Easily Add Free Photos to your Blog Posts

The PhotoDropper plugin lest’s you easily and quickly add free photos to your WordPress Blog posts with 1-click! Once you enter a keyword for a photo “Photo Dropper Browse Photos” menu it will show you all the available photos matching that keyword, then all you have to do is select the size you want and the image will appear in your post along with links to the original site and license.

There is an option to use only commercially available photos if your site is a business.

The amount of Creative Commons images uploaded to Flickr daily is astonishing so this tool will become more valuable by the hour.

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Get More Traffic to Your Blog

Starting a website is just the first step and probably the easiest. Now you need visitors, this is the hard part.

Here’s a very good article covering some of the best ways to get traffic to your site. There are no quick ways to get and keep visitors but by following as many of the tips in this article you will be off to a good start.

A chance popular posting to a social networking site could bring hundreds of visitors in a few days, but to build up a good stream of regulars can easily take a year or more so be sure to love what you blog about.
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WordPress Tricks

Want to show thumbnails of each post? Show category images? Make your blog mobile friendly? Automatically post Del.icio.us daily link to Wordpress? Then this article is for you. 40 WordPress tricks and hacks.
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Manage Blog Ads with ScribeFire

ScribeFire Quick Ads allows you to manage and publish ads to your site easily. The ads (banner images and/or text ads) are served up from many of the largest networks out there, Google Adsense, Kontera, Advertising.com, etc. Payouts are monthly once a minimum of just $5 has been reached.

From the site:

• Point and click ads directly into your blog without adding a single line of code to your site
• The first service to enable publishers to serve both optimized banners and in-text ads on their sites via a single platform
• QuickAds greatly simplifies ad inventory management with a powerful optimization decision engine, which matches each impression with the highest revenue producing ad
• Ads are selected from our ad inventory pool, which is fueled by our experienced sales team and relationships with over 100 ad networks
• QuickAd’s advanced in-text advertising solution guarantees site publishers the highest degree of relevancy between content, keywords, and ads

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50 Great WordPress Themes

50 fantastic and free WordPress themes over at SixRevisions.com
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Wordpress 2.7 - Chock full of changes

Tonight at 8pm EST or tomorrow at 1am if you’re on GMT, version 2.7 of Wordpress will be released and it’s full of new features, mostly in the admin panel (which is really where it counts)

Some include:

Brand new admin layout with collapsible left side menu and navigation features like drag and drop module reorganizing and convenient shortcuts to commonly used elements

Install plugins from main admin area

Batch edit feature allows you to edit multiple posts at the same time. Change author, add/remove categories and tags

Default Media settings lets you specify things like default image size or crop size

Future Upgrades in Admin

One really useful feature is that Wordpress will now allow you to upgrade to future versions from within the admin panel, no more downloading updates and then uploading via FTP etc. Read about more of the features at the link below

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Free websites Blogs and more

Weebly’s super simple drag and drop interface allows you to create and host your own free hosted site or blog.

From the site:

• Create a free website & blog
• Switch designs on the fly
• Drag and drop interface
• Buy a new domain instantly, or
• Host your existing domain for free

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Website Analytics and Beyond

If you are a fan of Google Analytics you will flip over nuconomy. While Google Analytics gives you all types of drillable data about who came from where, what they clicked on, and how long they stayed, nuconomy gives you that and more (and for free…for now)

In the image above you will see a graph of how many viewers watched a particular online video, and for how long. You can tell if people dropped off at a particular moment in the video, how many people watched it all the way through, how many fast forwarded and the list goes on.

And that’s just one example. You can get data about how Flash, Java and other scripted elements are viewed as well as all the usual data…what country visitors came from, what pages they viewed, where they entered and exited, etc. etc.  If you are interested I highly recommend that you sign up now before the beta registration closes. The one caveat I should mention is that it is a bit more complicated to install than Google Analytics, but they claim that even a large website can be done in about an hour.

For bloggers, though I haven’t tried it, there is apparently a plugin (widget?) version for WordPress that can be installed in seconds.

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