Do It Yourself Photo Lab – The stage

Foam board is your best friend.  It’s cheap and it’s available at nearly any craft store, Target, Walmart or Supermarket in America.  I prefer to pick up the all white foam board, but if you’d like one side to have a color (possibly for future backdrops) then by all means go ahead.  The key here is that the board is bright white because this board will be used as your backdrop and also used as your reflector to shine some of the light back towards the camera and add depth to your photos.  You will need at least 2 pieces of foam board for this project – the first piece will be beneath the product and the second piece will be upright angled behind the product to reflect light back towards the camera.

Do It Yourself Photo Lab – The lights

Head on down to your local hardware store and go to the lighting section.  You will want to pickup a 3 or 4 pack of 100 watt Soft White light bulbs or the equivalent compact florescent soft light bulbs.  In this section you will also find clamp lights — I recommend getting 8 and 1/2 inch clamp lights, the important step here is to make sure they are rated for up to 150 watts power just in case you want to add brighter lights down the road.  In order to help keep the clamp lights firmly attached in your photo setup I recommend picking up a pack of A clamps (alligator clips).  If you live near a Big Lots they sell 2 packs of Alligator clips in their automotive section for $3.00 a set.  You will also need close line clips (those wooden clips used to hang clothes back in the day) and a roll of parchment paper (this will be your light diffuser) which they may or may not have at the hardware store.  If all else fails you can head to the supermarket to pick up these items.

Do It Yourself Photo Lab – The stands

Stick in a can, stick in a can – your light stands will be made out of empty buckets or empty coffee cans filled with quick set cement and a 6ft 1 x 2′ piece of wood.  You’ll need to mix up the cement and fill the empty buckets or cans and then place the stick into the mix and allow it to dry for a couple hours (yes it says quick dry cement will harden in 5 to 10 minutes, but keep in mind these are buckets not a surface repair).  In order to ad versatilty to your stands I recommend letting the stick rest up against the side of the can that way you will be able to put two stick in a cans next to each other and clip them together for a more rigid light stand (possibly to hang other items from besides lights).  Your hardware store checklist – empty cans (metal or plastic), scrap wood (1 x 2′ pieces of the height you’d like your light stands), bag of cement (50lb bag),

Do It Yourself Photo Lab – Putting it all together

Once you’ve assembled your stick in a cans you’ll want to clip on your clamp lights.  The clamp of the clamp light doesn’t always make the best grip so either add a secondary clip with an alligator clip or add a towel around the 1 x 2′ before clamping on.  For my lighting setup I made 3 stick in a cans — 2 for lights and a 3rd to use to lean my foam board against as a backdrop.  If you do not have a good table to work with for this projector I recommend using a couple saw horses so that you have the flexibility to walk around your lighting and make adjustments easily.  You will need to use the close line clips to clip on some parchament paper to the front of all your clamp lights.  This will help diffuse the lighting so the brightness is spread over a wider area instead of being harsh and focused.

Lay down a piece of foam board and place your product on it.  Place a second piece of foam board vertically behind the product.  For the lights I angle them at 45 degrees so that both lights make the product the focal point and ultimately reduce as much shadowing as possible.  Once the lights are on you can play with the foam board behind the product to see what angle gives the best reflection to bring out the highlights and details of the product.

Position your tripod directly between the two lights and adjust the image settings to manual so that you can adjust the lighting for florescent.  You’ll want the camera to use a low ISO (around 100 if possible) so you’ll need to do some test shots to see what ISO is being used.  If it is possible to adjust the ISO manually then set it to 100 otherwise just make sure your product as plenty of light and you are using a solid tripod to eliminate any shakes (at low ISO’s the slightest shake will result in image blur).

This image was shot using a Canon SD780IS and all the items described above.  After completing the shot I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 to adjust the white level.  The total cost of the materials to build my photo studio was $70, but I have left over materials to build 3 more stick in a cans and I have 2 spare foam boards.  On the plus side I now have lighting for both video and photography for less than it would cost to get one.  A Do It Yourself Photo Lab is a great investment and I think the image above speaks for itself on what can be done with a basic digital camera and a one-time investment of $70.

