From time to time I need images for my sites or for my clients’ designs. I like using StockExchgange most of the time (a free photos site). Still, sometimes I need a better looking image and I come to stockexpert.com for that image. The good thing is that the images would cost 1 USD, a small price when we think about the hundreds of dollars we can get for a design.

I have been using the site for 1 year I think and was able to get some pretty decent images for 1 USD. All with a nice resolution (just good for web): 800×600 pixels.

Some weeks ago I downloaded one again for a new design and was shocked to see it’s a smaller one. Yes, it’s just 400×300 pixels (half of the ones I was able to get all this time for the same price). I thought I did something wrong, but then, after another download I noticed the increased price.

So, the same image I’d get for 1 USD now comes for 2 USD. 1 dollar for a small image, maybe it’s a tad too much. Or maybe we just have to settle for this till we find something better.

Do you have any ideas? Is there a better service?

I know you got sick and tired of hearing the same thing: “content is king”, but let me tell you ONCE again, you have NO idea how true this is. A good site is important for us because of the GOOD UNIQUE content, because it’s useful and we need all those informational articles in order to be able to understand a topic and gain as much knowledge as possible.

A good content is now one of the most sought for commodities on the web. People pay good money for unique articles, for re-writing (when they can’t hire professionals or are just too cheap to pay for something good, but they still want to fool the search engines into thinking the content is original), translations and many other options.

Most of the bloggers and article writers who create unique articles are already in a huge advantage: they create something original that draws people in and can also bring in revenue from advertising or any other money making plans. And still, I am shocked to see how many such good bloggers are too lax when it comes to protecting their own content.

Even if a unique article is just 5 minutes of work to you, its value is HUGE. Because it’s UNIQUE.

I started creating articles 6 years ago with a Karate site for the Romanian people who were into martial arts. In just weeks I saw my work being copied by others. I got mad and demanded for the duplicated plagiarism to be deleted. It was. Sure, I got some response like “yeah, you’re so mean, why can’t I use the article too?”, but I knew I was right. I am mean indeed, but that unique article that’s too good to be stolen, is also good to bring ME traffic and revenue in time and establish me and my site as an authority.

In some months I started a webmaster project (forums with unique articles) and got even more interested in creating content and also protecting it as much as I could. There are tens of articles I wrote and tried to make them interesting and useful. Sure, I am not a professional writer, but this didn’t stop my visitors from learning something from me and be able to improve their web design skills.

From time to time I still have people who steal content from me or try to scrape my blog articles. My content, even if copied partially, can bring some traffic to them and revenue. They do try to steal our content to make their sites content rich and earn money from our work. I still have to see such content thieves who have NO ads at all on their site (since most try to fool us into thinking they are just good samaritans and wanted their visitors to get more knowledge blah-blah-blah). Sure, with Adsense all over the site and tons of affiliate links. All with my own articles. Cute!

So, maybe it’s time for most of us, (good or bad) content writers, to realize the IMPORTANCE of our content. For our site that would have more visitors, a good image and why not a good revenue and for ourselves too since all our articles do have VALUE. In this case the value is for our site only. We don’t have to pay tens of dollars for an original article, we have it created in few minutes by our talented minds. The others, who can’t create articles are invited to PAY for a unique article and we’d surely provide them with the best article we can create.

But our work is ours and will be used ONLY in our projects. As Google gets more drastic with duplicate content and as the content market grows each day, a good unique article is like a jewel that needs to be protected. Even if some think I am mean, I don’t allow re-publishing. UNDER NO CONDITIONS. I don’t care what site you use, I don’t care how much of my article you are using. You can’t do this.

What can a visitor do if he/she really likes one of my articles? The same I do: I just link to it and write a nice short personal presentation recommending it to my visitors. I do promote that good article and still don’t steal the content another author created.

Maybe it’s a good idea to be “mean” and try protect that king. We don’t want other sites (stealing our content) to get better traffic than we do, we don’t want others to earn money from our work. If it takes you and me 5-10 minutes for an article, this doesn’t mean it’s worthless. It means we might type fast and just have the ideas flow. The fact we don’t spend 5 hours into making an article, doesn’t mean the article has no value. And this value, even if sometimes we fail to understand this, is big enough to attract others to use it for their own profit.

