I’ve been trying to jumpstart my photography hobbies again, and as a result I’ve been looking into ways I could profit off some of the images I take. After some research and Googling, I learned about how some amateur photographers have been able to generate a pretty decent monthly income by submitting their portfolios to microstock agencies. Due to their nature, you only get a percentage of the profits for every photo downloaded or sold, but the more photos that get accepted and placed in the database, the more chances you’ll have of seeing your income steadily go up. In addition, they take all the guesswork out of building your own portfolio store, and provide a much needed marketplace to help monetize your images, something you wouldn’t be able to do on your own unless you were already lucky enough to have a high profile website. As hard as it might be to believe, I am unfortunately not one opf those people.

From what I read, iStock and Shutterstock were the two most popular microstock sites, and those photographers who joined and been accepted have done very well with them, especially Shutterstock. So I decided to join the party too. After all, my photos aren’t doing anything for me just sitting on the hard drive. Why not sell them and start padding my income a little? Maybe with the extra cash I can buy some niceties that’ll help me impress the ladies and finally get me a date for those lonely Friday nights.

After making my decision, I quickly went to work. I upgraded my Photoshop software with the Noise Ninja plugin, then spent hours sifting through my photos, picking out the best ones, then running them through Noise Ninja to get rid of any digital and noise artifacts, adjusted the color tones here and there where needed, and by the end of the day I had ten gorgeous photos I felt would easily pass inspection.

I submitted my photo samples to Shutterstock, and got back a response a few hours later:

5061175 Rejected
5061178 Rejected
5061181 Rejected
5061184 Rejected
5061187 Rejected
5061190 Rejected
5061193 Rejected
5061196 Rejected
5061199 Rejected
5061202 Rejected

Regards,
Shutterstock Support

Crikey, I hadn’t seen this much rejection since I last logged on to eHarmony. Apparently I’ve arrived very late in the microstock game here, and the competition to get accepted into agencies like Shutterstock has become so fierce now that even professional photographers are being rejected.

Well that’s just great. If only I could go back to 2005 so I could give myself a good slap across the face and tell that idiot, “Hey you schmuck! Go check out those microstock sites before they start getting popular! You can make some real coinage man!”

*Sigh* Always too little, too late.

On the upside, I can apply again in 30 days. But now that Shutterstock has basically deemed my entire portfolio to be utter crap, I’ll have to start all over again.

I guess I’m not much of a photographer after all.

Inspired by Mashable’s latest streak of publishing insane link lists for their readers (covering images, audio, video, analytics and podcasting), I decided to publish my own personal toolbox for bloggers in general. Enjoy!

Analytics This

• Add This! - Make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your blog and subscribe to your feeds. Saves you the real estate of using tons of bookmarking icons, and also provides tracking stats.
• BlogStorm - A free service allowing you to track the number of websites linking to your blog posts.
• Clicky Web Analytics - One of the best stats services I’ve seen out there next to Google Analytics. They have a premium version you can try out free for 3 weeks, and it only costs less than $2 a month to use (if you sign up annually). Worth every penny, and offers even more features than Google does. Check here and scroll down for a comparison between Clicky and other analytic services.
• Google Analytics - Arguably the most comprehensive analytics service out there, now with a much improved interface and look.
• HitTail - Reveals in real time which keywords people use to find your website, while offering optimal keyword suggestions you can use for marketing and SEO purposes. They have a basic free service.
• Sitemeter - One of the oldest and most popular tracking service of choice for bloggers.
• Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem - Get a rough idea of where your blog ranks in the blogosphere. Determined largely by link popularity and Sitemeter stats.

Buzz Buzz Buzz

• Google Trends - You can view the latest Google search trends here. VERY useful for getting a sense of what the most popular keywords searches currently are, so you can possibly utilize them for your next blog post.
• Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ BlogPulse - Find out what the blogosphere is currently abuzz about. Also contains helpful tools to track stories and conversations between bloggers.
• Sphere - Excellent service that can help you find blog posts and media articles related to your content. They provide a widget you can install on your blog as well. Very helpful if you want to find other bloggers who are posting content similar to yours.
• Spotplex - Provides real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. Similar to Digg, but without the voting.

