Search Results for: ai content

Do You Know These Top 10 Websites to Find Free Images for Your Blog?

I recently found out that adding pictures to individual blog post really makes each article sticky and resonates more with those who read it, because an image tells more story than a bunch of words crumpled together. But due to the advent of copyright laws online these days, you can’t just pick up any beautiful image you see online and slap it into your blog post, because if the owner of that image hasn’t given you right to use it, then you might end up be sued for copyright infringement (which might warrant you taking down the photo).

So in other to avoid this copyright infringement and stay on the safe side of things, you might want to stay clear copyrighted images and focus on those ones which are free to use.

In case you don’t know where to find such free images as aforementioned above, below are 7 awesome websites that you ransack today in your search for free images.

1. EverstockPhoto [http://www.everstockphoto.com]

everstockphotoEverstockphoto is one of the most popular website to find free images, it is known to be the search engine for free images. Their images comes from many sources but don’t feel uncomfortable they are all license specified.

Creating an account on everstockphoto for free, you can upload, tag, comment and collect images on behave of  your free account.

Currently they are having more than a million images on their site. Everstock was launched in April 2006.

One of their main aim is to become the leading portal for the stock exchange photography community, and add more features to service.

2. Stock.XCHNG [http://www.sxc.hu]

Stock.XCHNGThis awesome website is probably of the biggest places on the internet to look for free images. It has over 400,000 free images on virtually different any topic on the internet; ranging from Arts, Technology, blogging etc. Also, since it’s now owned by Getty Image, be expecting to see more enhanced image search services on the long haul. Give them a try today.

3. Free Photos Bank [http://freephotosbank.com]

FreephotobankThis is another awesome site to get free images for your blog posts. Free Photo Bank offers you an awesome option to see which photos are the most downloaded and the good thing is – you really don’t have to register in other to download them. Plus you can decide to use it literally for anything you have in mind.

4. Photo Pin [http://photopin.com]

photopinAn awesome website that is among the best when you want beautiful images, top-quality and elegant free photos for your personal use, Although each images there are under the protection of creative commons licensing – this means if you end up using any of photos from Photo Pin you’d need to link back to the original source.

5. Freedigitalphoto.net [http://www.freedigitalphotos.net]

freedigitalphotos.netYet another awesome free image community, they have a unique way of uploading images on their website. All their photos are free, either business, personal or educational, it all free. although their images are of small size, but they are all perfect, if you need the larger size of their image then you need to go for the premium account.

6. Foter [http://foter.com]

FooterThis is yet another free image website where bloggers can come and get relevant photos for their blog posts. And just like Photo Pin above, you can use any of the images but you mustn’t forget to give credit back to the image source.

Apart from that, there’s no other restriction, so you can decide to use the images as you deem fit.

7. Unprofound [http://www.unprofound.com]

unprofoundThere are enormous amount of totally FREE relevant images for you to use if you’re targeting to get an image impromptu.

With Unprofound , which  I consider the best because of the no-restriction it gives with the use of it images; you can use the images gotten from there for anything you have in mind.  Either for educational, personal or commercial purposes, images from Unprofound will help you better in being on the safe side of things.

8. Comp Fight [http://compfight.com]

ComfightComp Fight makes it quite easy searching for Creative-Commons-Licensed images for your content uses daily. The beauty of this site is it ability to search out relevant images from Flickr and combining it to their own images so that you can get the most relevant image search ever.

9. Morguefile [http://morguefile.com]

MorguefileIt has a massive amount of images for free download, ranging from arts to all kinds of images. But these images can only be used for personal, practical and educational uses and it can’t be sold or used for commercial purposes. So while using images from Morguefile you might want to be really careful not to end up using it for things other than what I just mentioned above.

10. Stockvault [http://www.stockvault.net/]

Stockvault.netOn my last list is stockvault, not that stockvault is the worse free images community. Among the images communtiy listed here it’s one of the best community to find free images. It was launched in 2004, its a community for students, graphics designers and photographers, these three group of people can share images for others to use without no cost. They are having over 30,000 free images available on the website.

You can even try these two websites to find quality images for your blog posts

So in conclusion, all these sites are the best in terms of getting free images and they can keep you safe from photographer’ wrath if you adhere to follow all the instructions attached to using each images gotten from their sites.

But let ask, did I miss your favourite free image website? Please tell us yours in the comments. Thanks for reading.

The Speed of Your Website Is More Important Than You Think!

Before you start exporting images, you should familiarize yourself with some of the important issues relevant to using graphics on the Web, such as file size, file types, and image optimization. Many of the avail­able graphics tools will do this optimization for you, but to make good choices that best suit your situation, you should understand the how and why of optimization.

