Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

How To Make Your Blog More Accesible

In my guide on How To Build An Audience For Your Blog, I mentioned the following:

1. RSS is your friend
2. Don’t make your readers jump through hoops to comment
3. Start a meme or participate in spreading one
4. Be consistent in your content
5. Use images to reinforce your message
6. Comment on other blogs
7. Broadcast your posts

I would now like to add an 8th rule: Make sure your images are hosted properly

You may be wondering why this is important because after all, it really doesn’t seem to matter right? But it does. It is terribly important and I’m going to explain why.

Let’s say you’ve crafted an incredible post with witty content and compelling prose plus ultra awesome images to really convey the message across to your audience. Like a true blogger, you spent like a couple of hours editing and rewriting it so it would 100% perfect. And then you post it and half the blogosphere reads it via an RSS reader like bloglines thus totally misses out on your images which happen to be hosted on Blogger.com’s hello.com service. That totally sucks, dude.

Don’t use Hello.com to host your images for your blog. They are only visible if somebody visits your blog directly. This means that anybody using an RSS reader to read your blog will never EVAR see your images. Consider this fact, my blog has an accompanying image with almost every other post. My RSS feeds garner around 70,000 unique views each month. That’s a lot of images that would have gotten missed out.

Stay away from the hugely popular free services like Photobucket as well - most government orgs and Stat Boards are blocking them. So if you use it then people like Sean the Soldier, Tina the Teacher and Dick the Civil Servant won’t be able to view your images on their office pc. Which is a pity because most people read blogs during office hours.

If you have your own server (like yours truly), you can host your own images. But that is expensive because bandwidth is limited and not cheap.

The best solution is to host your image on Flickr so they can be seen anywhere and everywhere. Take a quick tour of the biggest blogger’s sites and check out where they are hosting - chances are that the images will be on Flickr. You also get a whole list of features that are incredibly useful. My favourite is the auto-resizing of uploaded images to 3 different sizes for use on my blog.

So are we clear on why hosting for your images is important now? Please post your questions as comments if you have any queries.

Thanks cowboy! Boy, your Guide sure helps! :)

kick ass… think im gg to change to flickr!

Hey Cowboy Caleb. I’m quite new to Flickr, and I have absolutely no idea how to post multiple pics to my blog. I know there’s this option to “Blog This” to post a pic. But that can only post a single pic right? I’m totally confused.

Oh no.. Please enlighten me!

Thanks!!

klm > You can only post a single pic using Flickr. If you want to get multiple pics, then you will have to manually get the URL address of the photo and use the HTML to include the images in your blog via the IMG tag

Email me if you need more help.

Hey.. I got it after fiddling around for quite some time. But still, I got it! Thanks!!!!!

Excellent advice for any blogger. Every day I read plenty of RSS feeds with images that don’t display, which annoys me, but not enough that I want to go visit the actual site.