Are you using Google Analytics to monitor your website performance? It’s a goldmine of free market research data, but most businesses fall into one of two categories:

• They mistakenly decided they didn’t need analytics. How can you improve your website if you aren’t measuring it?
• They installed analytics and then never used it.

If you rely on your website for any part of your sales or business lifestyle, then please let this be a call to action: start using analytics to measure your online performance. What can Google Analytics (or any other analytics package, for that matter) tell you?

Pencil by The Shane H

Where are your customers coming from?

In an analytics package, you can learn where your customers are coming from. There’s no comment box or clerk having to ask everyone where they heard about you – the tool does it without them even knowing. Wouldn’t it be nice to know:

• Which one of your advertisements and banner ads were working well? Which ones send people but those people don’t stick around?
• Did that blog feature actually send any web traffic?
• Does that paid directory listing not actually send you any web traffic?

This isn’t just data: this is market research information you can use to measure and evaluate your online performance. And it’s free!

What parts of your website are popular? Which parts stink?

Unfortunately, many businesses put a website up quickly and without much thought. They wouldn’t do the same for a real world storefront or send out a salesperson without a clear message and call to action.

Analytics can help you understand how popular and effective the pages are in your site, such as:

• How many customers arrive and leave immediately?
• Where do customers linger? Is there a particular popular section?
• Do you have a page nobody reads? Is that because it’s not important or because nobody can find it?

It’s easy to over-analyze this stuff here, but it’s important to do some digging and see what’s happening behind closed doors – what exactly are people doing on your website?

How’s your search engine optimization?

Last but not least: SEO. Regardless if you are a newbie to this area or your website is a well-oiled machine, analytics can teach you a few things, such as what are people actually typing in the search engines to find you. It’s not what’s here that will surprise you (often weird phrases will show up), but moreso the stuff that isn’t here. It goes back to what I said earlier: you can’t improve performance if you aren’t measuring it.

Andy Hayes is the managing director for Travel Online Partners, a travel online marketing firm.  Don’t miss their popular Google analytics ebook to make this most of this free market research!

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Post tags: Andy Hayes, Google Analytics, Travel Online Partners, Web analytics
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My Top Picks: 3 Free, Open Source eCommerce Shopping Carts

OpenCart – Free, open source, great features

Zen Cart – Free, open source, great features

PrestaShop – Free, open source, great features

There’s nothing more for me to say about the choices I listed above. Each has a load of great features, but you’ll need to look at each one to see which might be the best fit for you.

Free Cart That Works Either Standalone or as WordPress Plugin

FatFreeCart is free and very basic, but also offers a pro version (E-junkie) for more features. FatFreeCart is pretty much just copy/paste (with a little editing to fill in the product info), and it can either be used as a standalone cart on just about any site, or you can download the WordPress plugin to easily add the cart to your WordPress blog. This one is great for the small site that doesn’t need a full-blown ecommerce solution. If you’re just looking to sell the occasional ebook, for instance, this qualifies as quick and easy.

WordPress eCommerce Shopping Cart Plugins or Themes

If you want a more full-featured cart for your WordPress blog than FatFreeCart gives you, here are my top picks for shopping cart WordPress plugins/themes.

eShop is a popular free plugin. It’s a good middle-of-the-road solution, in that it has decent features, but comes with less documentation and help than the other choices below.

YAK is another free WordPress plugin that comes with free basic documentation, but you’ll need to pay a little extra if you want the detailed installation and configuration instructions available in the YAK Handbook.

WP e-Commerce is free for its basic module but also offers premium extensions and themes that each cost extra. This is the WordPress cart that started the whole movement.

PhPurchase isn’t free, but at the current cost of $49, that’s affordable enough for me to think it worth including here, especially since it comes with a robust set of features.

Other CMS-Specific Carts

Sorry, you’re out of luck if you’re hoping I’ll be listing carts for other non-WordPress CMS systems such as Drupal or Joomla. I’m not knowledgeable enough about those systems to make a list, so you’ll have to rely on someone else’s research for those.