Everyone’s Got An Opinion

• Co.mments - I use this over coComment as it runs faster and it’s easier to use. Comment organization is rather simplistic though and can be hard to read through sometimes.
• coComment - This is more community oriented than Co.mments but it can get VERY buggy (and at the time of this writing there has been a lot of issues and complaints regarding its integration with Technorati.) Still, when it works it does prove useful.

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money!

• AdBrite - A versatile ad marketplace that offers you a variety of ways to publish ads and advertise your own site.
• AuctionAds - Display live eBay auctions on your blog for profit.
• CafePress - Merchandising, merchandising! Where da REAL money from da blogging is made!
• ChipIn - A cool widget that provides an easy way to do fund raising.
• Chitika - A contextual advertising company that offers the popular eMiniMalls ads you can place on your blog for profit. Best for blogs that are more product oriented.
• Google Adsense - Google’s ad publishing network, one of the foremost and most widely used networks by bloggers.
• Kontera - A service where you can change some of your text into link ads for profit.
• Openads - A huge ad-space community that offers powerful software to help you rotate and control ad space on your site. The ability to rotate ads will also make it far easier for you to use multiple ad services to help monetize your blog.
• PayPerPost - Write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion. As with most monetizing efforts, your blog should get a considerable amount of traffic in order to truly benefit from the service.
• Text Link Ads - One of the most popular context advertising services on the Internet, where you retain full editorial control over the advertisers that appear on your blog.

Multimedia Frenzy

• Radio.Blog.Club - One of the first stand-alone players that lets you stream sound on your blog.
• BlogTalkRadio - Host your own live talk show for free. A great alternative to podcasting, and allows call-ins to your show as well. />
• BlogTV - Broadcast live and recorded video shows for your blog.
• finetune - A visually appealing widget that allows you to build your own custom playlist and embed it on your blog. Not as versatile as Radio.Blog.Club though.
• Flixn - Fast and easy way to upload a webcam video to the web and your blog. Very easy to use and perfect for those times you want to make a quick webcam vid on the fly.
• Gabbly - Chat service including code you can use to embed a chatroom on your own blog.
• Hipcast - A service that can take a lot of the guesswork out of podcasting for you. Offers audio and video blogging capabilities.
• Meebo - Meebo now offers you the ability to embed any chatroom you want on your own blog.
• myBlogTunes - Create your own radio station and embed it on your site.
• Odeo - Podcasting portal that recently assimilated Audioblogger into its service.
• Project Readon - If you’re a hearing impaired blogger, this site offers closed captioning for many popular Internet videos.
• Quizilla! - Got blogger’s block? Here’s a site with tons of quizzes you can take, the results of which you can post on your blog. There’s also a directory of lyrics, poems, stories, games and more.
• YouTube - Again, if you don’t know what this is by now, there is no hope for you.

Newsworthy

• Bloglines - One of the oldest and most popular free online readers for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.
• FeedBlitz - Gives you the ability to offer email subscriptions to your readers, though it’s not without its problems. There’s a newsletter edition as well.
• FeedBurner - It’s FeedBurner. Nuff said.
• Feedster - A new service that gives you the ability to jazz up your favorite feeds and include them as widgets on your blog.
• Google Reader - Despite still being an experimental service, it’s already become one of the most popular feed readers out there. Neat and simple, though some features remain severely limited.
• Popurls - Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, NewsVine and more, get it all in one neatly organized page here.
• Topix - This might prove useful if you want to blog about local news rather than national or international (which is what every other blogger does.)

Picture Worth 1000 Blogs

• 123Flickr.com - Takes the guess work out of creating Flickr galleries for novices. The galleries are basic looking, but they can spare you a lot of coding grief.
• Flickr - You really, REALLY should know this one by now.
• PhotoBucket - Along with ImageShack, both sites provide one key service that will serve you well: the ability to offload your images elsewhere, thus relieving the stress on your own server during peak traffic times.
• SlideFlickr.com - Instantly turn your Flickr photos into a slideshow, which you can then embed on your site.

