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I like to use pictures in my blog posts on some blogs. I don’t do it on this blog much, but I have some on other topics that I like to add photos to. I found a pretty good list of places you can get photos from free or at a low cost to use in your blog.

20 Sources of Excellent Stock Photos for a Productive Blog Post

Whenever i am making a very long post, i tend to use >Flickr photos where i credit the user’s photograph which are used in my blog post and i will continue to do so, as and when i find great photos that could fit my content. Recently i am heavily sourcing for stock photos that i can use for free or pay them a nominal fee since i have a number of website projects to complete.

Now everyone loves to have a unique list of stock photos which they can use with rights only to their website and this might require you to engage a photographer/Designer who can cater to your needs or else be one yourself.

I love it when someone famous validates what I do. Such was the case recently when Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame printed a list of the most used blogging platforms:

1. Blogger - 34,104,000 users - up 58% from last year
2. Wordpress - 11,440,000 users - up 444% from last year (wow!)
3. Six Apart TypePad - 10,601,000 - up 20 % from last year
4. TMZ.com - 7,107,000 - up 10%
5. LiveJournal - 3,366,000 - up 27%

The numbers are according to recent Nielsen ratings. But you can see that WordPress is the fastest growing blogging platform on the market right now. Over 400% growth in one year. If they grow at the same rate this year (not likely, by the way) then WP could overtake Blogger within a year-and-a-half.

These statistics are not why BCP uses WordPress. We use the blogging platform because it has great features that allow us to serve our customers so well - to provide the SEO benefits we offer and to make writing and posting the blogs easier and more manageable. The validation from Beal came when he said:

Blogger has a huge lead but I wonder how many of those are active and not spam scraper sites? I remember the days when it seemed LiveJournal was the tool to use for blogging, but I instead went with Blogger. Now I’m a true Wordpress convert.

I agree with the statement about Blogger. I’ve got two Blogger accounts that I don’t even use any more. One has just been sitting there since August 2004. It’s still there and no one has used it. That begs the question, How many other abandoned Blogger blogs are out there that are being included in these user numbers? It’s possible that WordPress actually has more active users than Blogger. And it would be easy to see why.

Get More Out Of Your Blog Today

I’ve seen a lot of people writing posts about autobloggerpro being used as a scraper tool for stealing content. They are right. There are people using autobloggerpro to steal content.

But does that mean the software itself is bad because some people use it in a bad way? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, I have two blogs that have autobloggerpro software installed in them.

I don’t use it to scrape content from anyone. But there are some features in the software that can really benefit you with your wordpress blog.

Here are some of the things you can do with Autobloggerpro.

1. If you own or manage multiple blogs, you can manage all of your feeds into one place. You set your feed to summary on all of your blogs and add the feeds to your autobloggerpro blog. Now every post you make will put a summary into your autobloggerpro blog with a link back to your blog post on your other blogs. It becomes an online newsreader.

2. it comes with relinker software built in. That means you can go into the admin panel and put in links to your affiliates, websites, or blogs and associate each link with a specific word for anchor text. Every time a post contains the word you associated with a link, it automatically links that word to wherever you assigned it. Your own contextual ad program.

3. It has it’s own sitemapper built in that will update as often as you want it to automatically.

4. Rewriter is built in. To help with seo you can put in specific words and associate them with the words you want to replace them with automatically. So you can make all synonyms change to the exact phrase you are targeting.

5. Header and Footer Customization for each post. You can put whatever you want into the header or footer of each post one time and every time you post it will add those automatically.

6. AutoMeta Plus; This module runs entirely on autopilot when it is enabled. It compiles a list of unique keywords from each article and places them on the top of the page in the meta keywords list. This optimizes your page daily for the keywords that are in your articles and search engines love this. A list of common words (known as ’stop words’) is included with AutoMeta Plus from which keyword are excluded.

7. Autoposter: You can upload your articles into the queue and schedule your articles to post whenever you want. Related to timestamping, but for posting articles.

Of course if you use autobloggerpro, you should still add original content every single day. Building the link popularity of your autobloggerpro blog means the links to all of the blogs you pull feeds from carry more weight.

So Autobloggerpro is not a replacement for writing your own blog. It has built-in tools that help you optimize your blog and make some tasks easier.

Autobloggerpro can be found here.

(Search) You need to monitor your online reputation to be sure that information available about you and/or your company is mostly positive. But how do you do that? Bill Hartzer suggests using Google Alerts which is a free service from Google that emails you automatically whenever there are new Google results for your chosen search terms within News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups search.

I’ve been using Google Alerts for some time now. There’s no better way to keep tabs of your reputation online. If you add your name, nicknames, company name, and your domain name (URL) to your Google Alerts list then you should catch everything that is published about you online. Seriously, it should catch everything - good, bad, or neutral.