Why The Short List?

I know many people will wonder why I didn’t include this or that cart in the list (I know some will be asking why I didn’t mention Magento and osCommerce, for instance). I left many carts off the list on purpose because I find them to be too complicated or too old to make my top picks list. That doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t absolutely perfect for some people; I’m sure they are. And of course, there are lots of great but costly choices tht I could have included as well. But I love free or extremely affordable options when available, so that’s what I chose to focus on.

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Post tags: ecommerce, Shopping cart
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Don’t Miss Marketing Opportunities

Any chance you have of spreading the word about your site should be taken. Smart marketers never miss an opportunity and you shouldn’t either. You never know when one incredibly influential person might stumble over a link to your site, fall in love with your site, and suddenly send a flood of traffic to it by mentioning it on his or her blog or social media stream.

Of course, you do need to consider whether or not your time could be better spent doing something else, so if submitting your site to directories takes up so much time as to outweight the potential benefits, then you’re probably losing the benefits you’d hoped to gain.

Automate Processes, Not Content

So when people ask me if they should submit to directories, I always say yes, but I add a caveat: “Yes, submit to directories, but don’t spend too much time on the task. Automate as much of the process as possible to free up your time for other important marketing tasks.”

Some people cringe when they hear the word “automate”, as they immediately envision black hat spammers evilly autogenerating content in their sleep, polluting the web in the process. That’s definitely not what I’m talking about, so please don’t even go there in your minds. Processes should be automated where possible, not content.

The Tool I’ve Used For Over Four Years

So here’s how I’ve been automating the process of submitting to directories for over four years now. I use a tool called SubmitEaze that gives me the most flexibility I’ve found to reduce the time need to submit to directories. Every now and then I forget to use it, and when I remember again later (usually when an email arrives telling me about some new feature of the software), I kick myself for having put it aside for so long. (Hey, I’m human, and stuff gets lost in the daily flow just like it does for everyone).

I’ve actually reviewed SubmitEaze a few times in the past, beginning way back in January, 2006. You can read those reviews here, here, here and here. I haven’t reviewed it lately, however, and there’s been a ton of great new features since the last time I did, over two years ago. So, here’s an updated review of the product. (And no, this is not a paid review, nor were any of the ones I’ve done over the years).

Not Just Site Directories – Article Directories Too

The biggest new feature in the last two years has been the ability to not only submit to directories really easily, but to also submit articles to article directories as well. Article marketing is a step up in the marketing chain for several reasons.

1. You aren’t just giving a brief title and description of your site; you’re supplying an entire article about your site’s niche topic, with links back to your site in the author bio – and on top of that – you are authorizing anyone to use that content on their own sites, as long as they also include your bio (with links intact). This not only spreads the word to the article directories themselves, but potentially to many other individual sites who reuse the article as well.

2. Some article directories have a fair amount of influence in the search rankings, so you can potentially get fairly easy rankings for the articles. True, the ranking is a secondary effect, since the directory is ranking instead of your site, but the visitor still gets a chance to find your site, when they might not otherwise.

So to be able to use a tool that makes the task easier of submitting your site to directories – and in addition – makes it easier to submit articles to article directories – well, that’s just a bonus that is really valuable. To top it off, the articles submitted can be spun right within SubmitEaze to ensure that variations of the article are submitted, rather than the exact same content going out to each directory. Woot! I’ve used spinner software before, so it’s nice to not have to dig out a completely different tool to do something that the tool I’m in can do for me.

Other Features

Now, I don’t use every feature available to me. For instance, the tool can automatically set up and manage a reciprocal links directory to make adding recip links easy. But I haven’t traded reciprocal links in years, and I don’t plan to do so now, so I just skip any directories that require a reciprocal link. If asked to recommend doing recips or not, I usually say recommend against it, assuming the person is talking about this kind of generic reciprocal link. It’s just not useful to anyone, so it’s a waste of time and space on your site. But if you disagree with me (and that’s allowed [big grin]), then you’ll probably love the feature that lets you deal with it very easily.