Promotion Commotion

• Blog Carnival - A directory of carnivals you can join to help promote your best blog posts.
• Digg - Want to try bringing in a horde of obnoxious, drunken, one time visitors to your site? Then Digg is the perfect place to go!
• Meshly - Not as popular as the major user driven news site like Digg, but it offers an interesting way to submit news articles (via instant messaging).
• Netscape.com - one of the largest user driven news sites, but it’s a bit slow and hard to navigate. However, it contains far more topics you can choose from to submit posts to, so your content is more likely to hit the popular front pages here than at places like Digg.
• Reddit - Another user driven news site, but one which can be more effective in bringing traffic to your blog. The quality of visitors also seem to be far better than the Digg community as well.
• StumbleUpon - Randomly surf the Internet with a toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. Also proven to be a great for bringing traffic to your site. (For more info on stumble promotion, read this article.)
• Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone - READ THIS THREAD from Webmaster World. It provides the best advice I have ever seen for optimizing your blog for search engine traffic, and truly reads like a “condensed SEO Bible.” Even though it was written in 2002, it’s just as true now as it was back then.
• Technorati - Where’s the Fire? - You probably already know
  about Technorati, but you may not know about their new WTF feature. It’s not as active as the more popular aggregators out there, but that fact means it also makes it easier to get your content voted into the front pages for more exposure.
• Truemors - This might be a good site to submit postings of a gossipy/rumor related nature.
• Twitterfeed - A free service where you can feed your latest blog posts directly to your Twitter account.

Reach Out And Blog Someone

• Blogathon - A blogging community that does an annual marathon (where bloggers post every 30 minutes in a period of 24 hours for the charity of their choice). Creates good exposure for your blog, as well as offering a chance to give something back to the community.
• BlogCatalog - A directory and community for bloggers. Contains a discussion forum and a well designed directory to help you find like minded bloggers and readers. In my view it’s far superior to MyBlogLog, which lately has become more stagnant and prone to spam.
• BloggerTalk - An up and coming blogging portal which includes a forum. Looks promising and may become the go-to spot for bloggers once they get enough members.
• Blog Mad - Traffic exchange network, where you earn credits while surfing other blogs. Great way to find new bloggers and expand your community, but the interface is HORRIBLE.
• BumpZee! - Similar to BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog but tedious to navigate, plus the community seems to be more narrowly focused on niche marketing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
• del.icio.us - You ought to know this one by now. Excellent and popular social bookmarking service, not blog oriented but it can be used that way. It’s a bit on the geeky side though, along with an interface about as attractive as Britney Spears without hair. If it doesn’t suit you, Ma.gnolia is a viable alternative that sports a much better looking interface.
• Feedslice - Currently in private beta, but keep checking back for its official launch.. It’s designed to be a niche social network themed around syndication feeds. Sounds very promising!
• LouderVoice - Review network that allows you to publish reviews both to their network and your blog. You can also use Twitter as well.
• MyBlogLog - Blog community that emphasizes connecting with readers of some of your favorite blogs. It’s more stats oriented than BlogCatalog, but it’s become stagnant lately and more prone to spam abuse.
• TheGoodBlogs - Clunky but interesting blog network. They still need to work out some of the kinks though.
• Twitter - A microblogging service where you can tell the entire world (who could care less) what you’re doing in 140 characters or less. Can also send tweets via IM and SMS as well (that is, when it works.)
• Webmaster World - Though some forums require premium membership and the site is tailored for web designers, there are still many free forums you can participate in to get help for maintaining and designing your blog.

Tools For Fools Bloggers

• .HTACCESS Banning Generator - Provides an easy way to modify your htaccess file for banning purposes.
• Browsershots - Want to make sure your blog still looks spiffy for Bulgarian readers using the Konqueror browser on their Linux box? Then this is the site for you.
• Copyscape - A Google like search engine that can help you find sites that might be plagiarizing your content.
• CSS Compressor - An online tool you can use to compress your stylesheets. Compressed CSS files can sometimes boost the response time and speed of your blog.
• Google Adsense Sandbox - Helpful tool to get an idea of what kind of ads might display on your blog from Google’s Adsense network.
• List of User-Agents - If you’re the sort of blogger who loves to check his logs regularly, here’s a directory of user agents you can look up to determine who owns or runs some of the spiders and bots that are crawling all over your blog.
• Market Leap Search Engine Marketing Tools - Several free tools you can find here, from checking link popularity to keyword discovery.
• SEO Toolset from Webconfs - A lot of cool tools you can use here, from checking backlinks to Kontera ad previews to making sure your URL redirects work.
• ServerMojo - Free monitoring service that can check your blog every 15 minutes to ensure it’s up and running. Includes various settings and notification options you can choose from.
• Test Everything - More online tools than you will ever need to test your blog.
• ZapTXT - Use this service to receive notification and alerts when sites are updated. The site relies on feeds to determine whether a site has been updated or not.