I had a blogger write a review of one of my blogs. Two splogs scraped her first paragraph, which included my name. They were porn-promoting websites on Blogspot, the biggest neighborhood for spam on the Web. I was notified of the legitimate blog review of me and both splogs in one Google Alert. That’s how quickly they scraped the content from the legitimate blog. It happened in less than one day because I have my Google Alerts set to notify me daily.

I immediately flagged the two splogs and notified the reviewing blogger that her content was being scraped and used for nefarious purposes. She flagged them and a friend of mine flagged them too. I highly recommend that you notify Google when something like this happens to you so that you can have those splogs shut down.

In this case, the damage done to me was minimal. The real damage was the stolen content that was written by another blogger. But what if a real reputation management crisis occurred and you found Google Alerts that carried some serious repercussions to your reputation attached. What should you do?

The answer lies in your blog. It’s the perfect reputation management tool because you can combat negative comments about you by posting more entries to your blog. If you don’t take proactive control over your reputation, someone else will.

This is the day of splog. Fake blog. Spam blog. Whatever you call it, there are a ton of them. All you need to do to see one is head on over to Blogspot.com and start browsing blogs. You’re bound to stumble upon a few.

Don’t know what a splog is? Read this definition from Guardian Unlimited:

Their creators design spam blogs to achieve high search engine rankings by filling them with questionable or stolen content that is added automatically. Set up a few thousand splogs, use Google’s AdSense ad-serving programme to line the pages of the blog with paid-for click-through adverts, and the money rolls in while polluting search results for everyone else.

What makes a splog so undesirable isn’t so much what they post on their blogs, but how they acquire it. Most of them steel or scrape content from other bloggers and websites and leave no exit for their traffic except through the ads on their splogs. So far, they’ve been able to get away with the practice.

The Splogfighter With A Mission

One anti-splog advocate has a unique twist on fighting splogs. He’s got a website at http://fightsplog.blogspot.com, and has posted a visual graph of what the splogosphere looks like. More power to him.

But what should the rest of us do about splogs? Should we waste time caring about it?

Content Theft, Plagiarism, and Splogging

I do believe there are things that most of us can do to cut down on plagiarism and content theft. The first thing being able to define it. There must be some consensus on just what content theft is. Can it just simply mean lifting content that isn’t yours? Or could there be more to it? I personally believe that content theft happens in other, more subtle ways, as well. For instance, a former employee of BCPs posted some of our clients’ URLs on a popular freelance website as a part of his bid, with the addition of, “check these sites for samples of my work.” It was rather misleading.

To be fair, he had written for those clients, but he had contributed to their blogs, not their websites. He also had contributed to the blogs during a certain period of time and failed to point that out. His job bid was misleading because it simply pointed potential employers to a broader scope of work than the employee was responsible for with a vacuous claim of I wrote some of this. In a telephone conversation, the potential employer could have asked, “OK, which part.” Online, where links are active, it’s misleading and that is itself a form of content theft. After all, the person who was responsible for writing the rest of the content wasn’t getting the credit that he or she deserved.

And that’s the essence of splogs. Someone is taking credit for someone else’s work, or making a dollar of it without sharing the fruits of the labor. That’s just downright unfair. It’s stealing and it’s wrong.

Tools You Can Use To Protect Your Content

Concerned about content theft or splogs? You can do something about it. I recommend Copyscape. Just head on over and type in your URL. See what comes up. If someone has stolen your content you’ll know about it as the results will show it.

You can also take a line of your content and enter it into a search engine. Again, the results will show if your content appears on more than one site.

When it comes to articles, add a code at the end of the article that is unique. No one will know what it is, but if someone scrapes your article and fails to use your author resource box then all you have to do is search for that code. Find an article without your author resource box and you can send a cease and desist letter.

There are ways to protect your content. From splogs and from other types of content thieves. Exhaust all of your administrative remedies before resorting to legal action. If someone fails to listen to reason, call your lawyer.

Excuse that last post, please. I was trying out a new tool. It’s called Clipmarks.

I wanted to try out a new blogging tool to see if it was better than my current method of uploading and using photos in blogs. I have three methods that I use primarily. The first method, which is frowned upon by many bloggers, is the hot linking method. If I see a photo or image I want to use then I copy and paste the URL of the image into WordPress and link back to the source (I always give attribution). I use this method sparingly, but it has come in handy at times when I wanted to give a visual presentation for the concept I was discussing.

My Unusual Photo Use Methods

Another method for using images, one that is more preferable, is to take a screen shot of the website or image I want and upload it to WordPress as an image. This is obviously a better way, but it takes more time. And, in order to do this you have to alter the htaccess of the blog that you are blogging to or you can’t upload the image. Some of the blogs that I contribute to have not been configured to make that happen. So I have a third way to use photos for those blogs.

Instead of uploading directly into WordPress, I upload the photo to my Flickr account. Then I hot link the photo from Flickr. This is not the most preferable way to use photos because Flickr, while an excellent photo sharing website, is a third-party source and resizes all the photos to the same size. Still, this method has saved my life a few times.