How Guest Posting Works:

• First we need you to register with TechBlogStartup here. Simply choose a username and enter your email address (make sure this email address is correct – your password will sent there). You are allowed 2 links in your “biographical info.” One link to your twitter account and one link to your personal website. You will need to use <a href=”"></a> format for links. If you need some help with this don’t worry.
• Once you’ve registered and you have your password, contact us and tell us your username and the topic(s) you’d like to write about.
• We’ll upgrade your account from subscriber to contributor – allowing you to submit articles for TechBlogStartup.
• Once your topic is approved and your account is upgraded to contributor write your post, we’ll review it and publish it – that’s it.

Minimum Requirements for Guest Posting:

• Articles must be 500+ words.
• Articles must be written in English.
• Your Guides/Tutorials must be original work and not published anywhere else.
• You must follow the formatting guidelines below for your images and headings.
• Images for thumbnails will be 200 x 200px, Images in posts will be no wider than 620px.
• Images that are Creative Commons must include attribution (please do not remove watermarks).

Benefits of Being a Guest Poster:

As a reward for the effort of putting together a guest post you will receive exposure on TechBlogStartup. Each post written for TechBlogStartup will include a brief bio about you along with a link back to your website and your twitter account. These links are do-follow. We will also be creating a writers page where we will include your bio and your appropriate links.

A Few More Tidbits on Formatting:

TechBlogStartup is powered by WordPress so a basic understanding is recommended, however not required. Within the body of your articles we use the following tags:

• h3 tag: the <h3> tag is the heading tag used to emphasize the most important information – sections of the article. You can see the <h3> tag in action in the four major headings inside this post.
• h4 tag: the <h4> tag is used within the <h3> tag to display lower leveled information. We do not use this tag often, but if you find it necessary feel free to use it.
• Other tags are <blockquote>, <p>, <code>, and <pre>. Please note that when using <pre> to include the language type. Example: <pre lang=”php”>. Available languages include css, js, php and more.

If you have any additional questions regarding formatting or guest posting please let us know. Contact Us | Register

Setting Up SocialBot

When you first load SocialBot v4.1 you will see a series of icons across the top for Account Profile / Default Filters / Company Profiles.  This is the starting ground for the process of submitting to Social Bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, Fark, Mixx, Delicious and more.  Before you begin your Social Bookmarking you must start by clicking the Company Profiles button and entering in the information for all the fields – this information will be used when SocialBot semi-automates the registration process for your accounts.  If you plan on doing multiple campaigns with SocialBot you will need to create a Company Profile for each website you intend to promote.  Once you’ve completed this step its time to jump into Account Profiles.  Within Account Profiles the default profile for SocialBot has 94 services to choose from – there are also lists for Popular Services (50), CAPTCHA Sites (7) and Scuttle Sites (37).  If you are not too keen on using the pre-made lists you can do what I did and create your own list (my personal lists consists of 39 services, 5 of which require CAPTCHA).

The Catch

Now here’s the catch with SocialBot v4.1 – you must create accounts for all the Social Bookmarking sites and verify the emails.  The bottom line is that unlike Bookmarking Demon 5 which automates this process, you will need to go to eat sign up page: create the account, verify the account via email and then enter in your login/password details in SocialBot v4.1.  For my personal Account Profile of 39 Services I spent about 90 minutes setting up these accounts.  The good news is that this process is not half as bad as it sounds because SocialBot does semi-automate the process.  For each service on the list a window to the right appears with a sign up link.  When you click the sign up link an internal browser will appear and most of the fields for creating the account will be filled with the information entered in our Company Profile.  Since website registration pages are always changing you can also right click in any of the fields and a pop-up window will appear which gives you one-click access to any of your Company Profile data.  Although you have to be present to register for the Social Bookmarking sites – you will never have to type on the keyboard during the process.

