Blogging

Introducing… Anti-Sell, the Dedicated Website & Blog

Long-time visitors to SEOno will have probably worked out by now that I don’t post about SEO much anymore. And that I sometimes use SEOno as a dumping ground for other types of posts: namely those related to Anti-Sell (my book), such as freelancing and networking.

Well… I’ve had lots more ideas for Anti-Sell-themed posts, so I decided to do the logical thing: anti-sell.com is now its own website! 🥳

Anti-Sell.com homepage screenshot
As it says on the homepage, I have plans for a variety of content: more networking tips, guest posts, more case studies and Anti-Sell Stories… It made sense to give it its own space rather than add them all to SEOno.

It’s been a while since I launched a new site of my own (the last one TechEvents.Wales, which was back in January 2018 IIRC). It went relatively smoothly, although all the pages’ rel="canonical" tags pointed back to the (now non-existent) test sub-domain’s pages, so I’m glad I caught that issue quickly…! 😆

Given that it’s my newest distraction project, I can’t promise that I’ll be posting any SEO posts for a while… However, one of the first posts I have planned for it is a guide on how SEOs can get more clients – so there is a bit of tie-in I guess. And I plan to target some high-volume keywords with some of the posts, so who knows – maybe it’ll make an interesting case study one day as well.

Anyway… If you’d like to write a guest blog post for it, get in touch. There’s also its own Write For Us page which has some rules and guidelines on it.

As I say at the end of the book: Happy Anti-Selling, folks.

4 (Unusual) Alternative Image Ideas for Blog Posts

Ahh, the age-old question: what image should I use to accompany a blog post? A stock image? A screenshot? Any old thing you find from Google Image Search…? (No, definitely don’t do that last one.)

When people ask me, I usually send them down the Flickr Creative Commons route, as I hate stock imagery and Flickr images often feel more genuine. But sometimes there are some good alternatives you can use that you mightn’t have thought of…

Let’s start with the really obvious one, and work our way to the more… odd.

1) Take your own photo

Ok ok, so this one’s not that unusual (going by the title of this post), but with Google Image Search, Flickr, etc. being so ingrained in our minds as the go-to resources for images, it’s easy to forget that you can always just do it yourself…

Even if you’re not a professional photographer (and if you’ve ever seen any photo I’ve ever taken, you’ll definitely know that I’m not a professional photographer), with smartphones it’s easy to take a good, high quality photo by yourself that can be decent enough to go with a blog post. The question however: what do you take a photo of?

I’ve gone down this route when Flickr Creative Commons – and other avenues – have come up short. Obviously it’s topic-dependent, but I’ve often found something lying around on my desk that I can turn into a half-decent image. When I struggled to find a good photo to go with a post talking about my thoughts on DA (Domain Authority) for example, I grabbed my Roger Mozbot bobblehead figure and artfully positioned it in front of a computer monitor displaying Open Site Explorer data.

Roger Mozbot (before Prisma) photo
…Meh

Of course, that photo looks dreadful, so I took it one step further…

2) Take your own photo (and run it through Prisma)

Prisma examples
The iPhone app Prisma ‘artifies’ photos. I’ve blogged about it before and used it a stupid amount of times on this blog:

And even guest posts:

Click to read more!

(Don’t Be) Blogging for the Sake of It

When I set up this blog over five years ago, my personal goal was to aim to publish at least one post per month. With the exception of one month early on (February 2012, when I took a brief hiatus), I have met that goal. But a few days ago, while combating a busy workload and a sort of form of writer’s block, I found myself clambering around, trying desperately to think of something to blog about.

Which is why I typed (and have published) this.

In the end, I came up with goods, and it’s a semi-decent post by all accounts (or at least I like to think so!), but otherwise I was thinking of publishing this post – in order to ‘fill the gap.’

But you know what? Aside from the fact that there would’ve been a month missing if someone looks at my blog’s Archives, it really doesn’t matter. It’s much more important to write something of quality rather than to write because you have a quota to meet / a box to tick.

I mean just look at this post. Look at it. It’s looking so sorry for itself. It’s barely a couple of hundred words. It doesn’t even have an image to go with it. Pah. It’s certainly not my best, but by publishing it, I would’ve been able to say that I’d published a post during the month of August 2016. Huzzah…? No. No huzzah.

But you could argue that this post shouldn’t – or doesn’t need to – exist at all… Although I decided to publish it anyway, to make a point.

Don’t get me wrong… Deadlines are a good thing. Since I started writing for State of Digital, my writing style and overall blogging game has increased significantly: I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to meet the deadline of providing a post every five weeks – in addition to doing one once a month for SEOno – but I have done, and it’s been going well. Really well.

But at the end of the day, I have a new rule: from now on, when it comes to SEOno at least, I will write new posts when I damn well please, not necessarily once a month. I’d much rather publish a killer post after a three-month gap rather than publish three smaller, underwhelming posts each a month apart.

Would you agree? Yes? Good. Thanks for reading.

Using Prisma App to ‘Spice Up’ your Blog’s Images

A few days ago I caught a tweet by @tombeardshaw showing a painting-style image of his usual avatar head-shot:

I was really impressed, so I asked him who painted it for him, because I was convinced that he’d commissioned someone to do it for him especially.

But I was wrong – it was made via an iPhone app.

Introducing Prisma

Simply put, Prisma is a modern art filter app, overlaying your photos with different artistic styles. In addition to making photos look like paintings (like the example above), you can make them look like sketches, mosaics and even cubist. There’s about two dozen different filters that you can apply.

Here’s what the interface looks like:

Prisma interface - before & after screenshots
Before on the left / After on the right

I’ve slowly become obsessed with it since discovering it, as have many of the people I’ve seen using it. @cardiffisyours is now using Prisma’ed images for its Twitter profile pic and cover pic:

Prisma on @cardiffisyours screenshot
The Guardian recently published an article showing loads of great examples of recent famous photos that have had the Prisma treatment.

The other day, I realised that it had another really good application: photos for blog posts.

Alternative images for your blog posts

I spend a lot of time finding good accompanying images for blog posts, usually hitting up Flickr’s Creative Commons search. I hate stock photos (as I feel that they’re often very generic and ‘forced’-looking), but finding a good, natural, free-to-use image can really take some time. Ironically I often feel that it takes me longer to find a good image for a post than it does to write the damn thing in the first place…!

For a recent post on SEOno – 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Operate a ‘Minimum DA’ Rule When Building Links – I really struggled to find a good image. I tried Flickr’s CC search for keywords around “authority”, “minimum”, etc. but couldn’t find anything appropriate at all. I realised that all I really wanted was a screenshot of Moz’s Open Site Explorer, the tool that displays the metric that was the primary focus of the post. I tried a screenshot at first, but it looked… boring.

Then I had an idea…

Click to read more!