A quick roundup of its major features:

• Submit to both website directories and article directories.
• Turbo Submission mode automates the process so you can submit to directories in super-fast time.
• Over 4,000 website directories and 1,000 article directories currently in the list that can all be sorted by Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, or number of incoming backlinks to the directory.
• Full range of general directories to choose from: Free, Reciprocal Link Required, and Payment Required.
• Ability to select just niche directory listings (i.e. directories which only list websites of one particular topic).
• Lets you set up rotating link title text and description text for each project. This is important for ensuring variation and targetting of different phrases.
• Link page maintenance so you can quickly create and upload reciprocal links to your website (if you disagree with me as mentioned above).
• Tag, categorize, and search your directories exactly how you want, and add your own notes to each.
• Free software and directory updates forever.
• Add your own custom directories to the list.
• Complete control over the auto-fill feature within SubmitEaze – you can even add your own custom fields. This can be hugely useful in some situations.
• Import / export between different computers.
• Create detailed submission reports.
• You can add a rating to each directoy so you can keep track of your favorites.
• And lots more

So, that’s my favorite tool for dealing with directory submissions. What’s yours?

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: article marketing, directory submissions, spinner software, Web directories
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eBusiness Coaching

Ok, that resource would be me, and I’m neither free, nor all that cheap. But you probably already knew that. Still, as a reminder, you can get more information about my coaching at my other site – eBuzzCoach.com. Now let’s move on to the easy/free/cheap stuff.

Business Planning

SCORE templates for business plans, cash flow and sales forecasts

Domain Names

Find the perfect domain name and register it at GoDaddy.

Hosting

HostGator is the only hosting company that I recommend these days. I’ve been superbly happy with them for quite a while now.

Blog / CMS Site Creation Tools

Blog – WordPress – no better choice. (The self-hosted version – not wordpress.com).

CMS – Snippet Master – easiest ultra-light content management system.

Themes

Open Source Web Design (OSWD) for free web design templates.

WordPress free themes

iThemes WordPress premium themes

WooThemes Premium Themes

Headway Premium Theme

Logo Design

LogoYes is a DIY logo design service.

Or use Logo Nerds to get a custom logo designed.

Royalty Free Images

e-junkie is the easiest shopping cart to integrate into your site that I’ve ever tried.

Marketing (Flyers, Postcards, Business Cards)

Next Day Flyers or Vista Print to design your own business cards, postcards and flyers. Vista Print even has free business cards, which will do in a pinch.

If you can’t wait for processing times, or you just want to print some business cards now, then your best bet is to use a business card program, so you can print them out right after you design them.

IAB Standard Banner Ad Sizes – Bookmark this because you’ll need to find this again sometime in the future.

Link building resources

Social networking strategies

Word of mouth marketing

Time Tracking

Freelancers, especially, need to keep track of how much time they spend on each project, so they can bill accordingly. toggl is a great little free time tracking tool that you can use either online or on your desktop. Perfect.

Finances: Accounting / Billing / Invoicing / Taxes

Invoices Made Easy designed for small service-oriented businesses like freelancers.

Small Business Accounting software for basic accounting without all the extra stuff you never use.

TurboTax because everyone has to do taxes, so it might as well be easy.

Legal: Contracts, Forms, Business Letters

Get almost any sample contract, form, or business letter from docstoc or Forms Guru.

Time Management / Scheduling

ToodleDo is your virtual to-do assistant (non-human) to help you remember everything.

Google calendar

Collaborating / Meeting / Networking / Office Apps

Zoho has everything you need to collaborate and share with others including a word processor, spreadsheet, note taker, wiki, organizer/planner, email, web conferencing, database app, and more.

Backup / File Storage

Mozy or Carbonite both do a great job of easily backing up your files. Backup is so important. Don’t put it off!

Email

Gmail is the only email service I recommend. It’s free. It has fabulous spam control, and you can always search for old emails (because you never need to throw them away).