Graphics optimization is the process of reducing the file size of images used on web pages, while preserving the quality and clarity of those images. This process provides a few key benefits:

  • Smaller images are friendlier to your end users. People will be able to download the web page faster if you’ve opti­mized your images.
  • Your website will appear faster to them, and they will be less frustrated than if they had to wait thirty seconds for all your huge, unoptimized images to appear.
  • Smaller images are more bandwidth-friendly. Web hosts usually limit how much data your website can serve per month. If your images are smaller, you won’t hit your quota as fast. Some providers will even charge fees when you exceed your limit. Commercial organi­zations that host their own websites also pay a bandwidth fee. It might seem trivial, but the savings will add up if you get a signifi­cant amount of unique visitors to your site.
  • Smaller images take up less space. Sure, we’ve all heard the argument that disk space is cheap, but disk space is even cheaper if you don’t have to buy as many disks to store all your huge images. Amazon’s S3 service charges for both the space used by your files and your bandwidth. It’s in your best interests to keep the image sizes small so you pay less for storage and data transfer.

speed-up-website-image

Download Times

Even though many people have fast Internet connections, you still need to think about download times for your assets. A 100KB JPEG might appear small, but add in five of them, the 122KB Prototype JavaScript library, several CSS files, and several other assets, and it can take a few seconds or more for those images to download.

Users tend to be incredibly impatient, and you want to do everything you can to make your pages load as quickly as possible.

You can use various methods to calculate the total size of a page. Adding up the file size of your page, scripts, style sheets, and images using a calculator is one way. Another, more accurate way is to let an outside service do it for you.

Visit Website optimization service here , and enter the address of your site to see a detailed report.

Dealing with Different Graphics Formats

Optimizing images can be difficult because you need to consider the type of image you’re working on.

For example, photographs need to be optimized differently than charts or logos.

When you work in a web browser, you work primarily with three graph­ics formats: GIFs, PNGs, and JPEGs. We’re using each of these for­mats in our site.

GIFs

GIF, short for Graphics Interchange Format, is a graphics format that uses a palette of up to 256 distinct colors from the 24-bit RGB color space. You don’t use it for photographs because of this limited-color space, but it’s great for logos. The GIF format also supports animations.

Historically, GIFs have often been used for logos and buttons because they support transparency, which means you can place a GIF on the page and see the background through parts of the logo. However, devel­opers are increasingly adopting PNGs because of that format’s superior transparency support.

PNGs

PNG, short for Portable Network Graphics, is a bitmap image format that uses lossless compression and was designed to replace the GIF format. It supports only RGB colors, and it’s designed for use on the Web.

It also supports transparency quite well. Unfortunately, this transparency is supported only in newer browsers, but don’t be afraid to use it because the image quality can be amazing.

Be sure to watch your file sizes when using PNGs; a 24-bit PNG with transparency can be quite large.

speed-train

Don’t Recompress a JPEG!

You should avoid recompressing a JPEG whenever possible. If you’ve compressed the original image by 20% and still haven’t gotten the file size you wanted, don’t compress the new image further; instead, compress the original file again. It’s important to keep your original files uncompressed, so you can go back and re-create them.

JPEGs

JPEG is a compression format for photographic images. It’s widely sup­ported, but it uses a lossy compression, so artifacts can be created if you compress too much or recompress multiple times.

JPEGs do not support transparency at all, and you should use them only for photographs. Logos, screenshots, and gradients are definitely not appropriate uses for JPEGs.

What are the methods you’re using to speed up your website? Do you compress images?

Let me know if you find this article useful.

How Using Google’s Disavow Link Tool May Help Rid of Bad Backlinks

Bad backlinks and the impact they will have on SEO has become a concerning factor among different webmasters and site owners.  With the introduction of the Penguin update which was set to penalize low value backlinks, the situation will worsen with the upcoming Penguin 2.0. Site owners may be justified for crying foul as they often don’t have control over links from external websites. A competitor could deliberately point thousands of spam links to your site to encourage penalties on your side, a practice known as bad SEO.

Even sites that are not targeted by such spam links may still be penalized for past link building practices as long as they don’t confirm to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and if they fail to have such links removed.

Google-Disavow-Links-Tool-Graphic

Fortunately there is a way in which webmaster can resolve the matter, and that’s by using Google’s Disavow Link tool. Basically the Disavow link tool lets site owners submit files through the Google Webmaster Tool listing those links that should be valued and those to be devalued.

Say you have 5 good links pointing back and one bad one. With Disavow link tool you can let Google know of the 5 links you would like considered when your site’s links are valued.

