Many people feel that photo blogging is the most exciting kind of blogging that exists. Building and maintaining a photo blog is no more difficult than creating and updating a text-based blog, and many people feel that the internet’s high speed, full-color technology reaches the pinnacle of its appeal with the transmission of images.

Posting photographs in a blog format on a daily, weekly, or occasional basis is a great way to express yourself while reaching viewers in an emotionally charged and aesthetically engaging way, and surfing photo blogs can help you to get a whole new perspective on the world in which we live. Setting up AdSense on your Blog is a breeze, and you can complete the whole process in less then an hour. Free $97 Adsense Secret Ebook on Adsense Tips here.

Many people who run image blogs are photographers by trade, but photo blogging is also very popular among hobbyists and amateur shutterbugs. To be certain, a lot of the most popular photo blogs have gained attention because the pictures on them are of the highest artistic caliber, and a lot of the people who run these striking blogs are graduates of prestigious art schools and have impressive professional portfolios.

However, some of the most well known and most often visited photo blogs are as notable for their concepts as for the pictures themselves. Certain photo blogs, like the popular “Cute Overload” which features picture after picture of adorable animals, are more about the thematic content of the pictures than they are about the style in which the snapshots are taken.

The fact that photo blogs range from forums to display the work of highly skilled artisans to playful collections of curiosities shows that photo blogging is a truly diverse form. The fact that photo blogs are so easy to build and to update makes this kind of visual communication very democratic, and enables people at all skill levels to become a part of the global conversation about the nature and value of photography today.

Whether you are an artist or hobbyist who wants to create a photo blog, or whether you are just somebody who enjoys learning about new places and things, spending some time looking at the most popular photography blogs on the internet can be a very rewarding endeavor. You can travel to another place or another time by seeing pictures of faraway locations and long-gone eras.

You can see your own neighborhood with fresh eyes by discover how local artists have photographed the town or city in which you live. Photo blogging allows people to communicate all of these things and more, which makes it a very exciting part of the modern blogosphere. If the best thing about web technology is that it allows people to reach each other in a very personal way from across great distances, then in many ways photo blogs are the most successful kind of web sites. How can you find high paying keywords for your Blog? Free $97 Secret Adsense Book at http://www.honestreview.info/adsense/index.html

About the Author

Most people can make their AdSense Blog sites veritable cash cows! Free $97 Secret Adsense Book at http://www.honestreview.info/adsense/index.html

Advertising online is becoming a very big business. Anyone who doubts this need only look to trends with other advertising vehicles. Newspapers are starting to claim a large online presence. Magazines, too, provide print and digital versions. Even television networks are taking the online plunge.

These larger media companies recognize that advertisers want an online presence, but that doesn’t mean advertisers are only looking at the “big guys” to get the word out about their products and services. Many also turn to affiliate advertising programs to increase their revenue.

This little fact makes it possible for almost anyone with a website to turn it into a moneymaker. Plugging into this moneymaking opportunity is fairly easy thanks to affiliate website marketing programs.

Learning how to take advantage of this fast-growing trend will take a little study, but it is quite feasible for almost anyone to create a successful affiliate website. Understanding affiliate programs first, however, is a very good idea.

Affiliate programs are nothing more than advertising promotions that are put on individual websites. Oftentimes, these programs are designed to help the “little guys” make money. Some affiliate marketing programs are available for very small websites and even blogs. Advertisers pay either for A.) space on a person’s web site for an ad, B.) for click through on those ads, or C.) for sales that result from the click through. Sometimes the payouts will be determined by a combination of the three or all three.

To create a successful affiliate website, a person needs to do a few things:

1. Have a website. It is not possible to make money on affiliate advertising without first having a website to place the ads on. Sites don’t have to be fancy, but they do need to be approved by affiliate program companies in many cases.

2. Obtain approval. Anyone who wants to create online affiliate program websites needs to have some programs in mind. The kinds of advertising affiliate program choices range from animal care product companies to medical equipment and beyond. To join affiliate network promotions, most network sites require a site be set up first so they can review it before approving or denying a request. When joining an individual affiliate program no prior approval usually takes place.

3. Gain traffic. The key in making any affiliate site successful is to have traffic actually visit that site. Many people take full advantage of affiliate opportunity offers presented them by tailoring sites to fit the niche of the advertising. For example, a site owner that signs on to join an affiliate sales program for dog food might create a site about dog obedience, breeds and even care. The content on the site will completely revolve around the affiliate marketing niche.

4. Gain ranking. One way to increase traffic on an affiliate site is to increase ranking with the search engines. This means web sites need to be submitted to search engines and they will also need to have content that is relevant and fresh to earn ranking. The importance here is to have search engines point to a particular site when someone is looking for information. For example, if the dog site owner is diligent about updating his site, its ranking on a search engine might put it above others, which in turn can increase referrals and traffic.

