Tag Archives: problogger

9 Sure Fire Tips for Better Photo Blogging

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fire 150x150 9 Sure Fire Tips for Better Photo Blogging picturesListed below are 9 sure fire tips to improve your photo blogging success. Whether you’re a hard core photo blog publisher along the lines of Eric, Sam or Dave, or just enjoy crafting the occasional post, we all like to steadily improve our offerings and enhance audience size.

These 9 tips cover many topics beyond just photography tips, but are important elements to expanding your photo blogging horizons. With the new year already upon, now is as good a time as any to look for ways to distinguish your presence online.

  • General Knowledge – When it comes to blogging essentials, Darren is in a class by himself. His candid approach and informative posts have helped launch the careers of numerous bloggers. With over 128k daily subscribers and a best selling book, Darren features posts on a wide range of topics every blogger can benefit from reading.

  • Web development – Nettuts+ is an excellent resource for web developers and designers, offering tutorials and articles on technology, skills and techniques to improve how you design and build websites. Even though some of the topics covered on this site may be a bit advanced for many bloggers, the tutorials are broken down in easy to follow steps. I always look forward to receiving this feed!….Just interested in jazzin’ up your WordPress blog? Here are a few places to start, Hongkitat, Lorelle, and of course, Matt.

  • Inspiration – It happens to all of us, sooner or later, if you continue photo blogging, the time will come when you run out of ideas. What do you do? Why read more photo blogs, of course. Without a doubt, StumbleUpon is my greatest weakness. Be warned, this site is highly addictive! Simply sign up (it’s free), download their toolbar, select your topic preferences, and you’re off and running… Smashing Magazine covers a lot of ground in the graphic design/photography field; always a source for great “Top xx” type features. Also check out photoblogs.org, FFFFound and coolphotoblogs.

  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Perhaps the most over-used web phrase ever..however, you do need to know something about this topic to succeed online. If you are just looking for a general overview of SEO, check out this recent article by James. If you’re looking to take your SEO knowledge to the next level, start here.. SEO Book.

  • Photography Lessons – You can gain photographic knowledge from a variety of ways, such as reading tutorials, like DPS and Aaron, watching a professional photographer, like Chase, at work or even invest in private workshops, i.e., Jason, Don, and Jerry. Regardless of the avenue you choose, continuing education is not only important in developing your photography skills, it is a great way to network with other photographers!

  • Monetizing your photo blog – Without going into too much detail, if you are looking to make money with your photo blog, here’s is where to start your research; John, Darren (yes, again), and this single post from Steve

  • Marketing – In a word – Seth

  • Creative Design – In addition to killer content, web design comes in a close second in determining the success or failure of your web venture. To this point, using free WordPress templates alone is not the way to web success. Learn and understand the basics of great web design and implement these elements into your web presence. Three of my favorites? Check out Jacob ,Chad, and Gino.

  • Improve your writing skills – Let’s face it…all photographers think they are great writers and all writers believe they are awesome photographers. Truth be told, most photographers are not great photographers and most writers, well, struggle. Although I do write a lot, I acknowledge my limitations in this field. Looking to improve on your writing skills? Spend some time here…CopyBlogger, Daily Writing Tips, Editor Unleashed, CopyWrite, 10000 words and Writing Forward.


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Building a Better Blog

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I love the weekend…time to catch up on long overdue yard work and yes, working on building a better blog. One of the best ways I’ve found for improving my blogging is to read from those who have already achieved success. Today, I just wanted to veer slightly from my normal photo postings and share a few books which have been a tremendous asset to my growth in blogging. Regardless of your niche, each of these selections is applicable to improving your current results.

One of the first books I picked up starting out in the blogging world was Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business. This is a great book which covers all the bases for successful blogging in under 200 pages…everything from choosing a blogging platform, selecting a niche, how to build traffic, to marketing. I am a believer that time + focus equals success. I credit this book for laying the groundwork for the success I’ve achieved so far.

To help combat frequent detours from your blogging schedule, Eat That Frog is the best tool I have found to date. The format of this book is excellent…21 ways to stop procrastination..and it’s only 129 pages. The author does a great job of presenting his easy to follow steps in a straight forward manner. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. This would be an optional choice, but it has some my practical uses in my everyday life so I thought I’d share it as well.

