Finding images for your WordPress site can be a challenge. Of course, you could take the pictures yourself -- but if you run multiple sites, that could prove exhausting. I have recently started using a WordPress plugin that makes it very easy to find creative commons images and credit them properly right from inside my blog. The plugin is called PhotoDropper -- and I am loving it! PhotoDropper has over 62 million free images that blog owners can access and insert right from their WordPress dashboard. They also have a premium tier that offers more professional photos on a pay-by-the-photo [...]

Related Topics: Affiliate Marketing | Affiliate Marketing Column | Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing

Build it and they will come, right? Unfortunately, when it comes to starting a new blog, that is simply not true. I see many new blog owners become hyper-focused on getting Google to send them masses of traffic through SEO. And, while Google traffic is great and should not be ignored, focusing all your energy on SEO could be a recipe for disaster. In order to really build up traffic and a blog following, it's important to get off your blog and get out to places where your target market can find you. I don't care what the sales pages and "gurus" say -- there is no software or "loophole" t [...]

Related Topics: Affiliate Marketing | Affiliate Marketing Column | Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing

The new "send to Kindle" button may not be just another button to put on your site or blog. Because of Amazon's brand and Kindle's reach (both hardware and software) it could, if publishers comply, see meaningful adoption by consumers. In Q3 last year Amazon created a Send to Kindle Chrome browser extension. (There's no data on how that performed.) But now Amazon seeks to expand Send to Kindle to Firefox, Android devices, email and the PC or Mac desktop. It also works on any device with Kindle software (i.e., iPhone, iPad): The Send to Kindle Button lets you easily send that content to you [...]

Related Topics: Amazon | Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Social Media Marketing

The benefits and drawbacks of working from home -- or having employees working from home -- has been a big topic of discussion in the online advertising and publishing worlds, ever since new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told the company's telecommuters to come into an office or say bye bye to their jobs. One contrary point of view came from an interesting and influential voice this week -- WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg, who was interviewed by AllThingsD's Kara Swisher at SXSW Interactive. "Why are so many companies set into this factory model?" Mullenweg asked. "Find the best pe [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Yahoo: Business Issues

In this age of 140-character missives, Facebook "likes," and on-the-go mobile content consumption, it wouldn't be surprising to see that blogging had passed its peak, especially since many of the early software players have faded from the scene somewhat. But, Matt Mullenweg, a founding developer of WordPress and of Automattic, told an audience at SXSW Interactive that signups for WordPress have increased "every single year" and the average length of a blog post has also stayed steady, at about 280 words. "Certain ideas need to be expressed and a man needs more than 140 characters," Mulle [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Top News

Quora continues to make a content push that goes beyond its Q&A roots with Wednesday's announcement of a new -- and very basic -- blog platform. But, it's not actually an entirely new feature; Quora Blogs are based on, and a replacement for, Quora Boards, a curation tool that launched in December 2011. Quora users that previously created Boards will now find that those have been renamed Blogs, and given the tools that are associated with the blog platform. Those tools, as I said above, are very basic; this isn't a competitor for Wordpress.com, Blogger or other hosted blog platforms. [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Quora | Top News

Rare is the B2B marketer that's not using content marketing. But despite marketers' almost universal adoption of tactics like social media, article writing, blogs and infographics, only about one-third of B2B marketers say their content marketing efforts are effective. The numbers come from a new Content Marketing Institute/Marketing Profs study (sponsored by Brightcove) of more than 1,400 North American B2B marketers in August. The results might be seen as somewhat self-selective -- participants were made up of members/subscribers of CMI and Marketing Profs, which means these are marketers [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Features & Analysis | Internet Marketing Industry: Stats | Social Media Marketing | Statistics | Statistics: General | Top News

WordPress is a very simple-to-use solution for creating powerful affiliate websites. The best part about WordPress is all the plugins that are available. It seems there is at least one plugin for just about anything you can imagine! I've put together a list of 5 free affiliate marketing plugins for WordPress that I really like to use.     1. Pretty Link Lite This is probably my favorite WordPress plugin for my affiliate sites. In a nutshell, this plugin allows you to take long and nasty-looking affiliate links and easily turn them into "pretty links" that look like [...]