5. Convert traffic. Since many affiliate programs only pay out if traffic clicks through on their ads and even only if a product is purchased, making sure content is designed to convert traffic without hard selling is important. The name of the game here is enticing, engaging content that compliments the affiliate ads.

Anyone with a little time and some creativity can create a successful affiliate website. The trick is to slowly build up to become an “authority” on a topic or at least a popular port of call in the vast world that is the Internet.

About the Author

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People want to get paid for taking a survey online. This is understandable as they begin to hear their neighbors or even classmates at school talking about how people are getting paid for taking surveys quite effortlessly while spending so little time working on them. Taking surveys to earn extra cash for a short holiday at the beach or to pay for the latest MP3 player sounds like a great idea to many youngsters. This is the magic of internet paid surveys. We will now learn a bit more about how to get paid for taking a survey.

The fact that more marketing companies are now coming online to conduct their surveys just made the income game a little easier. We can understand why they are doing this as this is a more effective and efficient way to obtain consumer feedback than using regular survey posts or setting up booths in street corners to solicit comments. Housewives, granddads and grandmas who are retired and college kids are making up to $400 – $500 a month from internet paid surveys. They get paid for taking a survey on the products and services like handphone services or computers they use.

What do you really need to get paid for taking a survey?

You need to first sign up with an online survey site that is gathering survey participants. Once you are approved by the site, it would be quite soon that you receive the first internet paid survey to complete. Be a little patient as it can be as quick as within the next hour or up to a few weeks later. This is not because they have forgotten about you. A possible explanation is that your membership profile does not match with the available surveys. This is really no fault of anybody. But to get around this, you would have to try as best to fill up as many of the membership profile questions and indicate your interest in more of the items listed such as favorite pastimes, etc. Please be honest in your profile and not attempt to lie to the company just to get paid for taking a survey.

Depending on how much free time you have, you can join more than one survey research company. The trick to get paid for taking a survey everyday is by having many internet paid surveys. And to be invited to many surveys, you need to be registered with many internet paid surveys. It can be a dozen or even more. Veteran survey panelists who earn thousands are members of hundreds of paid web survey companies. The amount of money you earn is entirely dependent on how much time you are willing to set aside to do surveys.

It is possible to find that many internet paid survey companies to join and start to get paid for taking surveys. The only challenge is the amount of time and effort spent to scour the internet. To shortcut that, learn from my survey blog how people are instantly finding good internet paid survey companies and getting paid for taking surveys online.

About the Author

Davion is a successful webmaster and author. Discover where to find the highest paying free internet paid surveys at his popular blog http://Free-Internet-PaidSurvey.blogspot.com and start earning some extra cash today.

Get Started Making Political Cartoons

Even if you’re not a great artist, you can still make compelling political cartoons with the help of a computer. Take it from me; I’m not a great artist, not by any means, but I think I’ve still been able to entertain people (and amuse myself) with my Pollyticks political cartoons.

A great deal of credit goes to the developers of a few pieces of software that I use on a regular basis. The programs I’m referring to are Adobe’s Photoshop Elements, an image editing application; Macromedia (now also Adobe) Flash, which I use to create text effects and to enhance some of my hand drawn (albeit horrible) artwork; and Plasq’s ComicLife, a cartoon and comic layout program that simplifies the process of adding comic speech bubbles to your cartoons.

I prefer to use an Apple Macintosh (Mac) computer most of the time, but all of the programs I’ve mentioned, with the exception of Plasq’s ComicLife, are also available for PCs running versions of Microsoft’s Windows. In this article, I’ll describe how I use all three applications to produce illustrations, comics and political cartoons and show how everything I do can also be done on a Windows PC without the use of ComicLife at all.

Over many years working with computers I’ve used quite a few programs in the image and illustration editing arena and will point out how alternatives to my favorite applications can also be used to accomplish a lot of the same tasks.

For the record, I don’t claim to be an expert with any of these programs or techniques, nor do I claim that my way is necessarily the best way to accomplish the things I’ll cover. My goal is only to describe how I do what I do, so that you can do it as well as I do, if not better.

Know What You Want to Say

Alright, let’s get started. The first thing to figure out is what you want your political cartoon to say, in other words, what it will be about. Very often I’ll be at my day job when an idea comes to me, and I’ll reach for a piece of scratch paper to jot it down, but typically I make my political cartoons in the mornings before work. I’m a creature of habit, and what works for me most of the time is jumping into the day’s news first thing in the morning. I get most of my political news from the Internet now, so I crawl out of bed into the living room, wipe the sleep from my eyes and point my laptop’s web browser at CNN.com. I start with CNN because I like the layout and trust the source, but I suggest you start with whichever news site you like best.