No discussion about blogging is complete without mentioning Darren Rowse from Problogger. I’ll let you research his bio on your own, but Darren started from ground zero and quickly rose to one of the main voices in the blogging world today. His site is a gold mine of information, and the tremendous amount of reader comments are valuable as well. Like his site, his popular materials are packed full of ideas and insights. When I purchased his first book about a year ago, Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, it took me forever to get through since I was making notes on all the ideas that suddenly came to me. His latest offering,31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook, is just as impressive as his other works. I followed his site when his latest book was a daily feature. Nice to see that he was successful in evolving this into print. I purchased this book a few days ago and am really enjoying it….great how-to’s and free downloadable resources. I see today that he has already sold 3500 copies so far. Amazing.

Hope your enjoy and happy reading!

Biggest photo blog mistake

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100 3865 300x225 Biggest photo blog mistake picturesWhile scanning pictures for use on our “20 Awesome Photography Blogs” project, I’ve noticed a common mistake many photographers are committing with their photo blog images costing them valuable search ranking potential. This problem is so wide spread, I felt compelled to bring it your attention. I’m talking about the use of alt tags, titles, and proper file names.

There has been much discussion about getting the most SEO (search engine optimization) out of the images you use in your photo blog and many of the steps are really quite easy. Google and other search engines scan your photo blog posts for both text and image content. If you have ever searched Google for images, the photo file information you provide is how this search is performed.

“One of the most commonly known Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips that go around has to do with the way you name and tag the images that you use on your site. Its fairly commonly accepted by most SEO experts that Google not only looks at the text on your blog in order to measure its worth but that Google’s spidering bots also take a look at the code you use in your image files.”

Problogger – Photo blog naming tips and tricks

“Digital cameras assign default names to pictures.  These names are not appropriate to use on the web“  – Proper Naming Conventions

There are several tools and plugins available to assist you with this task. For WordPress users, the SEO Friendly Images plugin is perhaps one of the easiest to use.

“SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set.” SEO Friendly Images – WordPress Plugin

Hope you found these tips informative and if you have other plugins suggestions, please share in the comments!

purchase seo elite Biggest photo blog mistake pictures

Improve Your Time Management

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Darren Rowse of Problogger.net fame, recently posed an interesting question to his viewership titled ‘How Long Do You Take to Write a Blog Post ‘. Of the over 300 comments, most bloggers stated that it’s take about 1 hour per post. Personally, it takes about the same, if you consider the research time involved.

With this in mind, I have recently added a new tool to my work flow, KuKu Klok . The KuKu Klok is an online alarm clock, which can be used for many different purposes. One of cool features of the KuKu Klok is that once it has been set, it works even if you are offline (Who is ever ‘offline’ ?).

For my blogging purposes, I now set the clock for one hour at the beginning of my writing workflow, starting when I initiate the research process. This is important for me, since I have a tendency to ‘get lost’ while researching. Flipping back to the clock tab is a handy reminder to re-focus on my original topic.

I have also started to use this tool while writing my grad papers, and before my daily ‘surfing’ habit. Yes, I could just use my Timex Ironman w/Flix Technology , but that would be too easy. I save it for tracking running times, shopping trips, and daily commutes.

How to Make Money Blogging: 7 Strategies to Help you Get Started

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Several photographers have written to me asking how to supplement their income by monetizing a blog. I can honestly tell you that financial success will not happen overnight. However, if you do plan on making money, a considerable amount of work is required in the beginning. My first suggestion is to read as many of the free articles as you can, such as How to Make Money Blogging: 7 Strategies to Make Money Online. This article provides a good overview at the types of programs available to you.

Before you start slapping ads on your site, I would recommend reviewing your blog for readability and content. I am lucky to have friends willing to review my site and give critical feedback. This is critical. If your blog is not interesting, or easy on the eyes, viewers will not return. So a sharp eye on content is important. Nothing builds traffic more than a site people like. No traffic means no money.

Continuing on the traffic building strategy, you will need to understand the value of keywords in your writing. Keyword use related to your subject matter jumps your Google ranking. Top keywords should be used in your posting title and repeated within the first paragraph for optimum effect.

Link building. Link building is the process of linking to other sites, and having sites link to you. Focus on sites with higher rankings than your own site and these sites should be within your subject matter field. Getting other sites to link to you may take awhile, however, many sites (including ILovePhotoblogs) are more than willing to provide a link, if requested.

Conclusion. Making money with your blog is indeed very possible, if you take the aforementioned steps. Create great content, have a viewer friendly site, build links (incoming and outgoing), and determine the best type of ad affiliate programs that works for you.

If you have more suggestions/questions for making money with your blog, please comment.