Aweber is the best subscription email, newsletter, and opt-in autoresponder service out there.

Bartering

U-Exchange lets you trade services and goods with others for free. This is a great way to market your services too.

Learning

Adwords Learning Center is the place to start before you use Google Adwords. Make sure you get the most out of those text ads by understanding the process first.

Here’s another guide to pay per click to help you get a handle on it.

W3Schools is the best place to start learning some technical skills, such as HTML, CSS, and PHP.

(Note: If this post looks familiar, it’s because I’ve written it – or one very much like it – before. However, I’ve decided to move that old post from another blog over to this one, and I’ve edited it along the way.)

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© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: e - business, Freelancer, resources
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I routinely make backups of both my web sites (and their associated databases) and my home computer files. By “routinely”, I mean every single day. I not only have one backup of each important file, however; I have three!

I keep one complete backup on an external hard drive that simply plugs into any computer via a USB cable. Since it’s portable, I can take it and run with it anytime I need to.

I keep one complete backup “in the cloud” by backing up everything to an off-site, web-based system.

And I keep one non-complete backup on a tiny USB flash drive. I can’t fit everything on that little flash drive, so I put just my very, very, very most important documents there. Since it’s only about the size of my thumb (which I assume is where the nickname of “thumb drive” came from), I can easily transport it at any time.

So, why be so diligent with backups? Let’s consider just the following scenario.

If your home were destroyed by lighting, or fire, or other natural disaster tomorrow, would you be able to put your life back together? In a week? In a month? Never?

Just in the U. S. alone more than 50,000 homes are completely wiped out each year leaving families without their precious photos, insurance documents, passports, wills, legal papers, tax records, birth certificates and other essential files.

These documents and files are the essential paperwork you need to put your life back together quickly to recover from an unforeseen disaster. Where are you storing your own vital documents? Are they accessible to you anywhere you happen to be?

What happens if your computer is destroyed? While I always have my portable backup options available to me, they could be destroyed as well. Then what? Well, that’s where the “in the clouds” online backup service comes in handy. There are several choices, and I’ve covered some of them in the past. There’s one that’s fairly new to me, however, and I wanted to mention it here today, mainly because it has features I’ve never seen before.

My-personal-files.com is an online safe deposit box service.* This service allows you to access your stored files anywhere in the world you happen to be, from any computer or mobile device with an internet connection. That’s not so different than many of its competitors, but one thing does set it apart from the others. It has options that enable you to backup important documents that you don’t have digitized, and can’t easily convert to digital format.

I lived through Hurricane Katrina, so I’ll use a hurricane as a good example of how this might be useful. Let’s say you were one of the unfortunate hurricane victims. Your home is gone. You are forbidden from going anywhere near your neighborhood, let alone your city. The photos of your house and household possessions (that the insurance company will need to process your claim quickly) are gone. Your children’s baby photos are gone. Your passports are gone as are copies of your insurance policies. If all those files backed up to an online account, you would be able to print out copies of them from wherever you were. Imagine being able to show your insurance agent a copy of your homeowner’s policy and pictures of your home and its contents within minutes – even without access to your own computer. Think about how secure and confident you would feel when the world around you is in chaos.

When was the last time you felt that secure? Knowing that you could recover all your vital documents in a matter of minutes gives you peace of mind and control. You feel confident that you can recover from disasters and thefts easily and quickly. That kind of power should be in everyone’s digital arsenal. But not everyone who lives through a hurricane or other natural disaster has their important documents in a digital format. Not everyone even has a computer or online access!

As an example, when Katrina was on its way to our area, we did our best to pack up my elderly in-laws, and send them to safety. There was no time, however, to find and pack up their important documents, and they didn’t have a computer. So, how could we have gotten those documents backed up to an online service? That’s where my-personal-files.com differs. They have special plans that enable you to fax or mail document copies to them. Once received, they will digitize the documents, and send the digital copy back to you via email. Once you confirm that you’ve received it, they will destroy your papers in their secure document destruction facility. Obviously, you’ll need access to a computer to receive the email, and to access the files online. In our case, we could have had our in-laws prepare well in advance of any pending disasters, and we could have asked them to get their documents digitized and emailed to us. We could have then backed them up safely for them.

