photo credit: Julie, Dave & Family

There isn’t a blogger out there who doesn’t use images-I mean photographs-to transform their site from something akin to a book into a true multimedia experience. It’s part of the compelling nature of blogging for both readers and content creators that these sites of ours are not limited to text. And after all if you have something to share a picture can convey so much.

We face a dilemma though, when it comes to putting photos into blogs. If you do a lot of photography or if your purpose for blogging is to showcase your own photography, you may never feel the desire to use photos taken by others. But for the vast majority of bloggers, even those of us who do take our own photos, using a photograph that has inspired us or that conveys a point in a post that we create is often a temptation.

The fact is that there are different categories of rights that are applied to a photo that appears on the web. Many photos you find online are off-limits for  uncredited commercial republishing, i.e. using them for your own blog, as they would be if you owned an offline magazine and appropriated and used images you found in other publications without permission.

Many people do simply take these online photos and place them on their sites, but in addition to leaving themselves open for possible legal action, using the creative efforts of others without their permission is stealing, whether we care to admit it or not. Crediting the owner of a photo in an attempt to sidestep this fact is of no consequence if permission was not explicitly granted, and let’s face it, you’re probably not going to attempt to find out who owns rights to the image, much less ask for permission to use it.

Why have I taken 300 words just to explain the basic problem of finding images to use on a blog? Because for years I had no good solution. I have nowhere near enough variety in my own photos to address the needs of my blogs, and a fast, simple way to find quality photos that have been OK’ed for general commercial usage by their owners, has eluded me. This all drives home why the solution to the problem, which I am about to share with you, is indeed a very valuable resource and time saver.

photo credit: JoeChavez

The Photodropper plug-in for WordPress is an absolutely fantastic way to find free, high-quality photographs to use for your blog, quickly. Photos that you find through it have no rights issues because every single one of them has been designated as being under the Creative Commons license by the photographer, which allows you to use and even modify them, as long as you give credit. After it helps you find a photo and use it, Photodropper automatically put a small text credit underneath the image.

Here’s how it works: simply search and install the plug-in through your WordPress dashboard. When you do a post and you’d like to place a photograph that is somehow related to your subject or just to set a visual tone, simply hit the Photodropper icon. Enter a keyword that describes what you have in mind. You’ll be presented with thumbnails of photographs from the Flickr catalog that you may use, that are tagged with the keyword you typed in. If I type in an obscure keyword or one that describes an abstraction, I may be presented with very few choices, but if I keep it concrete I’ll often get dozens of choices.

The quality here is often very, very good. Granted, there is also a lot of mediocrity as well. But it’s a very rare case where I don’t find something usable and fitting to a post that I am doing.

Photodropper lets me choose from three different sizes of images, and as I say the photographer credit pops in automatically.

photo credit: Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho

By enabling photographers to designate photos as being licensed as Creative Commons, Flickr encourages exposure of good photographers based on the merit of their photos as determined by millions of Flickr users. While the images find fitting homes all over the Internet, making bloggers’ lives easier, creative people whose work might have remained unknown can get some help in establishing themselves as photographers.

What blogging tools have you found to help the task of adding photographs to your blog articles and posts? With all the WordPress plug-ins out there it wouldn’t surprise me if even better tools than Photodropper are now available. I would love to hear what’s worked for you-please let us all know in the comments.

As someone who does blog posts every single day I can share with some authority a blogging tool that has been indispensable to me in the months since I purchased it. My voice recognition software has transformed my daily writing ritual into something that does not stress me out physically anymore, and instead allows me to focus on the thoughts I’m trying to convey.

I have a level of typing ability that might be more properly referred to as typing inability, because I never really learned how to touch type. I’m fairly fast but the problem is that I have to look down at the keyboard constantly and this seems to tighten the muscles of my neck and shoulders. I know, I know: why don’t I just learned how to touch type? The stories I hear about repetitive stress injuries make me wonder about touch typing as a solution and I have always been ambivalent about it. Instead I’d remained curious about voice activated software for years, and I always had a feeling I’d buy it.

Still, as I say, discomfort in my neck seems to be increasing over the years, and I had always wondered about getting voice typing software. Finally I figured that at this rate the pain probably wasn’t going to get much better and maybe I could prevent a more serious ailment down the road if I spent the money now on the dictation software. I’m an active blogger, so I just saw it as a blog tool like my keyboard or my hosting plan.

On Mac your choices as to software for voice typing are relatively limited, and as I researched it I found that the software that came most highly recommended, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, was unavailable for Mac altogether. This actually put me off spending the money earlier because I had no interest in paying for an inferior product.

I stumbled across an article on voice recognition software that talked about the company that makes the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software for Windows having licensed the technology to a company called MacSpeech for their ‘Dictate’ voice typing software. That was enough for me and I plopped down $170, still a little skeptical.

I don’t intend for this article to turn into an advertisement for either of the companies I’ve mentioned. My point here is that as far as using voice typing software as a blogging tool, I could not be happier that I invested in it. It’s not just that I can lean back in my chair and not be hunched over as I hack away at the keyboard. I actually think that my writing flows better as I’m able to look in a relaxed way around the room or out the window. A little experimentation revealed that I don’t even have to use the included headset to dictate, that the software works fine with me just talking into the small microphone above the screen of my laptop.

I think the only downside was the price. Even for a tool I use every day it was fairly expensive, especially when you consider that I have a keyboard sitting right in front of me. But this is an expenditure for the long-term. I figure I’m almost certain to have avoided injury or least greater discomfort that might have occurred in the future. And if you prorate a cost of over many comfortable years, I suppose that as blog tools go, voice recognition software is one of the best investments one could make.

