Put links to your blog in your bios
Tell people about your blog when you do presentations
Encourage people to visit your blog when they sign up for your ezine so they can get even more free info
Put a featured blog post with a link in your weekly ezine
Pull blog feeds into your Facebook profile and other social networks
Include blog links in signature blocks on forum posts
Submit your blog to all the blog directories and search engines
when appropriate, direct people to specific blog posts to answer their questions in discussion forums
If you post videos on video sharing sites, include the URL for you blog in the description
Most importantly, write informative content using keywords that will be picked up in organic searches

When planning strategies to get more traffic to your blog, be sure to make a commitment to yourself to post as frequently as possible and to provide your readers with some fresh new ideas. They’ll be glad you did.

Next post: Getting People to Comment on Your Blog Posts

A Great Idea Is Only The First Step For Your Online Profitability

January 9, 2009 By Sherry Tingley

Whether you are looking to improve your blogging development, or are looking for more effective ways to monetize your website, the key to building and maintaining a site that will capture the interest and attention of the blogging community is by finding your niche.

Find and fill a unique need in a way that no other web site does. You’ll then be able to build a lasting readership among web surfers. Once you have discovered a niche, you will still have a lot to do, but finding your place in the constantly evolving blog world is the place to begin. It can be tough to distinguish your blogging web site from all of the others.

Every great blogging web site starts with a great idea, and you can’t build a successful site that will last without one. There are many great sites aimed at today’s bloggers, and competition for the attention of this growing demographic is fierce.

To make your blogging web site unique, you will need to offer something that no other site is currently offering….. or you will need to do the same thing that an already popular site does, but in a more relevant way.

One way to discover an ideal model for your blogging web site is to look at the sites that have successfully captured a blogging audience already.

Then determine how you can adapt some of these existing strategies.

You will also need to add a unique selling position to your project in order to stand apart from your competition.

The most successful websites that consistently do the best in today’s market are the sites that have the “personal touch”. The fiercely individual surfers who are bloggers are a demographic that responds best to personality, so consider how you can give your site a unique and attractive feeling by lending your own voice and sensibility to your site’s design and content.

Once you have a great idea for your site, have pinpointed a special niche that you are well equipped to fill, and have infused the site with personality, the next step is figuring out how to get the word out to bloggers.

In the long run, a great idea just isn’t enough to propel your blogging web site to success. You will need to draft a smart and realistic marketing plan in order to draw readers to your site. Once you hook a blogger, your great content will keep them coming back, but it is vital to get that first glance or your site won’t have a chance.

And, once again, the key to any online success is TRAFFIC.

Without traffic, you might as well just be writing to your Mother (which at this time of year is also a good idea).

Always be aware that traffic doesn’t just happen; but is the result of some pretty serious marketing efforts on your part.

Oh sure, the search engines will find you….eventually; and you will get some traffic from paid advertising….usually very expensive traffic.

So what works? Quickly? Most effectively? And most affordably?

You may start by asking yourself, “How did I get to this blog?”

Check back regularly to find out. Bookmarking this page right now could prove to be one of the better “get traffic” decisions you make.

Or better yet, the very bottom right hand corner of this and all of our pages contains an RSS link. Just click the button and relax. You will automatically start receiving any and all updates.

Till next time,

Fred