Now that you’ve created your Company Profile and completed setting up your Account Profile you are ready to jump into the Web Sites buttons: Sites / Pages.  Sites is exactly what it sounds like, you add your website to the list and either spider or create a sitemap.  I skipped both of those options and headed straight for Pages where you can select the site name and also click the Spider button.  For my WordPress blog I was able to spider my entire site, but by default you will return many results for tags, categories, and comments pages that you do not need in your bookmarking project.  This is the time when you want to use the Default Filters button on the toolbar.  I ended up using the Bulk Insert option in the Pages section and copy and pasted the URLs for the pages I was hoping to promote.  Once you have the URL you would like to promote on the list in Pages simply check the box next to the name and click the Submit button on the Toolbar.  A new window will appear and ask you which Account Profile you would like to use – this is when you’ll select from either the Default / Popular Services / CAPTCHA Sites / Scuttle Sites or from your own list you’ve created.

How Long Does It Take?

The process of submitting my 39 Social Bookmarking sites takes approximately 5 minutes per URL.  Since SocialBot v4.1 does not support multi-threading (multiple simultaneous submissions) like some other Bookmarking Software the process is a bit longer.  There is also no way of verifying the submissions since you only have a Status column in the Submission Process Window and once the process completes this window disappears.  Of course you can verify the results in the page details window, but this only alerts you if there were any errors and for which particular site.  It does not link you to the actual submission and this is a major problem.  From my testing the Status is only accurate about 70% of the time.  After manually verifying my submissions I’ve found that only 27 out of my 39 sites worked properly even though every item on my list showed Completed without any Errors.  On the plus side at least I did not have to manually submit my article to 27 sites, but since I paid for the product I expect it to work as advertised.

Summary

SocialBot v4.1 is a decent product, but it is not without its flaws.  The lack of multi-threading, adding new Social Bookmarking services, submission verification, automated account creation and email verification really leave a lot to be desired for the user.  At a price point of $24.95 or less, the product performs about as good as one could expect with the price – the bottom line is that you get what you pay for with SocialBot.  If you are hoping that you can get around buying Bookmarking Demon 5 or BookmarkWiz for a fraction of the price I’m sorry to say that this is probably not the case.  For someone looking to mass submit to a couple dozen Social Bookmarking sites, SocialBot, does the job.  For your major services such as Twitter and Facebook I recommend manually submitting and then leaving the rest up to SocialBot v4.1.  If you are worried about being able to verify which sites submit successfully I can tell you that Digg, Fark, Furl, Mister-wong, Reddit, Slashdot and del.icio.us all work well with SocialBot v4.1.

You Need Quality Content

Before you start requesting review units I believe that you should have created a solid body of work – no less than a hundred posts.  Some of those posts should be reviews of products you own personally or you’ve tried/borrowed from a friend.  If you have a local retailer with a generous return policy you could start off there by buying, reviewing and then returning some of the more popular gadgets in your niche.  Once you have a substantial amount of quality content it’s time to start sending out emails.

Behind every company is a PR agency which handles the company image and more importantly distributes review units.  These companies are very easy to find if you know where to look.  Go to the vendor or manufacturer who produces the product you want to review and visit their Press Release section.  In every Press Release there will be a “Media Contact” – a person responsible for distributing that particular press release and ultimately the person who will distribute review units.  As I said earlier you must be willing to accept rejection so what I recommend is that you create an Excel spreadsheet and begin creating a list of media contacts starting with their Name / Agency / Company Affiliation / Product(s).  A single PR agency will have dozens of Media Contacts who will be responsible for a variety of Press Releases so be sure to add several to your Excel Spreadsheet.

Create The Email

Now it’s time to compose a formal email which you will send out to each of these Media Contacts.  It’s a good idea to include a Response column in your spreadsheet that way you can keep track of who has responded and whether or not they were interesting in working with your blog.  In the first email I send out to Media Contacts I do not ask for a review unit, I am simply breaking the ice and explain a little bit about my blog including stats, subscribers and why I feel that working with their agency would benefit the exposure of their product as well as my readers.  However, I will mention which products I am interested in reviewing from the company they represent even if I do not ask for a product initially.  Once I have received a positive response I record this in my Excel spreadsheet and then reference the list when it comes time to ask for a review unit.  If you are looking to land your review unit immediately then by all means request the unit you are looking for in that second email.  The more willing and open you are to reviewing related products, the better chance you have of being placed higher on that waiting list when it comes time to review something huge.