They weren’t as prepared then, but they can be now. It’s nice to know there are options out there for backing up important documents, even when those documents aren’t yet in digital format.

So please…backup. Backup often. Backup regularly. Backup everything that’s important to you. Don’t let anything get in the way, not even the fact that some things aren’t already digitized. There are ways to backup everything these days. My-personal-files.com is one way to ensure a little peace of mind, no matter what happens.

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© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Backup, Computer storage, Data security, insurance documents, online safe deposit box service, Remote backup service, usb flash drive
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I actually started looking at this one a couple of weeks ago, but I had to make an emergency out of town trip last week, so I’m only just now getting around to telling you about it. Sorry about that. So, what is this product?

This is Lance Jepsen’s ebook, Internet Marketing: Profits That Lie Hidden In Your Website – How To Triple Your Web Sales In 25 Days, plus several bonuses that are pretty nice addons (we’ll get to those in a bit).* Why do I like this particular ebook out of all the ones I’ve read and rejected? Lance includes specific examples that really help to explain each day’s lesson. This book really brings together a lot of general marketing principles and then shows how to apply them to your web site to increase your profits. Most of us haven’t had formal marketing training, nor have we been exposed to the psychological and emotional reasons for people’s purchasing decisions. Much of that training has been condensed nicely in this 180 page ebook, so that by the time you get to day 25 of this plan, you have a much better idea of how to wring the most juice (profits) from your existing web site.

Unlike many ebooks, this one isn’t just a bunch of hype that leads you to wanting more (and buying more). It gives down and dirty information and when you’re done reading it, you’ve had a wealth of education, and I’ll bet quite a few mind-blowing A-HA moments. (I know I had a few of them!)

Ok, so, I really like the ebook. But I also liked the bonuses, especially the learning exercises. There’s no better way to really learn something, than to be tested on it! And self-tests that don’t have someone grading you are even better. That’s when it’s all about learning – without the stress! I also liked the landing page templates, and well, I’ll let you take a look at the rest on your own. I don’t want to overhype anything either. This is just a straightforward review. Bottom line: It’s a good ebook with information that will really help you learn some online marketing techniques that can wring more money out of your sites – along with some nice bonuses to go along with it. Check it out and see what you think. Internet Marketing: Profits That Lie Hidden In Your Website – How To Triple Your Web Sales In 25 Days

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© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: general marketing principles, Internet Marketing, Lance Jepsen, online marketing techniques, them to your web site, Web Sales, Web Sales In
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

TimeGadget
Motismo
SlimTimer
Toggl
Tick
Cashboard

If you use one of these, or another one that you particularly like, let us all know about it in the comments, please. Thanks!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, Web Applications
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I use Zuula 100% of the time as my web search engine, but I also love it for image search as well. And now that they’ve added even more image engines to the list, it’s great! Want me to prove to you that you shouldn’t be relying on just one image search engine? Ok!

The first thing you’ll notice about Zuula’s image search is that there are 10 engines all nicely laid out in tabs, so you can quickly click from one to another. Here’s a reduced screenshot of the 10 tabs (hard to read, I know, but it had to be reduced to fit).

The tabs listed are Google, Yahoo, MSN, Pixsy, Flickr, Stockxchng, Photobucket, Picasa, SmugMug, and Exalead. (I’ve arranged the tabs in the order I preferred – you can rearrange your tabs in any order you want).

Now let’s say you’d only searched on Google for the term “daylilies”. This is what you’d see.

Not very exciting, and very likely, not what you were looking for. Now scan down the screenshots of what each of the other search engines found for the term “daylilies”. Look at what you would have missed out on seeing if you hadn’t used Zuula to search!