Related Topics: Affiliate Marketing | Affiliate Marketing Column | Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing

Creating a blog on an e-commerce site for the purpose of revenue generation and branding is a complicated idea. For starters, it's a blog. If you're going to do it right, you need frequent and quality posts. That takes time and money. Then, there's the issue of content. What will you post about? Will your posts focus on your company, its products, and the employees? Do people really want to read that? How can a company's blog be profitable as well as achieve marketing goals? Tweets and Facebook posts focused solely on your products and offerings will get old fast. Linking to sites wi [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Retail | E-Commerce | Social Media Marketing Column

It could be the end of an era for one of blogging's institutions, not to mention one of search marketing's favorite ways to give and get links. The blogroll -- or Link Manager as it's currently known -- is on the chopping block for the upcoming release of WordPress 3.5. The folks at WPBeginner noticed a ticket in the WordPress 3.5 development system that discusses the possibility of removing the Link Manager from the core WordPress software. The way WordPress development works is that ideas are proposed and then discussed among the developer/user community; this idea has a few dozen [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Search Marketing | Search Marketing

A series of actions -- and inaction -- on Google's part makes it clear that Feedburner is a very low priority in Mountain View. Google has been slowly abandoning Feedburner over the past 16 months, and all signs show that the RSS service is headed to the dead pool. Google's latest move involves the loss of Feedburner Japan's domain -- feedburner.jp -- in late July. That was where Japanese users could manage their feeds, much like English-language users can do now via feedburner.com (which redirects to feedburner.google.com). Whether intentional or accidental, Google failed to renew the [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Google: Feedburner | Top News

Blogging is a WordPress-dominated world. Close to half of the top 100 blogs are using WordPress as their publishing system. That's according to new research published today by the folks at Royal Pingdom. Pingdom used the Technorati Top 100 blogs list as its source list and found that 49 of those 100 blogs are running WordPress; 40 are self-hosted, and another nine use WordPress.com. (Our sister site, Search Engine Land, is currently No. 60 on Technorati's list and is one of the 49 that runs on WordPress.) The last time Pingdom ran a check on this, they found that 32 of the top 100 bl [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media

We recently launched our Marketing Land and Search Engine Land accounts on Tumblr. We've been quietly developing them this month, familiarizing ourselves with the platform in terms of how to post, what to post, who to follow and ultimately defining why we should be there in the first place. If you've been thinking the same, perhaps our story will be of interest. Why Tumblr? Here's a response to launching our accounts after we announced them on Facebook: If we attract 12 year-olds to the world of search or internet marketing, that's not a bad thing. But no, that's not why. So what is o [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Features & Analysis | Pinterest | Social Media Marketing | Top News | Tumblr

It's difficult to define the typical blogger, but new research from Nielsen/McKinsey says that more than two million of them are moms. In a blog post yesterday, Nielsen says that about 6.7 million people are currently using blogging websites -- which I take to mean sites like Blogger, Wordpress.com, Tumblr and services like those. Of that number, When other blog-related sites are included, Nielsen says about one-third are moms and 52 percent of bloggers are parents with kids under 18 years old. Nielsen doesn't specifically use the phrase "mommy bloggers," though, which indicates a specific [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Statistics: General | Statistics: Social Media

Blog and website owners have a number of options when it comes to installing a comment system, and each system has its own pros and cons that will be unique to different websites. Speed should be one of the considerations that website owners use when choosing which comment system to use. But according to a recent analysis, there's not a huge difference in speed-related performance among five popular comment systems. Royal Pingdom ran a number of performance tests to compare the default WordPress comment system with LiveFyre, IntenseDebate, Disqus and Facebook's comment system. The f [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Features & Analysis

Sixty-nine percent of American women online say they rely on advice they find on blogs when making consumer electronics purchases, versus only 53 percent that say they rely on social networks. That's the conclusion of a recent survey sponsored by BlogHer, the female-oriented blog network. The largest number of respondents (74%) said they most preferred to get information about products by visiting stores, suggesting that educating retail salespeople would be an important part of a consumer electronics marketer's strategy. Next up (61%) was manufacturers' websites. Consumer electronics revie [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Statistics: Online Behavior | Word Of Mouth Marketing