Dear <Media Contact>,

My name is <Your Name> and I currently run <Your Site>, a tech blog focused on <Your Niche>.  <Your Site> is focused on delivering the latest, news, reviews and tutorials with daily visitors of <Number> and monthly views over <Number>.  As an influential tech blog I feel that both <Company They Represent> and the readers of <Your Site> would benefit from a solid relationship.  Please consider my site when it comes time to distributing review units.  Some of the products from <Company They Represent> that are generating the highest interest on <Your Site> are <Product>, <Product>, <Product> and <Product>.

To see some of the products we recently reviewed please visit <URL>, <URL> or <URL>.  I believe in honesty and sharing my personal insight through product reviews.  I cannot guarantee that I will love a product, but I will provide all of the facts and evaluate the device with the utmost respect and patience.

Sincerely,

<Your Name>
<URL>
<Phone> / <Email> / <Twitter>

Some Final Tips

Follow the example email above and replace the fields to reflect your tech blog and the media contact you are trying to establish a relationship with.  Do not be alarmed if the first email you receive shows a bit of skepticism on their part.  Remember you are selling your site and if they request additional information be as prompt and straightforward as possible – honesty is key.  Explain your passion for the field and provide as much supporting evidence as possible.  Some Media Contacts will respond with generalized messages, others will flat out say no and some will request to see some sort of analytics from your blog to prove your claims on visitors – stay strong.  Just remember that a yes is a yes, if you have to send off 30 emails and you have a 3% success rate that still means you’ve landed one more review unit than you started with.  I hope that you’ve found this information helpful and I encourage you to leave comments below – if you have additional ideas share what’s working for your tech blog.

Step One: Internal Links

Every time you write a new post you need to take advantage of Internal Linking – creating links between existing posts on your site.  As Google and Yahoo begin indexing your articles the more internal links within your posts the easier it will be for the search engines to find new content.  As a rule of thumb I always include at least one internal link within my posts that references an existing post indexed by Google.  To verify which posts are indexed by Google visit Google Webmasters and view the sitemap for your Blog.  If you do not have a Google Webmasters account then type site:yoururl (replacing yoururl with your blog’s address) – this will display all of the URLs currently indexed by Google for your domain.

Step Two: Social Bookmarks

My philosophy on great content is simple – sharing is caring.  In order to share your content with the world I recommend creating accounts on Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious and Reddit.  These four social bookmarking sites have proven the most valuable to my tech blogs and generate nearly 10% of my total visitors each month.  When I write a valuable piece of original content I always submit to these four sites.  There are hundred of other social bookmarking websites on the Internet and it’s really up to you to decide how much time you want to invest adding your content.  If you don’t want to invest the time it takes to manually submit your sites and have some extra cash lying around then I recommend taking a look at Bookmarking Demon Version 5 Click Here!.  With Bookmarking Demon 5 you can auto create accounts on over a hundred social bookmarking sites and mass submit your content.  Keep in mind doing so has risks such as your IP address being banned or your bookmarking accounts being closed so I insist that you only bookmark a couple of URLs per day.

Step Three: Social Networks

There’s 3 social networks that I focus on with my tech blogs – Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  Some might say Twitter is more of a hybrid – half social network half social bookmark, but for the purpose of this guide we’ll call it a social network.  In my 10 WordPress Plugins for your Tech Blog Guide I recommended installing Facebook Sharecount and Tweetmeme Retweet Button – these two tools will make tweeting your content fast and simple.  When it comes to MySpace I let Bookmarking Demon 5 do the job for me with the automated submission.  In order for these 3 social networks to truly drive targeted traffic to your Blog you will need to begin a following.  For your Twitter account begin doing searches for keywords that you focus on and start following – people who tweet about tech are very likely to return the favor and follow your account as well.  Facebook is all about creating a Fan Page — you will first need to create your own personal page and then add a Page, but we’ll go more into detail on our Facebook Tutorial.