And THAT’S why you shouldn’t limit your searching to just one search engine.

*just a little search tip o’ the day from me to you

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, image search, image search engine, little search tip, search engine, search engines, web search engine, Yahoo
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

Every day this week, I’ll be posting based upon a random Flickr image that inspires me. Here’s one now.

Is that a cute pic, or what? It reminds me very much of my 2 year old granddaughter. She’s at that stage of blooming independence in which she wants to do things for herself without any help from us old fogies. If I attempt to help her put on her shoes, for example, she’ll say “I got dis”. Sometimes, she does “have it” under control, and other times she still needs my help. But her confidence in her growing abilities is fun to watch.

I, on the other hand, am regressing as I age. Rather than growing in independence, I’m becoming more dependent. I now have to depend upon reading glasses to read things. I now have to hold on to things (chair arms, tables, whatever) to go from a sitting to a standing position or vice-versa, more and more frequently. And the worst of it all is that I am losing my memory quite significantly. This is the ultimate in dependence. I can no longer depend upon my own mind to remember things the way I used to do. When it comes to memory, I can no longer confidently say, “I got dis”.

So, what’s an aging brain to do? Call in the backups, that’s what! I’ve recently been introduced to Sandy, and she is now my new assistant / brain / life-changing virtual assistant. Sandy is in fact, a virtual assistant service from iwantsandy.com. From now on, Sandy reassures me that she’s “got dis”, and she really does have my back when it comes to remembering what I simply cannot.

There are gazillions of to-do sites, calendaring sites, etc. out there, but Sandy works for me because she requires almost no exertion from me. I’m a busy gal, and the fact that I’m often multi-tasking is one of the reasons I can’t remember everything. The last thing I need is to take too much time or too much effort to add yet another thing to my to-do list, in the form of creating a to-do list! I’ve tried desktop calendars, online calendars, PIMs, all sorts of widgets and gadgets, but none have transformed my life’s memory problem like Sandy has.

Now if you haven’t heard of Sandy, don’t come to it filled with assumptions that it is another calendar/todo service. That was my assumption, so I didn’t truly investigate it right away. Once I did, I realized what a mistake I’d made in passing it by earlier.

Let me give you some examples of how Sandy helps me. Feel free to go get the official examples from Sandy’s site, but here’s my own personal take on it.

I always have email open and at the ready for my use. So, using email to control my virtual assistant would be a no-brainer for me. I wouldn’t have to open/use/connect with any additional application. I can tell Sandy to remind me of something just by sending her an email. And luckily for me, I don’t have to waste a lot of time or words to do so. Want an example? Ok, here’s one.

To: Sandy (your own private sandy email address)
Subject: Remind me to write post about Sandy next Tuesday at 7pm

That’s it.

Sandy will understand things like “next Tuesday”, “7pm”, “remind”, “remember”, “today”, “tomorrow”, “in 2 days”, “in a month”, “in 15 minutes”, “1-4pm”, and lots more. I can use the language I would normally use, just as though I were speaking to a real live human being, and virtual Sandy understands what I’m saying, stores the information, and then reminds me about it when I need to know.

Want another example? My email inbox has been killing me for years. No matter how well I try to organize it, I still end up with an ever-growing list of emails in my inbox. If I move them out of the inbox, then I tend to forget about them and never follow up. If I let them slide down too far at the bottom of the growing list of inbox items, again, I forget about them. No more. Now I just forward them on to Sandy, asking her to remind me of them near the time I actually have to deal with them. For instance, an affiliate program emails me and tells me I need to change all my affiliate links because they changed something on their end. That’s a pain in the rear for me to have to do, so it’s something I probably need to put off until I have the extra time to deal with it. But I do have to make sure it gets done by whatever date the affiliate network has specified, which is usually a week or two away. So I just forward it to Sandy, asking her to remind me a couple of days in advance of the due date, and I can safely move that email out of my inbox, without fear of forgetting about it. My inbox is now clean and pristine!