This has actually come as a great solution to webmasters and site owners struggling to remove low value backlinks, and with Google’s Penguin 2.0 set to roll into motion it will be gravely important for site owners to remove poor quality links. However there are some things to bear in mind when using this feature.

Note that if you submit links incorrectly and choose to remove non malicious links your site could drop in search engine rankings. For example, if you choose eliminating links by domain name instead of by individual backlinks you risk removing links from good sites which may have actually contributed to your site being where it is.

Use Disavow Only In the Event of An Attack

With the potential of harming your search engine rankings, site owners should only use Disavow links once sure that they’ve fallen prey to negative SEO, or in the event that certain backlink issues are not resolved with other site owners.

Note that the process of separating negative backlinks from beneficial ones can be a hectic process and one that will devour your time and effort. Sites such as Majestic SEO charge $49.99 to retrieve your entire link profile. From then it will be up to you to determine which links are worth removing and which are not. Bear in mind that certain malicious looking links may actually be rated by search engines, and it will depend on how they are placed on the referring site.

Google hasn’t really given a solid explanation on how it uses data obtained from the Disavow Link Tool. Although it may remove reported links from your site’s profile, it also reserves the right to thoroughly and independently review your submission and decide on which links to value or dis-value.

Given that the links submitted may come useful as supporting evidence in the event that you want your business reconsidered by Google after penalization in search rankings. With the potential harm associated with using the tool incorrectly it will best to use the services of a qualified SEO professional instead of attempting to troubleshoot and repair damage from SEO attacks on your own.

If you want to know more about using Google Disavow tool in details read this.

Did I missed any point? Are you using this Google Disavow tool? Does it really work?

Show Me Your Blog Design and I’ll Show You Your Blog’s Future

I won’t agree with you if you tell me that your blog design has nothing to do with your traffic and how you make money online.

If I should show you two houses, one with a beautiful design and the other with a rough design and voluntarily ask you to choose one out of it as a gift (I wish I could), you’ll definitely go for the one with a beautiful design.

Let’s draw this back to the aspect of blogging.

Your blog design has a great role to play; it’s the first thing to consider before thinking of writing quality content, generating traffic or making money online.

Definitely it can affect your blog in a positive way and also in a negative way, a good design attracts visitors while a bad design bids them farewell.

blog design

What are the blog designs that can affect your blog and how can you avoid them?

1. Use a simple theme

Too much of everything is bad, there’s this saying that goes thus “one man’s food is another man’s poison”. You might optimize your theme in a way that will look good to you but do you know if it looks good to your readers?

I have an idea, why not ask friends or other bloggers you’ve created connections with to check out your blog and tell you their opinion about your design.

If you get a negative answer from three different bloggers then you must make a change to your blog design. Make your blog design simple and avoid over optimization. It’ll not only make your blog look good but will also welcome visitors to your blog.

There’re many sites that provide premium WordPress Theme. But Below I’m sharing 2 top and best, affordable WordPress Club That provide great Premium WordPress Themes!

ElegantThemes – Looking for great, professional looking, elegant style wordpress themes? Elegant themes have it all. They provide great quality wordpress themes. Get 100% complete access to their entire collection of 76 themes for only $39!

Theme-Junkie – ThemeJunkie provide best wordpress Themes for very low price, Professional looking, Fast loading and great lifetime support.

2. Navigation counts

You’re building an empty desert on your blog if readers find it difficult to navigate through your blog.

I’ve received few messages from bloggers contacting me to check their blog if it’s eligible for google adsense and to my surprise, most of the blogs have no navigation at all. I managed to type “/contact” after the blog URL in order to get to the contact page, I know that’s a no-brainer.

If a visitor visits your blog, will they find it easy to contact you or know more about you? Those pages are very essential, you also need to group your blog posts into categories; this will make it easy for readers to access your blog. You can make navigations easier by placing your pages at the header and at the footer of your blog, it really counts.

3. Font types and size

Of course, you want to make your blog beautiful and attractive by using fancy fonts.

Before doing this, the question you should ask yourself is; will my readers be able to read my blog content?

If yes, then you’re safe but if no, there are two things involved. It’s either they put on a google glass for easy readability or they won’t bother stressing their eyes thereby leaving your blog. The size and type of your font matters a lot. There are fancy fonts that can slow down a blog and of course, you know we’re all in a hurry. If I should visit your blog and find out that it has a lazy load, I won’t hesitate to leave your blog. So try as much as possible and optimize your fonts for your readers and not for yourself.

blog design

4. Using multiple colors

The eyes naturally gets attracted to anything colorful but too much of it is a distraction to the eyes. The maximum number and range of color you can use on your blog is around 4 – 6 major colors, it depends on the theme of your blog. If you’re using a red theme then the background of your navigation bar and sidebar title must be red, your blog background color can be different and your footer color can be different too, making it a total of 4 colors on your blog. This makes your color a uniform and professional. Avoid multiple colors on your blog; it’s nothing but a color riot.