Step Four: Post to Article Directories

Sometimes it takes the power of an established website to help show the world that your Blog exists.  There are endless amounts of article submission websites that let you post original content and share backlinks to your Blog, but I stick to one – Ezinearticles.  I use Ezinearticles because it’s proven to drive loyal readers to my blogs.  What makes an article submission successful is great content and its that great content that interests readers into viewing your profile and ultimately clicking your domain.  A normal article I submit to Ezinearticles will get around 200 views in the first week, 30 will view my profile and 5 to 6 will go to my site.  These numbers might sound small, but if you plan on submitting articles on a weekly basis they will add up quickly.  Most importantly the people visiting your site will already value your content and will become the most likely candidates to bookmark and follow your social networking accounts.  If you still aren’t convinced that Ezinearticles is a great free way to drive traffic to your blog take a look at their benefits page here.

Step Five: Post Quality Content on a Regular Basis

Internal links, social bookmarks, social networks and article directory submissions are great, but they all rely on the fact that quality content drives traffic.  You need to spend the the time and do the research to create valuable content for your readers.  Sometimes you will want to share content from other tech blogs and this is important as well, but you still need your own content to separate your site from the sea of blogs flooding the Internet.  If you don’t have the time to create the original content a successful tech blogs needs then I suggest you start outsourcing your writing from day one.  Finding ways to monetize your Blog to cover the costs of paying for writers will be a struggle at first, but I know many tech bloggers that use this method successfully.  Keep in mind that their tech blogs are focused primarily on making money and they own dozens of blogs, but if that’s your goal then go for it.  My goal is simply sharing information to help others with the ultimate goal of creating a valuable resource for the Internet – or to put it a different way I want to be an expert in my field.

I hope that you’ve found this guide useful, please feel free to leave your comments below.

Resources and Tools for this Guide: Bookmarking Demon 5

The next step in my Pre-Post Checklist is creating the necessary post tags.  It’s a good rule of thumb to re-use existing tags across your blog rather than creating hundreds of unnecessary tags.  As Twitter continues to grow in popularity many blogs and websites will begin using hash tags instead of the traditional tags (ex. wordpress is now #wordpress).  I have not fully adopted this trend in my blogging, but it is worth mentioning for those that want to plan ahead.  When choosing your Tags make sure that they include the keywords of your article and reference any existing tags being used by related content on your blog.  Please keep in mind that by default your Tags become your meta keywords when you are using the Thesis Theme or the All-In-One-SEO-Plugin.

After you’ve completed your tags it’s time to edit the meta description for your post.  The meta description is the block of descriptive text, often times the first sentence or two, that appears beneath a link in Search Engines.  Creating a short and concise meta description gives prospective visitors a good idea at what they are clicking and ultimately will lead to lower bounce rate from your blog – The best advice I can give you is to be as accurate as possible with your meta descriptions.  If you are not using The Thesis Theme for WordPress then I suggest that you install the All-In-One-SEO-Pack plugin.  This plugin will auto generate meta descriptions for all of your posts and also allow you the option to manually edit your meta descriptions, I prefer the latter.

If you’ve read my guide on Generating Traffic from Google Image Search then you know the importance of completing all the text fields when you insert images.  Ensure that you’ve written an accurate Title, Description and Alternate Text for every image that you’ve inserted in your post.  For Thesis Theme users also make sure that your Post Image alt text field is completed.

The last step in the process and quite frankly the most important is to proof read your post for spelling and grammar mistakes.  If you’ve spent the past hour writing quality content don’t you think you owe it to yourself to present the information in the most professional way possible?  What is a reader going to think when they find numerous typos in your posts?  Of course you will not pick up every spelling or grammar mistake, but by setting aside a few minutes before you hit that Publish button you’ll be setting yourself up for success.  Now that we’ve gone through my Pre-Post Checklist let’s quickly run through the steps:

• Edit the Permalink to be short and descriptive while maintaining keywords
• Use Post Tags, remember Post Tags become your meta keywords – choose wisely
• Hand Write all Meta Descriptions using The Thesis Theme for WordPress or the All-In-One-SEO-Plugin
• Complete the Title, Description and Alt Text for all images in your post
• Proof Read all posts before hitting ‘Publish’

I hope that you found this guide helpful in your quest of becoming the next great tech blogger.  If you have any questions about this guide feel free to leave your comments below, I welcome the feedback.