What do you think about this? How important is your own content to you?

I like to see the “daily blog tips” from time to time, so this morning I was greeted with an article I thought about for quite some time too: Twitter Less, Blog More!

Even if in this case the author has Twitter in mind, I think we can go further and expand this to almost all social networks that exist at this moment. And let me tell you, they are in quite a number.

I read a lot about tips of submitting your content to tens of social media sites, about how to get into the top spots in digg, mybloglog, blogrush, entrecard, sphin, technorati etc. How to add as many friends as possible, how to click on cards, enter “what I am doing now” messages, see how many people follow you, how to follow others, how to vote, click and blink.

Even if all these DO help us to get our content and blogs out there so that other bloggers can see them, we WASTE a lot of time by doing this. In my first days of Entrecard I wasted 3-4 hours a day dropping cards on others, reading and commenting, since I was trying to Get something more from that crappy Entrecard traffic

In all social networking sites in order to have success one needs to spend time and effort. It takes work to get those top results in network that are saturated with people who DO THE SAME as you do. They are all there, adding friends frantically, voting, exchanging hellos and trying to get their own content as high as possible.

Each minute you spend OUTSIDE of your blog, you spend it NOT working on your blog. It’s also true that these networks do bring in traffic and exposure, but it’s also important to balance this promotional effort with the content creation. It would be sad to spend hours a day promoting a content that’s getting less and less valuable, since you can’t spend too much time writing from all the efforts you are making to get the word out.

Maybe it’s a good time to start spending more time reading useful content and preparing our articles, then run to FEW sites that would help us promote, send a link and spend few minutes and then get back to our blog. Maybe this would slow down some of that big less quality traffic many of these sites bring in and it would attract some visitors who would come back to read that good content we spend a lot of time creating. GOOD content will always attract, that’s the secret.

Would you like to drive this car? What of you had access to it from the moment you take driving lessons? Would you like to learn how to drive on such a car?

I have a client who is a driving instructor in my city and he taught me how to drive too. He would be our example of the best way to drive clients to your door as a business. He’s done it and maybe we can learn from his experience too, about how to offer our clients something that would make them COME to us and WANT to work with us.

He is a “crazy” guy, he just bought a Peugeot 307 Coupe (135 HP) and he’s using it as a “school car” for the clients who want to learn how to drive a car. And let me tell you: THEY ALL WANT TO DRIVE THIS BABY.

He started with a small car that has no value (as compared to this one). Then he got better cars and he realized that clients are picky and want more and more for their money. 6 months ago, when I took driving lessons he used a Volkswagen Passat car (a great one too) and the reason I chose him (from all the instructors he had there on all kinds of cars) was the fact I’d be able to drive such a nice car.

Sure, in the end I had to learn how to use a car in the city, but I got something more: the chance to “ride” an over 100 horse-power engine on an “almost luxurious car”. It was a blast: a good car is a pleasure to drive.

After some months that “maniac” took his business to an even greater level: got a “jewel” of a car, a coupe that looks amazing and attracts people like a magnet. I drove that “baby” and let me tell you I was in huge ecstasy. Now, he’s not teaching people how to drive (as tens of other similar firms do in my city only), he’s the ONLY one to let his students drive a convertible. Even if the car will have to suffer (it wasn’t new, it cost 13 thousand Euro, just like my new Opel Corsa, 90HP), he’ll be able to make lots of money to cover the car’s “use” and also bring way more clients to his school and secure a good profit.

What did he teach me and all of us now, since you know the story too? That in this business world thinking outside the box and offering something better and different can be the secret to success. Such a “perk” drives people to your door. It brings you recognision (you’re the “crazy” one to offer this and that) and clients who’d kill to work with you.

The only thing is to be able to understand what might make your business special and “push it”.

I own several webmaster related forums (both in English and Romanian) and maybe because I am the admin and have the highest post count people consider me to be something like a “yoda” and direct the questions to me. Of course there are other members who are as good as I am in this and some are way better, but I seem to attract the questions like a huge eye-glasses wearing magnet.