Remember, it’s usually 5:30AM when I’m looking for daily cartoon ideas, so what I want is a site with a simple layout and good headlines. At that hour I’m not ready for a 3,000-word treatise on Bush White House foreign policy. I’m looking for a quick rundown on the big news of the day.

Use Tabbed Browsing

I like a web browser that supports tabbed browsing, like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7.0, Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox (for both PC and Mac). Tabs let you open many different websites at the same time and quickly jump between all of them. If you’ve never used tabs for web browsing before, I highly recommend you give them a try. The feature is probably built right into your browser already. I find that of the hundreds of features available in most web browsers today, tabs are among the most useful, especially for research.

My favorite websites for political cartoon ideas are CNN.com, Yahoo.com (particularly their News section), Drudgereport.com (sometimes conservative, but often breaks big stories before the traditional media outlets do), Google News, YouTube (yes, YouTube), Fark.com (great for offbeat news), Digg.com (World News section), Daryl Cagle’s Professional Cartoonists Index, Washingtonpost.com and — brace yourself — FoxNews.com. FoxNews has a reputation for media bias (leaning to the right), but I don’t care. They write great headlines and employ some of the best photojournalists in the business.

In addition to the above websites I have a small library of Gary Larson’s Far Side books, which I lovingly refer to as my “secret weapons.”

Storyboard Your Ideas

Once I have an idea in mind for a political cartoon, I either scribble it down on scratch paper or fire up TextEdit (on the Mac; Notepad or Wordpad on the PC) and quickly type it out. If you haven’t noticed, a lot of my cartoons are photo-toons, so when I find an image I want to parody in a cartoon I’ll copy and paste it into an image editor like Photoshop or save a copy of it to my computer desktop for later use. I’ll describe that process soon. For now, the focus is on figuring out what you want your political cartoon to say.

Some of the best advice I’ve ever encountered on how to generate political cartoon ideas comes from famed political cartoonist Mark Fiore who said, “The most important factor in making an animated editorial cartoon effective is having something to say. Just like with a print political cartoon, it’s got to have an opinion and punch or it becomes something entirely different.”

With an idea for a political cartoon firmly in mind, the next thing to decide is if I’m going to draw it out, use photographs to tell the story, or try a combination of both drawn art and photos. Now is as good a time as any to address the question of copyright.

Get the Right Tools for the Job

I’m going to assume you already have access to a computer, odds are either a computer running Microsoft Windows or Mac OS 10. I do everything for Pollyticks — from writing articles to producing my political cartoons — on an Apple Mac, specifically a 12″ Apple Powerbook with a 1GHz G4 processor and 1.25GB of RAM running Mac OS 10.4. That’s a lot of techno-babble that translates loosely to “My slow 3-year-old laptop.”

To get hand-drawn artwork into my laptop for upload to Pollyticks.com I use an inexpensive $50 Canon flatbed scanner (Model: LIDE 80) or a $99 Wacom Graphire4 digital drawing tablet, which allows me to draw and paint directly into programs like Photoshop or Flash. If you can draw at all, I highly recommend getting a drawing tablet because it not only saves time but also produces better looking results. When you use a scanner to import artwork into a computer, the scanner captures all the tiny imperfections on the sheet of paper, in addition to your artwork. By drawing directly into programs using a digital drawing tablet, you avoid that problem.

Everything I do on my Mac can also be done on a Windows PC with a few slight modifications to the process to account for the absence of ComicLife for Windows. Plasq, the program developer, says they’re working on a version of ComicLife for Windows users, so stay tuned for that by checking their website for updates at Plasq.com.

I prefer the look and feel of Apple computers and the software that runs them, but for something like designing political cartoons, the choice between Windows or Mac is a matter of personal preference more than anything else.

Earlier in this article, I mentioned the three programs I use to make Pollyticks cartoons: Adobe Photoshop Elements, Macromedia Flash, and ComicLife.

The one I couldn’t live without is Adobe Photoshop Elements. With Photoshop I can draw cartoon characters, edit a picture of the White House, or paste a picture of Vice President Cheney’s head onto a turtle’s body. It can also create comic panel borders, apply drop shadows (subtle shadows around comic panel windows that produce a cool 3D effect) and create speech bubbles with text for dialogue — pretty much everything it takes to be able to produce a Pollyticks-style political cartoon.

Macromedia Flash is first and foremost a program used to create 2D (two dimensional, ala Comedy Central’s South Park cartoon) computer animations, but it’s also a useful drawing tool. I use Flash when I draw characters for cartoons because it has a feature (Bitmap Tracing) that smoothes lines, giving them a professional look. And Flash produces what are called vector graphics, which can be easily enlarged or shrunk without losing detail. Normally, when a picture or drawing is enlarged, the tiny colored dots (pixels) that make up the image start to look blocky. Not the case with vector graphics, which retain their smooth lines regardless of size.