Step One: Download and Install the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

You can download YARPP here or you can install the plugin within your WordPress dashboard in the Plugins/add new section (just search “YARPP”).  Once you have the plugin installed you will need to copy the yarpp-template-example.php file into your theme directory – in this case I copied the file into my thesis_16 folder (/wp-content/thesis_16/).

Step Two: Open and Edit yarpp-template-example.php

Personally I use Dreamweaver 9 for all of my HTML and CSS editing.  If you do not have Dreamweaver you can use the file editor within WordPress or you can open yarpp-template-example.php in your favorite text editor.  If you decide to edit the file in your text editor be sure to upload the file back to your theme folder to overwrite the file we previously copied to that location.  With the yarpp-template-example.php file open you will replace it with the following code:

<?php /*
Example template
Author: mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)
*/
?><h3>Related Posts</h3>
<?php if ($related_query->have_posts()):?>

<?php while ($related_query->have_posts()) : $related_query->the_post(); ?>
<div><div><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/lib/scripts/thumb.php?src=/<?php $values = get_post_custom_values(“thesis_post_image”); echo $values[0]; ?>&amp;w=80&amp;h=50&amp;zc=1″ alt=”<?php the_title(); ?>”/></a></div>
<div>
<div><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></div>
<div><?php the_excerpt(); ?></div>
</div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>

<?php else: ?>
<p>No related posts.</p>
<?php endif; ?>

This is the code I use to call the Thumbnail file that is created in the Thesis theme, display a link to the post and also display an excerpt of the post.  In my testing I’ve found that the style of related posts works the best to increase the page views on my network of tech blogs and on TechBlogStartup.  If you would not like to show an excerpt or you would like to format these thumbnails differently feel free to edit the code at your leisure.  I can also assist you if you run into trouble – just click the submit blog link in the navigation bar up top and send me a message or drop a comment below.

Step Three: Edit your Style Sheet – CSS

Since this guide is focused on The Thesis Theme for WordPress, the file we will be editing is the custom.css file which is located in /thesis_16/custom/.  Copy and paste the following code into your custom.css file and save the changes.  If you are not using Thesis, you can add this code into the style.css file for your current theme – note: some themes might have a style sheet with a different name, but the default WordPress theme uses style.css.

.custom .related_holder {display:block; height:90px; margin-bottom:10px; background:transparent url(/bg-dotts03.gif) repeat-x scroll 0 100%;}
.custom .related_pic {float:left; width:100px;height:90px;}
.custom .related_pic img {padding: 2px; margin-right:10px; margin-top:10px; border: #666666 solid 1px; display:inline;}
.custom .related_contents {float:right; width:520px; height:90px;}
.custom .related_title {font-size:12px;}
.custom .related_title a{color:#008800; text-decoration:underline;}
.custom .related_excerpt {font-size:12px;}
.custom .related_excerpt p{margin:0;}

For my setup of Thesis I use a 640px width content area – 520px is used for the text of my related posts and then my thumbnail images are set to 150px by 126px.  You can change this setting in the Thesis Theme under Thesis Options / Post Images and Thumbnails / Default Thumbnail Settings.  You will notice that I use a bg-dotts03.gif image which creates the horizontal row beneath each of my related posts.  If you would also like to use this image download it here (right click, save as).  Save the changes to your custom.css file after you’ve made the necessary adjustments for your setup.

Step Four: Go into Settings / YARPP

You will now need to go into your WordPress Dashboard and visit your Settings.  Inside Settings find YARPP and scroll down to section Display Options section and check the box for “Display using a custom template file”.  Select yarpp-template-example.php from the list then go down to the very bottom of the page and choose Update Options.  You have now completed the setup of your Related Posts – time to refresh your website.  Click a post on your blog and check down at the bottom see how your related posts are formatted — If things are looking good you can proceed