There are a million other reasons I love Sandy, such as the fact that she can remind me via email, Twitter, SMS on my phone, integrate with existing calendars, etc. You should definitely go read up on everything she can do, because there’s just not enough time in my day to tell you everything. But I do suggest you at least give Sandy a real look if you need this kind of service, without making assumptions based upon past calendaring tools you may have tried. Sandy really is different and she just might take away some of stress and productivity problems.

She may or may not be right for you, but for me, I can almost hear her say “Don’t worry about remembering that Donna. I got dis“.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: affiliate network, assistant, chair, forward, pain, SMS, Twitter, virtual assistant
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

Let’s face it, crafting a good blog post or site article takes time. If I can find ways to cut corners, without sacrificing quality, I’ve just saved money. And as far as I’m concerned, saving money is the same thing as making money.

So, here’s one way to quickly, easily, and legally find and use Flickr images in your blog posts or site articles.

First, a quick lesson in copyright issues. Flickr has tons of photos with Creative Commons licensing, which allows you to use them, without cost, but with restrictions. There are various forms of Creative Commons licenses. Generally, I like to stick with the least restrictive, so that I never have to really worry about misunderstanding the license restrictions. The least restrictive license is the Attribution (BY:) license, which means that you can copy, distribute, display, and perform the copyrighted work, as well as any derivative works based upon it, but you must give credit (attribution). In other words, you can pretty much do anything you want with it, including change it, but you must give credit back to the original license holder. In the case of using Flickr photos in blogs, for example, you would generally link back to the Flickr photographer or page it was originally listed on. (Note that the license actually says that you must attribute in whichever way the author specifies, however, in most cases on Flickr, the author doesn’t specify anything. In that case, simply linking back is considered acceptable).

To search for only those photos with the Attribution (BY:) license, just go to the Flickr advanced search page. Type the phrase you want to search for, and then at the bottom of the page, check the following:

__ Only search within Creative Commons-licensed photos
__ Find content to use commercially
__ Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon

This will ensure that you choose only a photo with the least restrictive Creative Commons restrictions.

Ok, now you’ve found a great photo to use. The problem is that it can all become annoying and time-consuming to download the photo, upload it to your site, and then create the attribution links, so I went on a search for a way to make it easier. Lucky for me, you can find almost anything on the Internet, and I’ve found a nice way to handle this.

To use this quick shortcut, you’ll need to first be using Firefox, as this trick won’t work with IE. In addition, you’ll need to download and install Greasemonkey, and then install a particular Greasemonkey script, called Flickr Photo Link. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function. More Greasemonkey scripts can be found here.

So what does this Flickr Photo Link script do? If you’re logged in to Flickr, it generates a small attributed photo link in the comment box on every Flickr photo page you visit. To post the photo in a blog post or elsewhere, simply copy the generated HTML from the comment box and paste it anywhere you like. Let’s look at an example. I’ve installed the script and searched Flickr for a photo. I found one I liked, and took a screenshot of what the page now looks like since I installed the script. (See below).

See the code that I circled in red and pointed to? Without this script, that code would not be there. Normal Flickr image pages just show an empty Comments box, but this script automatically adds the code shown here. All I have to do now, to be able to use the photo in this blog post, AND give credit to the copyright holder, is to cut and paste that code here. I’m going to do that now, and the result will be below.

from Polka Dots Fill The Sky

See that photo and credit link above? All I did to produce that was copy/paste the code I was provided by the script I installed. That was so easy. Now anytime I find a Flickr photo that I want to use, legally and easily, all I have to do is copy/paste the code I’m given on the photo’s page. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

As you can see, it automatically chooses the Small version of any photo, so if you want a different size, you’ll need to go with the old fashioned route of downloading and uploading. But you can still make use of the attribution code (the part that starts with “from” in the code above).

So that’s my tip of the day for all of you who want to use Flickr Creative Commons photos, legally and easily. Have fun!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Author, Creative Commons, Flickr, Flickr photographer, Greasemonkey, HTML, images, photos, scripts
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