One of the most important questions in many members minds is “How can I learn web design?”.

We have a lot of possible ways to learn this, there are several well known sites with articles and tutorials, there are online books and even those books we don’t read as often as before, the “real” ones with paper pages and that smell of “print” on them. There are many webmaster forums all dealing with the aspects of running a site (that would include web design too), chat rooms and blogs.

And still .. nothing beats the good ole’ practice you can do on your own.

I never would imagine learning web design and knowing what I know now just from reading and discussing. And I am so glad I didn’t waste time with a lot of planning and I just started doing something.

6 years ago I started Karate and wanted to teach the others some of the things I was also learning step by step. This meant working on a Front Page template (back then), then work it on dreamweaver, passing through the “heavy java scripts” time and the flash intros trend, animated gifs and all the jazz. And then I started learning more HTML, some CSS and working with the layers that made it possible to be able to come up with some decent designs in Photoshop.

I was able to modify that site and also learn step by step all about site design, forum management, traffic, SEO, things you can just learn in theory from the books, but you need to experiment.

Reading articles and tutorials is a great thing since you can be informed and solve all kinds of issues, the forums have been one of the best place for me to exchange ideas and ask for help, but nothing beats your own experience and your own work.

Even now, after 6 years, I can’t tell anyone “you learn web design starting from here, and then go there and there”. Web design is something hard to “define”, it’s not a map or a road, where you just see your destination and checkpoints. Web design means a lot of things and can be mastered in different ways by all people. Some people work well with following a tutorial step by step, not changing a pixel, not moving a colour. Others can’t keep themselves from experimenting and always end up with something new. There is no right or wrong in learning web design, there is no “bad way” to achieve beautiful results.

The only thing I was able to advise all my members and soon-to-be-awesome-web-designers was to “start a site” and just do it. Find a topic they love and think about a project. Try to work on that design, see how the layers look bad and try to understand what makes a design beautiful. Slice it and use tables or (even better) divs and see how horrible they look in IE as compared to FF (Internet Explorer and Firefox, for my readers who are not as familiar as I am with these “shortcuts”). Search on Google for tips of browser compatibility and then head to the SEO side. Learn how to bring in traffic, low quality traffic through all kinds of schemes and then that good quality traffic.

I can’t imagine learning web design from the books, I can’t imagine driving my car just from discussing this. Just as I have to learn how drive safely, avoid other cars, keep the car on the road and even park without destroying my wheels, I also have to open Photoshop and work on the layouts, the program I use for coding the layouts and scour the internet for new ideas of CSS effects.

If you wan to have a shot at learning web design, then you’ll just have to start … web designing

In a previous article we were able to track down some tips for keeping our small web business expenses to the minimum while being able to maximize the profit. For a web related firm there are some expenses that are not required from day one and this helps us build some revenue while being able to provide more quality services and secure some profit.

For many starting entrepreneurs the idea of losing their salary is scary. Even if the wage is not that big and there are other issues too (otherwise, why think about starting on your own?), it’s still money coming into their accounts every 4 weeks (or 2 weeks, depending on the way the wages are being paid).

This money is still good money and can be used in order to sustain the new web business at least in the first months. There are still some problems we need to think about and this article will address them one by one.

1. Your new web business shouldn’t be a direct competitor to your official job.

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How could I forget? Yesterday my small personal web design firm, Dojo Design got older. 1 year old. On April 14, 2007, I got all the paperwork done (after having some issues with the accountant who had to solve all the legal work and failed miserably, getting me into a dead end and also having to pay more for something she did wrong). Anyway .. with all the fuss and starting it on the left foot, it was official 1 year ago.