Step Five: Customize the Location of Your Related Posts

In the Thesis theme we live and die by Hooks.  In the custom_functions.php file I have made the follow change so that my related posts are displayed at the end of my posts.  Note: you can also use Open Hooks to accomplish the same goal – in this case all you need is to insert <?php related_posts() ?> in the thesis_hook_after_post section.  Here’s the code I use in my custom.php file:

function post_footer() { ?>

<?php if (is_single()) { ?>
<?php related_posts() ?>
<?php } ?>

<?php }

add_action(‘thesis_hook_after_post’, ‘post_footer’);

The last step in the process requires that we go back into the WordPress Dashboard and uncheck the “automatically display related posts” option in the Display Options section.  Once you’ve complete this step you should be good to go and on your way to some Killer Related Post in The Thesis Theme for WordPress.  If you found this guide helpful or you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment below, we love to hear from readers.

Step One: Naming Your Images

Whether the image you will be using in your blog post is your own or an image you found on another website or blog, always give proper credit by sourcing your images.  Not only does this gain the respect of the website whose images you are using, but it shows your readers that you believe in full disclosure.  The fastest way to lose credibility with your blog is by using images off other websites as your own, or even worse – placing watermarks across those images for your site.  With that being said, the most important step in landing on page one of Google Image Search results beings with proper naming of images.

I can’t tell you how many websites I visit on a daily basis that use cryptic naming structures for their images (ex. jpn1234hte.jpg for an image of a new eReader).  Whether you are using your own image or saving an image from another website – start by renaming the image to something very descriptive for instance sony_ebook_reader_model_3443.jpg.  This descriptive naming structure will do wonders for Google Image search because the name of an image is its most distinguishing trait recognizable by a search engine.

Step Two: Re-use Your Images on Multiple Blog Posts

Once you’ve uploaded your properly named image to your WordPress blog I strongly encourage you to re-use this image on future posts.  The more posts you have that contain the properly named image, the better chance you have of Google indexing your post and image.  You can also increase this effect by linking to your previous posts (internal links) either within the body of your text or by using a related posts plugin such as YARPP which I recommend in my 10 WordPress Plugins for Your Tech Blog.

Step Three:  Fill in the Alternate Text and Description for Your Images

When you upload a new image in your blog post you will see a box (see image above) which asks you to fill in Title / Alternate Text / Caption / Description.  Always fill in all these fields for the images you upload.  By filling in these fields you are giving search engines even more data to classify the images in your posts and ultimately higher probability that your image will be returned on that first page of Google Image Search results.

Landing on the first results page in Google Image search is just one of many step in helping to generate traffic for your Tech Blog.  As you begin building a following and developing quality content, the backlinks will generate their volume of traffic, but Google Image Search is a great way to jump start the process.  If you haven’t done so already I highly recommend setting up an account with Google Webmaster Tools to help monitor your results rankings.  Please keep in mind that your Bounce Rate will be higher than expected since many people using Google Image Search do not click through to the full article.  To help compensate for this I recommend that you include a watermark on all images that are your own – this includes screenshots.

I hope you’ve found the following tutorial helpful in your quest to build the next great Tech Blog.  If you have any questions about this tutorial please feel free to leave a comment below – we are always looking for new ways to help the readers.

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<div class=”adright”>/*google adense 728×90 banner*/</div>
</div>

For TechBlogStartup I use a logo on the left side of the page and to the right I place a 728 x 90 pixel ad unit, which in this case is a Google AdSense Unit.  You can use any ad unit you’d like in the place of  /*google adense 728×90 banner*/ just make sure it fits the 728 x 90 size requirement.  If you would like to leave the space to the right of the logo you’ve created blank or use a logo which fills the entire width of your page then simply ignore the <div class=”adright”>/*google adsense 728×90 banner*/</div>.  Now let’s take a look at the corresponding CSS

.adright {float:right; width:728px;}
#heddiez {padding: 0; margin: 0; float:left; height:90px; width: 100%; background: #fbfbfb url(‘/techblogstartup.png’) no-repeat scroll center left; overflow:hidden; position:relative;}
#heddiez h1 {height:90px; width:270px; position:absolute; top:0; left:0; text-indent:-9999px;}
#heddiez h1 a {border: 0 none; display:block; height: 100%; width:100%;}

The logo file I use has been uploaded via FTP to the root directory (/techblogstartup.png) and it has dimensions of 270 x 90 px.  Since the ad unit I am using to the right of the logo is 728px wide the total width of my header is 998 pixels – if you’re width is smaller I recommend dropping to a smaller banner unit and then adjusting the .adright to reflect this width (ex. if the banner you will be using is 486px wide you would edit .adright {float:right; width:486px;}.  At this point you would have additional blank space between the banner and your logo file so you might want to increase the width of your logo along with changing the width listed in #heddiez h1 to reflect this change.

