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How to use Maps To Make Your Blog More Visual - DailyBlogTips

How to use Maps To Make Your Blog More Visual - DailyBlogTips

How to use Maps To Make Your Blog More Visual

Posted: 27 Nov 2015 08:06 PM PST

You often write blog posts that talk about or even promote events that you are planning and hosting. Events can involve either one or several venues, but either way location is usually a big factor. You may or may not have heard of Mapme, but you should probably look into it if these types of blogs are up your alley.

You may also just be discussing a topic or piece of content that has to do with places and locations.

Nowadays (and often in the olden days), readers gravitate towards visual content over written content. For blog posts, that means you want your content and the information it involves to be all the more visual, and less 'texty'.

But to achieve this, you need visual tools that are super appropriate for your subject matter, and that engage people with your discussion topic uber clearly.

Mapme is built for just that. Mapme tackles content by segmenting location categories and themes, and creating personalized, "smart" maps in a very simple way.

How it's Done:

a. Think of a map idea that would up your blog post's engagement factor

b. Sign up for map creation on Mapme.

c. Begin the 3-stage process:

  1. Create a map
  2. Choose the borders of your map (the default zoom of your map)
  3. Choose categories that describe your different places. Label them with a name, icon, and color, all of which you can go back and change whenever.

d. Embed the map on your blog, or wherever you want to engage people.

Other cool features that users can choose to take on:

-Opt to make the map content crowdsourced, so that those interested can directly and add location to your map. You can moderate the locations before they're added.

-Make reviews available for your map locations, to make your map into a community forum and not only a knowledge base/guide.

-Choose which information fields you want to hide or display with each place: URL, phone number, logos, e-mail, etc.

Don't forget to share your maps!

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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Struggling to Find Free Images? Check Out VisualHunt - DailyBlogTips

Struggling to Find Free Images? Check Out VisualHunt - DailyBlogTips

Struggling to Find Free Images? Check Out VisualHunt

Posted: 23 Nov 2015 08:35 PM PST

As you probably know, adding images to your website or blog is essential to make it popular over time. Not only will the images make your content come alive and help to engage your users, but it will also help to drive traffic to your site over time, as many people search for images on Google, and if they find one that is on your website they might end up visiting it.

Now the problem is that finding images that are free to use is not that simple. Contrary to what many people think, you can’t just search on Google for the image you are looking for, find a nice looking one, download it and use it on your website. Most of the images that show up in Google search results are proprietary. This means that someone has copyrights over those images, and if you use them without permission you are basically infringing the law and could get in trouble if this person decides to go after you, especially if you are using his or her image commercially.

image-search

There are two solutions for this problem: you can either purchase images from sites that sell royalty free images, or you can find images that have a license that allows you to use them, like the Creative Commons license.

The second solution is much simpler and won’t cost you any more, so I suggest you start with that.

Finding those free-to-use images it now always easy, but there are some tools and websites that will help you. A very nice one I came across recently is called VisualHunt.com. It’s basically a search engine that allows you to input some keywords and it will list Creative Commons images that you can use on your website.

They have over 354 million images indexed already, with almost 14,000 Creative Commons ones, and the number is growing every day. The Creative Commons images are high quality and manually curated, which makes your job much easier.

Another cool feature is that you can filter your search by license type and by color, as they include a color pallette for every image. For instance, you can limit your search only to images are can be used commercially, or you could search for ‘white cars.’

And here’s a tip: they have a section where they feature how bloggers and website owners are using their images. In other words, you get a plug from the website and get some new site visitors from it.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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