What have I learnt after 1 year? A lot:

• bad clients happen, just as good clients happen. It’s all about knowing how to deal with this and try to cover yourself the best you can
• they sometimes delay payments, so always have some money saved. You can never know when it comes in handy
• the fact you are no longer a freelancer, but a firm owner has also got its perks. They tend to respect you more when you are “official”
• prices rise (or at least should) once you get a higher load. Even if some clients moan because of your prices (some would like you to work for free), getting better paid means higher revenue and also more profit. As long as you steadily increase prices and not make huge changes in the pricing list, you’ll always get better paying clients and leave behind the cheap ones
• most of the time the cheap clients are also the most demanding. Always be prepared to tell them what your services for them are and know how to ask for more when they start wanting supplementary features they didn’t pay for (and they always do this)
• you have to know how to sell your time and expertise. Don’t let anyone underprice your work, since they’ll surely try
• a good schedule is mandatory and so useful. Otherwise you’ll work disorganized and it’s not a good thing for the long run
• the happiness your own firm brings is just remarkable. You work for yourself and earn quite nicely. No boss to mess with you, no coleagues to bring you down. It’s hard, it’s exhausting (especially when you are still the only one to run the business), but God it’s amazing

It’s crazy, I know .. we’re all writing in blogs, creating many many topics and hoping we can live a luxurious life from this. Or at least some expect this. But why are there SO FEW blogs that are worth reading? It’s weird: there are millions and still a huge part of them are sub-quality, spammy, idiotic posts blogs. As a blog writer myself and in the end visitor to so many blogs I kinda found out what makes ME leave a blog in 2 seconds. Let’s see what are the things that make your blog .. sink:

1. Hosted at blogspot or another free host.

Call me snobbish, call me anything you want, but I totally dislike anything that’s not on his own domain. Is a .com that expensive you weren’t able to get one? Did you really have to smoke that pack of cigarettes or drink that beer? Think about your health, eat less junk and drink less, not to mention quit smoking for 1 day and put those 9 USD for a domain. Once you start having visitors and make it successful you’ll thank me.

2. Default theme

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I have mentioned before that a blog is not a junkyard and I prepared there a list of the things that need to be taken care of so that a blog starts looking better. And since I mentioned the sidebar there too, let’s try and see now which of the items we have on a sidebar kinda waste space.

1. Google PR and Alexa rank buttons.

I know they are cute, but honestly, most of the people who want to know this have some nice plugins installed on their browser (I have both show in the status bar in Firefox for any site I want to see).

There is also a nice button from dnscoop.com (those who don’t know this: it’s a site that calculates the price for a site .. well, it’s not perfect, but it’s nice seeing the value. It takes into account the domain’s age, PR, Alexa rank etc.) Even if it’s a cool button, I wouldn’t use it on my professional blog since it’s tacky.

2. Feedjit and all other useless junk

I have seen these too. Some widgets that show where people are coming from, what they ate and how much they weigh. I know they seem cool, but I am interested in your CONTENT, not know that all your latest traffic comes from Entrecard or StumbleUpon

3. All kinds of widgets from programs that might help you advertise

I still have the MyBlogLog widget, but to be honest I don’t quite see its use anymore. Still, if you use such widgets try to have their color blend with the others. In the end we want the content to be seen first, not too fancy widgets.

4. Kill some of the ads.

Right now we have few banners: Entrecash (my latest project), linkworth and text link ads since they pay me now 400 USD/month (increasing) and HostGator since we’re on their servers and now I am pretty pleased with them.

The Entrecard widget and that should be it. I understand you try all kinds of possible revenue streams, just don’t try them all at once. It screams “desperate” and you don’t have too many chances to get a good revenue when you don’t know your true focus.

Advertising is very good, but has to be managed with care.

Each time you feel the need to put something else on the sidebar try to think if you really need this for the blog. Is there such an important information for your readers? Is this important as ad revenue is concerned? Try to be “cheap” with the space on your sidebar, most professional blogs do this.

Wtricks.com is an old site of mine. We have a forum for webmasters to discuss about anything web related but so far the index page (the root of the domain) wasn’t being used to its full potential. It’s now a PR4 page, so I though something needs to be done.

So, now we have a digg like script installed and we’ll be able to promote our articles. There is a twist though: ONLY WEB RELATED ARTICLES.

To be honest, I am sick of trying to get to web articles while digging through menopause related information, eating habits or fleas for dogs. This is why in our project we’ll accept only web related information. It would be easier for us all to find our information there.

Thank you for helping us make it a hit