But I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

Not to worry, here’s a list of sites I subscribe to via feeds, providing some of the best resources, tips and advice for blogging.

• href=”http://andybeard.eu/”>Andy Beard - Offers lively blogging posts that focus on niche and affiliate marketing, social media and blog search engine performance.
• Blog Herald - A stylish group blog offering commentary and valuable articles from some of the Internet’s most prominent bloggers.
• Blogging Tips - Just recently added this to my feed, but so far he writes good stuff (though the Superman logo hurts my eyes.)
• Blogging Pro - News, plugins and themes for blogging applications, though most of it is geared towards Wordpress.
• Copyblogger - Emphasizes copywriting skills to help promote and build a successful blog. Note, that’s copyWRITE, not copyRIGHT.
• Daily Blog Tips - Shockingly, this site provides blog tips on a daily basis.
• DoshDosh - An always informative blog with articles focused on helping you promote and monetize your blog. Really wish he would drop the anime images though and replace them with Jessica Alba photos instead.
• eMoms at Home - Don’t let the name fool you. There’s some valuable content to be found here for blogging whether you’re a Mommy or not. Personally I’ve always considered myself to be my beloved car’s Mommy, so I fit in just fine.

Lorelle on Wordpress - She’s been around since before blogs became blogs, and provides some of the most insightful advice for successful blogging I’ve found to date. She also recently published a short book to aid beginners in successfully launching their blogs.

• North x East - An offshoot of FreelanceSwitch offering weekly but informative articles for bloggers.
• Problogger - Darren Rowse is a machine. Nonstop advice for professionally minded bloggers.

Addendum

For some reason I seem to have a hard time finding popular message boards and forums specifically dedicated to blogging. If you know of any that might be worth checking out, let me know!

Updates

As it turns out, Mashable also published a Blogging Toolbox a few weeks before I published this one, and I completely missed it (though this was before I started subscribing to their feed. And here I thought I was being so original too, *sniff*. The good news though is that there’s not much crossover between the two lists, so I’m glad to see I still managed to list a ton of goodies that went unnoticed by the Mashers.

Still, you should find their “toolbox” highly useful as well, so go check it out.

One of the growing trends I’ve been observing in the blogosphere lately has been the arrival of social networking and Web 2.0 sites that all seem to have one thing in common: they’re all designed to encourage you to store your content on THEIR networks, rather than on your own site. Got photos you want to show the world? Upload them to Flickr. For videos, there’s YouTube. For music, there’s Last.FM, iLike, Garageband and so on. For those who like to write, network or blog, we have MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and blah blah blah, ad infinitum. And then of course we have the specialty sites like Twitter and Tumblr and blah blah blah ad infinitum. Good grief. While I admit that all these sites have their uses respectively, it also means you’re investing a whole lotta time and resources on just about everything except your own blog. People may not even come to your site anymore because your content is now available elsewhere, whether on a MySpace server or a YouTube channel or God only knows where else you’ve been going. Web 2.0 then has not only stolen your time and content, it’s taken your traffic too, and with it a chance for monetization. As a result your blog will eventually wither away until it becomes abandoned altogether, its distinctiveness completely assimilated into the Web 2.0 Collective. Resistance is futile.

Ok, I’m exaggerating, (somewhat), but I have noticed a pattern where bloggers no longer seem to attend to their own blogs with the fervor they once had in the past, and these social networking sites have a lot to do with it. Playing on all those networks can definitely suck up a lot of your time, so much that your creative and physical energy is usually completely exhausted by the time you’re ready to come back to your own blogging home. This actually started to happen with me as well when I noticed I was actually posting more often on StumbleUpon than I was here. Bad Lincoln!! Bad!!!!!

Somehow a balance needs to be struck between utilizing these networks while also maintaining the growth of your own blog, and I think the answer lies in part by observing Facebook’s recent move to allow third party companies onto their platform. For them it’s all about pulling the features and services these companies have into their own network, providing a central location for the very best these third party services have to offer.

