Early reader, photo by dsb nola — Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Remember how each year in elementary school you read more difficult books than the year before? This was to challenge you to expand your reading skills from the basic “See Dick and Jane” (yes, I’m that old) to more complicated reading passages and more advanced vocabulary words.
Now you may have been blogging for several months or several years. But if you are still blogging at the same skill level, you haven’t taken the opportunity to increase your skills.
What do I mean? My business partner Yael K. Miller has helped me learn how to use Flickr.com to find photos available for commercial use under a Creative Commons license and how to attribute those photos (for an example, see photo attribution above).
It’s a great feeling to know that I’ve learned another tool for adding images to my blog posts. (Up to now I’ve been using royalty-free photos purchased at istock.com, which is also a good place for photos.)
And this new tool is important because photographers deserve attribution for their work the same as we writers want attribution for our work.
Take a page from how elementary schools teach reading and keep challenging yourself to learn more advanced blogging techniques. Your readers will be glad you did!
P.S. And if you haven’t started to blog yet although you’re thinking about it, read my post “How to Have a Blog” at www.thebloggersbulletin.org .
(c) 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC
Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant. Her new FREE report is “Twitter, Facebook and Your Website: A Beginning Blueprint for Harnessing the Power of 3 for Your Business” – grab your report now from www.millermosaicpowerof3.com
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the info.
Darrell
Darrell –
I appreciate your leaving this comment.
Phyllis
Twitter: WordsmithBob
March 16, 2010 at 4:50 pm
great advice Phyllis! Every blogger should be learning new tricks and tools to make their blogs more appealing. I use Zemanta to find pictures for me. If you download and install Zemanta in your primary browser, every time you go to write a blog post, it integrates itself into your blog and will present images it finds on the web that have common license so you can use them. Then you just click on the image and Zemanta automatically inserts it into your blog.
Zemanta also will give you a list of articles and blog posts it finds that are related to your blog post. If you click on them, Zemanta automatically inserts them at the end of your post. Loooovin’ Zemanta. And did I mention it’s free? http://www.zemanta.com/
Bob –
Thank you for sharing this information about Zemanta. I’m definitely checking this out.