Conclusion

Go back and do some architectural work on your blog, I’m sure you know how it looks like. Try to make some amendment if you fall on any of the categories mentioned above.

Remember, a bad blog design welcomes a high bounce rate and a high bounce rate can get your blog de-ranked.

I’m sure these tips are definitely incomplete; I would love to hear your view.

Have you previously fall into any of these categories? How did they affect your blog?

Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Sales With Your Landing Pages

It’s always great to generate new leads for your affiliate marketing program, but every experienced business owner knows that it’s never easy (or cheap) to attract new customers. Instead of fretting over new marketing methods to grow your customer base, you should look towards your affiliates’ existing visitors and focus on increasing conversions from that group.

One important element that you should improve upon for conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the landing page. Before you do get started, you should get in touch with your affiliates. Brief them about your plans so that they can take the necessary steps in making their content and affiliate links consistent with your enhanced landing pages.

Once you’ve communicated your intentions clearly to your affiliate network, you can begin implementing the tips you’ll read below.

optimizing landing pages

 

Keep Visitors Focused

When people find their way onto your landing pages, you want their attention to be focused squarely on doing the one thing you want them to do on that page. If you want them to subscribe to a newsletter, don’t give them any links to other pages on your site or stuff a long article within the same page. Just place the form with easy-to-follow instructions.

By doing so, you place them in a mindset that has them concentrating on accomplishing one goal. They won’t be distracted by anything else that would lead them out of the page, thereby increasing your conversion rate.

Shoot Straight with Your Copy and Design

The very moment the page loads up, the visitors must know exactly what you can offer them. You have to capture their attention with a value proposition that’s both clear, useful, and of course, honest. There are many different ways of writing a compelling headline such as posing it as a question that your product/service can answer, and using the phrase “How to” in the beginning.

You can have a short summary of how your offer can help visitors. Include the biggest benefits to elaborate on your headline’s promise, keeping it to a concise bullet-points list of three to five items.

As for the overall design of the landing pages, it’s best to keep them as clutter-free as possible. Your layouts have to guide the visitor’s eyes in a way that directs them from reading the headline to the benefits and to the call-to-action button. Contrast your colors and the size of the copy with the button so that the latter stands out from the former.  Make the copy on the button specific so they know what will happen once they click on it.

Simplify the Process

The forms that you require visitors to fill out should be as simple as possible. You don’t have to get all the information from those signing-up at once. In fact, you run the risk of people not completing the conversion if you ask for every single detail in one long form. The name, the email address, and probably one phone number should suffice.

Make the labels for the input boxes clear, and they have to be aligned correctly for no confusion. Provide an example for tricky data like phone and credit card numbers, or limit the characters that can be typed in. If you really need a lot of information from the visitors, break up the form into multiple pages with a progress bar indicating where they are in the form-filling process.

It also helps if you allow them to go to previous pages without having them start over an entire page if they leave it.

Include Real Recommendations

To help overcome any worries your prospects might have about the quality of your product, ask those who’ve already tried out your offer to vouch for you through testimonials. People are more likely to trust a human face than your own marketing, so make use of your happy customers to be your brand evangelists.

Just don’t settle for generic phrases that sound phony. Get them to write a more detailed testimonial that outlines how exactly your product benefited them, and include their business titles if possible. It would also greatly help if your business has been mentioned by mass media channels or if you’ve partnered with well-known companies. Request their permission to use their logos. Above all else, don’t be tempted to get fake reviews on your site, as that can lead to a PR disaster if you’re exposed.

avoid fake reviews

Match the Message

Quite possibly the most important thing to keep in mind when updating your landing pages is that it has to make a connection with the page where the visitors came from. It’s only logical that when you click on a link that tells you how you can make money online, the page you end up on has to provide you the way. If you get anything other than what you’re expecting, you probably wouldn’t even bother sticking around to read anything on the page.

Talk to your affiliates about where they place the affiliate links. You have to know if the content on the page linking to your landing pages prepare visitors properly for what you’ll be selling them. If you want to target specific audiences to take specific actions, start creating more landing pages that are customized to their expectations.

Conclusion

Optimizing landing pages never quite ends, as you can always find one element of your landing pages that can be tweaked to bump up your conversions. Introduce changes bit by bit so you see which parts work and which don’t, and keep on testing.

Did I missed any points? Which method you’re using to boost your affiliate marketing sales?

Images by AdAge| Formstack