How Do I Use This HTML and CSS?

Now that I’ve shown you the code that I use it’s time to implement this on your own WordPress Blog.  For the purpose of this example I am going to assume that you have not created a logo for your website.  You will need some sort of image/graphic editing software in order to do so — Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator or even MS Paint.  Create a new image with the dimensions of 270px wide and 90px tall.  If you do not have access to any of the programs I’ve listed you could always use the Cool Text: Logo and Graphics Generator here.  Once you have your logo file created to the proper dimensions you will need to save the file (remember this file name).  It’s time to upload the file to the root of your web space (http://www.techblogstartup/techblogstartup.png) in either the public_html or httpdocs folder.

Now you will need to open your header.php file and look for div id = header.  In the default WordPress theme you will replace the following code with the HTML code I’ve listed above:

<div id=”header” role=”banner”>
<div id=”headerimg”>
<h1><a href=”<?php echo get_option(‘home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a></h1>
<div><?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?></div>
</div>
</div>

Make sure to update the HTML code I’ve listed above to reflect the name of your website by replacing “TechBlogStartup” with your blog name.  Now it’s time to edit the .css file which in the default blog scenario is called style.css.  Simply copy and paste the CSS I’ve listed above.  Be sure to edit #heddiez to reflect the name/file type for the logo you’ve created.  Save all changes to the header.php and style.css files and now take a look at your blog.  If everything worked out as planned you should have a nice clean logo with an ad unit of your choice to the right.  If you have any questions on this tutorial please feel free to leave a comment below, thanks!

• Create the favicon.ico file using the DynamicDrive FavIcon Generator
• Save the favicon.ico file to your computer
• Login to your web space via FTP
• Upload the favicon.ico file to the root directory of your FTP (example httpdocs or public_html)
• Add the following code to your header.php file in the HEAD section <link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>
• If you are using The Thesis Theme for WordPress, simply add the code above in Thesis options / Header Scripts

This is probably the easiest and fastest way to get your favicon up and running on your tech blog.  The change should be instant, but it might require that your empty the cache in your web browser.  From my experiences IE and Google Chome update the favicon almost instantly after refreshing the page, but I’ve had Firefox take up to a couple days before the change goes into effect.  The second method for creating a favicon.ico file requires that you have Adobe Photoshop.

• Download the ICO (Windows Icon) Format for Adobe Photoshop here.
• Extract the zip file
• Locate the “File Formats” folder inside your Photoshop Plugins folder
• On Windows move the ICOFormat.8bi file to this folder / on OS X/Classic move the icoformat (CS2/Mac version is ICOFormat_cs2.plugin) / on 68K MacOS X, icoformat (68K)
• Quit Photoshop, relaunch.  Sometimes you might need to restart the machine for the change to take effect
• Create a new Photoshop file either 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64 pixels, design your icon and when you are done click save – you will now be able to save the image as an ico file from the drop down list
• Login to your web space via FTP
• Upload the favicon.ico file to the root directory of your FTP (example httpdocs or public_html)
• Add the following code to your header.php file in the HEAD section <link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>
• If you are using The Thesis Theme for WordPress, simply add the code above in Thesis options / Header Scripts

Congratulations, you now have a custom favicon created in Adobe Photoshop.  If you have any questions about creating or setting up the favicon.ico file for your WordPress tech blog please feel free to leave a comment below.  We are always here to help and it’s our goal at TechBlogStartup to make your blogging as simple and straightforward as possible.

Resources: FavIcon Generator on DynamicDrive.com, ICO (Windows Icon) Format for Adobe Photoshop