I wanted to try a new service that I thought might be helpful and could potentially replace those last two methods of working with photos in WordPress. I went into it open minded, but not expecting too much. You’ll be delighted to know that I’m not too disappointed.

Clipmarks Just Doesn’t Make The Grade

Clipmarks is a service that allows you to clip certain sections of a web page and share those web pages with your friends. You can also use the service to clip images or parts of web pages to blogs that you write. That was what I wanted to use the service for. Only, my first attempt at using it (this morning) didn’t turn out so well.

The service is relatively easy to use, but I don’t recommend it for blogging. You saw the way the image looked. There is another limitation to the service as well. It will only copy up to 1,000 characters. That’s not much. Since I have a tendency to screen shot entire web pages and reduce them in size, that wouldn’t work for me at all. So you can see my disappointment in Clipmarks as a blogging tool.

It’s not that Clipmarks isn’t a useful tool at all, but as a blogging tool for clipping parts of websites and using them within your blog, I do not recommend it for that at all. So a big thumbs up to Zuggu and a sideways thumb slanted downward for Clipmarks. I doubt that I’ll be using it much after today.

If you are using google adsense in your blog, uploading the adsense deluxe wordpress plugin might be a great option for you.

Rather than having your adsense appear at the top and bottom or in the sidebar of your blog is okay, but much less effective than having the adsense appear in the middle of each blog post you make.

After uploading it and activating the adsense deluxe plugin, go to options and you will see an adsense deluxe tab.

You install your google adsense code into the appropriate box and save it as your default. If you also use yahoo publisher or have other adsense accounts or channels, you can set up more than one adsense account inside your adsense deluxe plugin.

When you are making a post, in some versions of wordpress, you may have to “save and continue editing” each time you post before you hit publish, then the adsense deluxe toolbar will appear above your text box.

Simply put your cursor where you want the adsense to appear in your post and choose the adsense account you wish to use from the dropdown. Then hit publish and adsense should appear where you wanted it.

Easy to use and increases your clickthrus. I recommend it!

I don’t see this posted about often enough. There are probably thousands of plugins for wordpress that do all sorts of things for you and that help you customize your blog.

However, seo is important to you as well and plugins can affect seo in a big way. Too many plugins can hurt your search engine rankings. It adds a ton of code to your already code-bloated wordpress blog.

Code-to-text ratio is an seo term that means the percentage of actual text in a web page. From SEOChat.com, “The code to text ratio of a page is used by search engines and spiders to calculate the relevancy of a web page. A higher code to text ratio gives you a better chance of getting a good page ranking for your page.”

Wordpress already has a lot of php code in it. Your blog posts are the text. Each plugin adds more code. So for each plugin you add, your percentage of each page that is actual text drops.

The advice I give you is that simple is always better when trying to optimize for the search engines. A static html page has advantages over html pages that use a lot of javascript. Same concept.

Use wordpress plugins that actually help you achieve what you are trying to do on your blog. Don’t just get all the latest and coolest plugins just because you think you need them to be up-to-date or cool.

Akismet is a good example of a plugin that you might need. It helps you filter out spam comments. Adsense Deluxe is a good plugin if you make money with adsense or yahoo publisher. AddThis is a decent plugin for making it easy for readers to bookmark your posts. Those all have a purpose that helps you manage your blog.

Before you add the latest greatest plugin, ask yourself if it is something you really need and something you would be willing to sacrifice some of your code to text ratio for.

Professional Management for Business Blogs
Business Blogging

Do you get a lot of blog spam? If so then you need to keep it under control. Too many bloggers think that if they require people to sign in before they comment then that will control the spam on their blog. That’s a big myth. It might keep the robots out, but as long as any human can type in the letters of your captcha or create an account and log on then you can expect to receive some spam on your blog.

The truth is, it is much more difficult to moderate that kind of spam than it is to moderate using a WordPress plug-in that I’m about to recommend. The plug-in’s name is Akismet.

Akismet is great for controlling blog spam on WordPress because it stops all of your blog comments before they go live. No one can see any comment, spam or otherwise, until you approve it. You can set Akismet to automatically delete any unapproved comments after a certain period of time. Or you can manually delete any comment you don’t approve of.

By using Akismet as a WordPress plug-in, you can ensure that any comment that meets your approval is approved when you want to approve it. Otherwise, if it’s spam, you can just delete it.

Professional Management for Business Blogs
Business Blogging
SEO, Content, and Link Building Stategies that work

From time to time I will share some of the software I like to use to support my blogging. You are also welcome to add software you use in your daily blogging chores.

Today’s post is about Remote Keys.

It’s a little macro tool that allows you to store snippets of code and text that you use over and over again. Each block of text or code is stored in a button. Wherever you place your cursor in any program you can type into, you push the button you stored your text or code into and it types it all in for you.

It speeds up my blog posting tremendously and it’s free!

Professional Management for Business Blogs
Business Blogging