The final program I use to make political cartoons is Plasq’s ComicLife, a tool so far available only for Apple Macs (sorry Windows PC users). It simplifies the job of adding speech bubbles and dialogue to cartoons. Photoshop can do it too, but it’s a lot easier with ComicLife.

Photoshop Elements is the one tool I couldn’t live without, but if you’re just starting out and want to see what using a similar image editing program is like before plunking down $70 on Photoshop Elements, GIMP, an open source (free) image editor, can do everything Photoshop Elements can do and more. It’s not quite as user friendly, meaning it might take you a little longer to figure out, but it’s a powerhouse program available for both Windows PCs and Macs (make sure you download the right version). Many of the features I use to make political cartoons, like the lasso tool (which I’ll describe later) and layers, work much the same way in both Photoshop and GIMP.

Draw with Flash

Let’s work on an idea I have for a political cartoon starring me and President Bush. The image of me will be a hand-drawn caricature, but I’m going to use a photograph for the president. I’ll combine both images together, add speech bubbles and save the cartoon in a format ready to email or upload to a website or blog.

The first program I’m going to use is Flash, in which I’ll create a cartoon version of myself and export it to an image. Images you want to email or upload to a website should usually be saved in .jpg format. Your other options are .tif, .gif and .png (among others), but most of the time you’ll use .jpg files because they’re compressible, meaning able to be shrunk and downloaded quicker.

File size is a different measurement than the actual physical dimensions of an image. That’s a tough concept for beginners to understand. File size and image size are two different things. Be careful not to compress an image too much as the more heavily something is compressed, the lower the detail. The goal is to find a balance between file size and image detail. I usually compress my cartoons down to around 100KB each.

FLASH TIP: One of the best Flash tutorial websites around is Bradfitzpatrick.com. Brad has a number of video tutorials showing how he uses Flash’s drawing tools to draw. Brad is a great cartoonist. I use the same Flash technique he does, which involves using the “line” and “selection” tools instead of the more popular paint brush and pencil tools. I’ll explain how to draw with Flash further in a future article. For now, you can use a mouse and Flash’s “pencil” tool. They’ll work fine too.

Edit Cartoons with Photoshop

Now that I’ve got my caricature created in Flash, I’m going to open it in Photoshop Elements. From the File menu in Photoshop, I click ‘Open’ and select the file of my caricature, wherever I saved it on my computer. While I’m here, I’ll also open the picture of the president, so that both images are opened in Photoshop at the same time.

Using Photoshop’s Magic Wand or Magnetic Lasso tools I’ll select, or cut out, the caricature from its white background, because all I want to paste into the picture of the president is the caricature itself, not the white background that surrounds him.

In most programs, the concept of copy/cut & paste works similarly. First, you copy something — either a single word, pages of a document, a file, a piece of an image or an entire photo — which sticks it into the computer’s memory. Then, you can paste that thing someplace else. The catch is that generally only one thing can be copied or cut (like copy, except that it moves the original) at a time. Once you copy or cut something new by clicking the copy/cut button, the batch of text or picture you previously cut or copied gets replaced in memory.

Copy into ComicLife

With my caricature pasted into the photograph of our fearless leader, I want to get the combined image from Photoshop into ComicLife where I can easily add my speech bubbles. Once again, the copy/paste feature is perfect for the task. First, from within Photoshop I select the entire image (Select>All), and then copy it to memory, aka the Clipboard (Edit>Copy Merged).

Then, I open ComicLife, drag a panel over from the right column into the main drawing area of the page, stretch the panel out as large or as small as I want it to be, and paste (Edit>Paste). Voila! The combined image I created of myself and the president in Photoshop appears within the panel I set in ComicLife. Some clipping may occur, meaning depending on the height and width of the panel you made in ComicLife, you could inadvertently cut off the edges of the image you created in Photoshop. To minimize clipping, try to make your ComicLife panel about the same shape and size as your image in Photoshop.

In ComicLife, I click-drag speech bubbles with the mouse from the selection window at the bottom of the screen up to where I want to place them on the image. A few lines of text later and that’s it. All done. Lastly, I export my creation (File>Export>Export to Images) as a 72dpi (dots per inch) jpg file for easy upload to Pollyticks.com.

You Made a Political Cartoon

In future articles I intend to go into greater detail on how to use Macromedia Flash, Adobe Photoshop Elements, ComicLife and digital drawing tablets to produce political cartoons. For now, I hope you found this simple overview helpful. Feel free to drop me a line with your questions or comments at bs@pollyticks.com. And please send me your own political cartoon creations. I’d like to start a page on Pollyticks.com with user-created cartoons. Stay tuned, fearless reader!

-Blue Steel

About the Author

Blue Steel is the comic-inspired proprietor of www.pollyticks.com, one of the funniest political cartoon, satire and humor sites on the Net. Enjoy, fearless reader!

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