In a way I hope that’s what I’m accomplishing here. While I belong to a variety of networks from StumbleUpon to Last.FM (and beyond), using widgets and other plugin technologies has enabled me to pull everything here in one place, rather than watch it all being pushed out there. Even my Flickr Album can be completely viewed natively without any requisite need to go to Flickr. That I think is the key. Follow the Facebook model, and use networks and services to help to promote YOUR blog, not the other way around. Resist the Borg! Fight the power! Viva La Blog Revolucion!

Yeah yeah, there’s been some talk about butt faced men getting some serious cuddle time from hot women around the blogosphere, so naturally I had to chime in.

First of all, this is the Sun we’re talking about, you know, the UK tabloid Brits fondly refer to as a shag-rag, and which also sport fascinating headlines such as “Double Decker Bus Found on Moon!” As soon as I found out the source right away I knew this article was going to be a load of crap. I mean seriously, the dudes in the photos didn’t even appear all that ugly. They’re no Ben Afflecks, but they’re certainly don’t look like a bunch of butt balls either (though one of them could use a real haircut).

Was this really supposed to make Elephant men like me feel better? To me it just conveys the message, “Wow, lookie here, even the skanky ones are getting some loving, so there must REALLY be something wrong with you if you can’t match their success!” Thanks guys! Here, come a little bit closer so I can use an ice cream scoop to rip out that part of your throat box giving you that snooty British accent. Trust me, I’ll feel better if you do.

I sound bitter. Am I bitter?

Honestly, I don’t know how some people do it. It took me literally all day just to check out places like Digg, Reddit, MyBlogLog, and so on. Just to read the latest feeds from my newsreader sucked up so much time that before I knew it, it was 3AM and my brain was fried from fatigue and an overload of information. How do people find time not only to sift through the all the crap out there, but also blog 20 posts a day AND work a full time job on top of that? My goodness.

I mean really, go here and tell me if you don’t just feel a little overwhelmed. Not that I wasn’t finding anything worthy of interest, it was just that I was finding too MUCH. Just last night I found an article pointing me to Orb, which might be the perfect solution for streaming my music, videos and photos from my home PC.. If they ever block Launchcast at my job, I have an alternative source for streaming music to keep me from going bat crazy with boredom (unless the schmucks block Orb too). But that little detour alone kept me busy for over an hour, and there were still dozens of other noteworthy items and links that were coming in a mile a minute.

Man, I’m gonna have to find some way to streamline all this content if I want to avoid getting brain tumors from processing too much info. In the meantime, I concluded my little blogging experiment to see what submittals I made to the social networking sites out there drew the most traffic. The undisputed champion was StumbleUpon, which easily brought in over 1000 visitors to my blog in just one day. In my blogging prime, the most traffic I had ever seen on a given day was 500 visits, so you can imagine my reaction to this shocking revelation. I also noticed StumbleUpon visitors logged much higher page views than any other referring source as well (an average of two page views per visitor). Reddit was a distant second, bringing in about half the traffic StumbleUpon did with a 1:1 pageview ratio. So while people using StumbleUpon stuck around for a while, the Reddit crowd were mostly hit and run. Snobs.

Digg on the other hand brought in a whopping 15 visits. It was kinda funny to digg one of my posts here and then watch as it literally showed up on page 16 of Digg’s Upcoming/Newest Stories a mere 10 seconds later. Apparently there seems to be some competition here. It seems promotion through Digg is more rewarding for people who already have high traffic volumes (and therefore a lot of potential Digg voters) than those who don’t. But for those occasions when I experience a random moment of clarity and piece together a brilliant, stunning work of literary art such that the world has never seen before, I might try having it stumbled first and then putting up a Digg button, so StumbleUpon visitors who sat gaping in breathtaking awe of my brilliance can Digg it as well. It might be enough to create a second wind effect that could bring in even more traffic. But that’s a job and an an idea for another day.

Submitting my posts to Del.icio.us, NewsVine and a smattering of other sites resulted in zippo hits. I’ll probably still use Del.icio.us (or Ma.gnolia) for its bookmarking services, but networks like NewsVine looks waaaay too convoluted and news-oriented for my tastes. Blinklist, Meshly and maybe one or two other places actually brought in some modest traffic counts, so I may continue to use these services and see how it goes.

Perusing all these sites by the way may have been a real time sucker, but it was also a great learning experience for me. It’s given me a much better handle on how I can properly promote my blog and some of my writings, especially to a targeted audience. And now that that’s over, maybe I can finally get back to doing some actual blogging.

So… uh…. how YOU doin’?