I want to tell you about a blog tool that I have found invaluable for certain types of sites that need more content added to them or more readers and reader involvement. In a word, that is probably most websites and blogs!

Skribit is a widget whose code you simply paste into your blog, probably on the sidebar, that allows your readers to easily ask you questions and request that you write about a given topic.

The first thing that this widget will do combat writer’s block. Someone might ask you a question completely out of the blue that you never thought of addressing, or didn’t think there was any interest in. Imagine how easy it will be to write on a given specific subject if there is a real person on the other end asking, who cares enough about your opinion to post the question first place via Skribit.

The other benefit that you get as a blogger is helping to work up a rapport or dialogue with your readership, no matter how small. You can make the case that this is most valuable when you’re just starting, out which is why I would suggest that new bloggers definitely install this widget. Imagine how you will differentiate yourself in the eyes of any reader who asks the question, from all the other anonymous blogs out there. It’s easy to see that you encourage repeat visitors by doing this. Just having the tool on your sidebar gives a certain professionalism to your blog, and by the way Skribit is customizable.

I have found my readers to be very receptive to leaving questions right there on the home page with this blog tool. Put yourself in your readers’ place. If you have established yourself as an authority on a topic, they might be tired of doing Google searches to find an answer to a specific question that they have. The prospect of a real person addressing their specific point could be worth a lot to them, and certainly worth leaving a brief question to you involves minimal effort.

This plug-in is a win-win for website publishers and bloggers on one hand and their readers on the other. It’s an example of how incredibly easy the Internet makes the exchange of information between individuals, as opposed to always having to refer to a centralized repository like an encyclopedia in the old days, or even Wikipedia today.

Skribit can be added to various blogging platforms, certainly not just WordPress. It is also free, although to add additional blogs you have to ‘go pro’ and pay. It may very well still be worth it to install and test to see the response you get.

It is a blog tool that might just put you down the road to having an audience with whom you interact, much faster. Don’t forget that that interaction more than anything is what separates successful (even professional) bloggers from the millions of people out there who are finding it difficult to connect with an audience.

Analytics–What Is It Good For?

As a blog tool, Google Analytics isn’t exactly something that makes your blog run better or gives you an easier time of adding content every day, but most bloggers would agree that installing analytics provides you with vital information about your readers.

It is valuable to know where your readership is coming from before they visit your site, what other sites on the Internet linked to you and in turn sent visitors. It’s also very valuable to be able to analyze the search engine traffic that comes to your site e.g. the keywords that people typed into a search engine that brought them to you. Google analytics allows you to check in detail statistics regarding these things and a whole lot more.

Analytics Installation

Installation is very simple. Simply create an account and add as many of your sites as you’d like to watch. You must have write access to a site’s files in order to add the analytics code to the site. (You cannot install Google analytics on any site you are interested in) when you finish the sign-up process you will be given a code snippet that you simply copy paste into the header or footer file of your blog or website. Is easier than it sounds; if you need help finding the files in which to paste the code, it’s easy enough to find on the Internet.

How to Read Google Analytics

Once the code is installed, you have a wealth of information at your fingertips. From the dashboard you can choose a given time period, from a single day to any date range you specify, and immediately drill down to see a lot information on your readership for that period. Interesting and useful stats include: how many unique visitors you had, overall page views, pages per visit, and visitors’ average time on your site. A fascinating feature is the map overlay area, which tells you where your visitors came from geographically, sorted by country and with the ability to drill down to have a look by state or province, right down to the individual city from which your visitors came, from any country in the world! You can also quickly check out what the most popular pages on your blog or website are.

What To Do With Analytics Information

So what value does all of this Google analytics information have to a blogger? It can be used in many ways.

What if you found out that half of the visitors on your recipes blog came because they want to find out more about barbecue recipes or techniques? Your visitors are telling you what they’d like to read about, and it’s very possible that you will see a real jump in readership if you will give it to them on a more regular basis. Without Google analytics you may never have known how well-appreciated your blog posts on barbecues were. Comments are one way to judge a blog post’s popularity, but they are very imprecise way of doing so. Conversely, you may have imagined that the world needs more salad recipes and that that would be a big source of interest and traffic for you; it’s possible that you are wrong in this notion, and with your analytics data you could redirect your energies into articles that your visitors appreciate more, if you want to.

What if you started a blog on car repair, thinking that you can help people who are interested in the fixing up old cars and turning them into hot rods? Google Analytics might inform you that a high percentage of your traffic actually comes from India, where people might be using your high-quality information to turn junk cars into basic transportation. Knowing that your readers are less interested in hot rods and more interested in just getting engines running might affect the subject matter of your blog.

The “new visits” statistic has value. If, over time, you’re seeing the percentage of new visitors slowly decline, it means that more people are bookmarking your site to revisit later. (Assuming the overall amount of visitors is not declining of course!) Certainly this would be an encouragement to you. Seeing that the duration of the average visits your site is increasing would also be encouraging; Google Analytics tells you this too. “Pages per visit” is another interesting stat: generally having the number rise is a good thing, although some experts point out that having people visit one or two pages on your blog and then leaving might be a sign that they found exactly what they were looking for, then quickly left. Statistics are always open to interpretation, and Google Analytics information is no exception.

Analytics offers a ton of information about how your site is being used by visitors. Seeing that visits are (hopefully) increasing over time is only the tip of the iceberg. If you use an analogy of your blog being a retail store, analytics tells you a lot about the reasons that people came to shop, what precisely they were searching for, and what they found. If you are interested in increasing visitors to your site over time and enhancing their experience while on your site, you really need information like this.

One more thing: the Google Analytics blog tool is free. When you think about it it’s easy to see that whatever other motivations the company has, Google wants your sites to become more popular and useful, and this is a great tool for that.