Category Archives for Rockstar Blogging
April 8, 2012 / Digital Marketing, Rockstar Blogging, Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
For choosing your blog titles, here’s the advice I’m sure you’ve heard:
March 21, 2011 / Digital Marketing, Rockstar Blogging, Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
I’ve seen several “top blog directories to submit your blog to” articles, however these lists are often light on details or out of date. Here are 16 blog directories that I went to take a look at. Like regular web directories, some blog directories will only list you for a fee, and yet still more request a reciprocal link before they will list you. Some are rather sneaky about it, you don’t figure out you have to reciprocate or pay until you are a step or two into the submission process.
That being said, just like web directories, it might be worth paying for a listing in some of these blog directories, however that analysis (choosing which one to pay for) is for another day.
For some of these you should be prepared to create an account and choose a category that your blog belongs to. Some ask for a full profile. Some have validation/ownership verification processes. It WILL take more time than you expect. Many of these will have a human review the submission before publishing it. That’s ok, in fact it is good, as google looks more favorably on directories that have editorial review.
January 21, 2011 / Digital Marketing, WordPress / by Kathy Alice
Copyright law exists to protect the creators of a original work, whether than be an article, a photo or a drawing. As soon as you create it you have copyright to it, which stays in place 70 years after the author’s death; at that point it belongs to the public domain. Unless you grant license for someone else to use your image, it is considered a copyright violation if they use without your permission.
Image theft is an important issue on the web, especially to people who make their living creating visual art. Just this week there was a furor over the site http://lxixixl.com/ which was copying and hosting entire collections of images from people’s websites. Complaints shut it down but there are others that are doing the same thing.
Theft of content and image happens every day on the web, so what can you do?
Ultimately it is up to you how much effort you want to put into preventing image theft and violation of your copyright, but don’t just ignore the issue, decide on an approach and take action.
January 17, 2011 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice
One thing I don’t do enough of, is make a practice of using images in my blog. I admit, I’m lazy and don’t want to do the extra work, and there is all that confusing copyright stuff, and where do you find them?
Up to this point the images I had included were screenshots that I had taken to help illustrate a how to post. Since I created the image, I didn’t have to think about finding it or the attribution. But today that is changing, it’s the new year after all and I want to improve my blog.
What you need to know – Copyright issues
Yes, you can find images on the web to use in your blog. You don’t have to source them all yourself. But before you run off to Google Image search and grab the first cool image you come across, educate yourself about the copyright issues.
Public Domain and Creative Commons
For most of you, who just need an image to make your blog post more visually interesting and to get the topic across more quickly, public domain and images published under the creative commons license are the two sources of images you will be dealing with. However keep in mind that there are different licensing rules if you modify the image or use it for commercial reasons. I’m not covering those topics in detail here but read the rules and you should be fine.
Images from the Public Domain are free to use, with no strings attached. They have been contributed to the public for its use. The “thinking boy” image above, is an example of such an image. He is from The Open Clip Art Library and was contributed by Ryan Lerch. This is a great resource for illustrations.
If you use an image published under the Creative Commons License, in most cases you are expected to include an attribution to the creator as well as state that the image is licensed under Creative Commons. Creative Commons licenses give artists control on how others may use their work, for example they may or may not grant permission for image modification. A really popular source of images licensed under Creative Commons is Flickr. Flickr Creative Commons Search is a great place to look at photographs to use in your blog.
Free versus Paid Images
For Free images there are a number of resources. Generally you will need to create an account to download them and the images are free to use but often you will need to create an attribution/link back to their site. Sometimes you have to pay for the higher resolution versions. Here are a few sites to check out:
For images that you pay for, you have more freedom to “use them as your own”. While it can get expensive for the higher resolution images, low res images are fine for your blog and are cheap. For example $1-$2 is common at iStockPhoto. These royalty free images are a great solution for websites where an attribution would look out of place.
Want more? This post by PresentationZen has a more extensive list..
Useful Searches Here are a few ways to search for photos other than going to the sites above.
With all these great resources, it opens a new world of possibilities to make my blog posts more visually appealing. Although I’m still working on the “lazy” excuse.
Other fellow bloggers to check out:
April 11, 2010 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice
I saw a blog post on when to use microsites vs. multiple domains. The blog post wasn’t that helpful, but reminded me that I wanted to sharpen my understanding of when:
In my corporate web job, we often used subdomains because we were hosting the new website (usually an application rather than a pure HTML site) on separate servers. But then we would often create a “vanity URL” on the main site that redirected to the sub site. Interesting, but not necessarily helpful to answering the question or when, from the marketing or SEO perspective multiple domains is called for.
I was confused on what the term “microsite” meant. The wikipedia definition: “cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website … most likely has its own domain name or subdomain” helped quite a bit. From both the technical and user experience perspective, it makes sense to install something like a forums, catalog or other separate feature on a subdomain, like maps.google.com .. or even on a completely separate domain. And if it will have a distinct brand identity, a separate domain is called for. One more reason, mentioned by the wikipedia entry, is that it can help target your PPC keywords more accurately.
Subdomains appear to be treated similarly to sub-directories by search engines per Matt Cutts, which means you may not get much SEO benefit for the added complexity.
So microsites usually mean additional domains. However just because you want to expand your web presence into a related but different topic than your web site already covers, doesn’t necessary mean a new domain. A new domain adds management and other costs, and you might have to start from scratch to get it indexed by the search engines. You are also missing out on the opportunity to get your original site to rank for more searches because it has more content.
However, I’ve seen creation of a blog on wordpress.com or blogspot.com with links to a main site be quite helpful for ranking for desirable keywords. A specific tactic to keep in mind.
March 30, 2010 / Social Media / by Kathy Alice
There are far too many ways to add social media links and icons to your blog. However, if you are playing the social media PR game, it’s a necessary part of your web presence plumbing, those share, tweet this, facebook icons on your site and your blog.
Up to now, I had been happy with my socialable plugin, resisting the siren call of adding bolder and bigger social media icons to my sidebar. Then I looked at AddThis.
You can see it in my sidebar to the right. I still have sociable but I updated the settings to show it only on individual blog posts so I didn’t have dueling social media button bars on my home page.
AddThis also generates cut and paste code for your website, blogger.com and myspace for four different types of buttons.
