Five Ways To Make Your Stock Photos Stand Out From The Crowd
Gone are the days when you can raise your market value simply by including a photo of some attractive white people. Stock photos, when used incorrectly, have come to signal inauthenticity. (We know those multicultural people don’t really work at your office.) But unless you’re a professional photographer, your image choices are limited. So what can you do?
In my years of blogging, I’ve uncovered a couple ways to use stock photos effectively. Here are my favorite tricks.
1. Crop at the eyes. By cropping photos of people at the eyes, you mask their identity while also encouraging viewers to interpret the picture however they choose – or even see themselves in the photo. It’s a trick that’s often used in book covers: Continue reading
How to Makeover Your Blog the RIGHT Way
Julia is a writer passionate about health, fitness & blogging. When she’s not running her dog she can sometimes be found writing about Sono Bello, cooking and a myriad of other topics.
It’s time for a makeover … for your blog, that is. Maybe it needs some extensive work, like a facelift. Or perhaps just a little bit of makeup and a new hairdo. Whatever the change may be, make sure your makeover doesn’t turn into a complete disaster. Here are some tips for the right way to make over your blog.
1. Know why you’re doing a makeover
When bloggers are looking at their website day after day, it’s easy to get bored with it and feel like it’s old and outdated. But think about your readers who spending perhaps one to fifteen minutes a day on your blog, or an hour a week. It’s not boring to them because they don’t spend as much time looking at it as you do! Continue reading
Blogging and SEO: Getting Your Targeting Right
Internet marketing isn’t simple. Never mind the fizzy babble about social marketing and getting rich in your pajamas. This is a tough market where someone can click away anytime he or she feels like it.
If you’re a blogger, you probably already know how tough it can be. If you want to do your marketing online, you need to look at marketing strategies and practical options, not hype. Most of all, you need to target your blog to core users.
Why? By targeting your content and keywords, you improve your search engine optimization (SEO), causing your blog to rise higher in search engine results and generating more traffic and more attention.
Targeting basics
Targeting is a marketing principle designed to identify core users. While targeting can get pretty scientific, its basic concepts are pretty straightforward. For blog targeting, ask yourself: Continue reading
Should Your Blog Mix the Personal with the Professional?
This is a guest post by Maria Rainier, a freelance writer and blogger for First in Education where she’s recently written on online ESL programs along with a guide to associate’s degree programs available over the internet. In her spare time, she enjoys yoga, traveling, and working with origami.
You check out a writing blog, hoping to learn how to improve your prose, but instead you read all about the author’s day at the mall with her two small kids. Or you open up a food blog, expecting to learn a new recipe for a dinner party you’re throwing this week, but find long anecdotes about family parties and funny things that happened to the dog.
Some bloggers include too much of the personal into their blogs, losing the focus of the blog – and possibly alienating readers. How do you know if it’s appropriate to share personal details on your blog? And how do know if you’ve crossed the line by sharing too much?
Here are some things to consider: Continue reading
