Working on InDesign Templates

A while ago, I posted a free Adobe InDesign template for a thank you card on my photography blog. This got me thinking that it might be an interesting project to work on for the rest of the summer… come up with a small catalog of free templates that people can download and use for various photography-related projects.

Today, I posted a second template – a free Adobe InDesign template for a model comp card. Don’t know how many of these I’ll end up doing, but I’d think about a dozen useful templates would be a good goal in the next month or two.

If anyone has suggestions for something to make a template for, feel free to drop a line in the comment box. The point is to make something that other people want to use… not just to make something for the hell of it.  If you want to follow the project, bookmark the InDesign tag at my photography blog. All of the projects will be tagged that way (among other tags).

The Fickle Whims of Google – Or How It Almost Killed My Blog

Earlier this year, Google updated its search algorithm. The point was to reduce the importance of “content farms” like eHow and Mahalo. These post a ton of bogus content targeting every keyword imaginable, and they rake in some advertising revenue from the search traffic.

I’m not entirely certain if it’s related to the algorithm update or that it was just a fluke coincidence, but my photography blog nearly got torpedoed by Google in March.

Inexplicably, my search engine traffic (which was just under 100 visits/day at the time) stopped. Completely, suddenly, instantly. I don’t know why.

I didn’t get a message in my Google Webmasters dashboard. I didn’t get an e-mail. There was no evidence my site had been hacked and that it was spamming people (which had happened to another of my projects in the past). I requested that my site be reconsidered through Google Webmaster Tools, but I have no idea if that actually did anything… because Google won’t talk to you.

This was rather discouraging, and I simply gave up posting for a while. Then, one day, magically, without any sort of reason, the traffic re-appeared. Google turned back on. And, just as quickly as the flow of search engine traffic had stopped, the site was back to 100+ visits a day.

More Progress on Associated Content

I forgot I started this blog/portfolio so long ago. I was looking through links to my photography portfolio site, and I saw this in the results and thought… huh. I should go write something.

Two years ago, I made a note that I’d hit a bench mark at Associated Content – 100,000 page views. As they say, there’s nowhere to go but up. I still write new articles from time to time, and I’m up to 136 published articles at the moment. But, more impressively, my page views has risen to 350,000. That bumped me, a while ago, to clout 9.

By the end of the summer, I want to publish a bunch more. If I hit about 175 – 185 articles, that should give me enough bonus page views to reach Clout 10. With that, I’ll get the max payout of $2.00 / 1,000 page views.

It hasn’t all been gravy, though. The Google update earlier this year screwed some stuff up. People were afraid it would hurt page views on AC and it surely did. Before the Google update, I was getting enough steady pageviews to average $20/month in performance payments. After the update, my pageviews got cut nearly in half and my average dropped to about $10/month.

They’ve improved a little bit since then, but certainly not back to where they were. Oh well, I’ll have to write some more stuff I guess…

By the by, check out my profile and read some of my latest articles over there.

New Projects: Olinda Gibbons Photography and Digital Photography How To

In the past few months, I’ve been working on two new projects: Olinda Gibbons Photography and Digital Photography How To.

Olinda Gibbons Photography

This is a site for a photography studio in New Jersey which I’m working with. I threw up a quick website back in March, but I had some time over the summer to redesign it. I’m pretty happy with the design now. There are a couple portfolio pages (Portrait Portfolio and Events Portfolio) as well as a blog area that shows examples of all our recent work.

Digital Photography How To

I started this project later in the summer. I thought it’d be nice to write about digital photography, since I’m spending a lot of my time doing it and teaching others about it. Recently, I’ve been writing a lot of articles about Adobe Lightroom, including a multi-part tutorial that I’m just finishing about brightening images in Lightroom.

AC Benchmark – 100,000 Pageviews

I’ve been writing at Associated Content for quite a while – since December 2006.  I’ve had bouts of creativity and long droughts without writing. But, it’s always easy to just pick up where I left off and start writing again.

Interestingly, some of those old articles still pick up plenty of pageviews each month.  An article I wrote about stamina food in WoW in October 2007 is still getting 4-500 hits a month.  Intriguing, considering the information in the article is completely outdated now that WotLK came out. Another article, about gemming for Paladins, gets even more hits… even though was completely outdated months before WotLK was released.

Thanks in no small part to these successful articles, I’ve surpassed the 100k mark for page views.

If you’re interested in any of my newer articles – on topics as varied as Fallout 3, buying computer parts, and fixing steam radiator systems – check out the RSS feed I just added to the sidebar.

Creating a Portfolio…

Although I tried to keep my blog moving through the new year, it just didn’t happen.  Now that classes have started with Rutgers, I’m working feverishly on the yearbook, and I’m constantly after school tutoring students, I just don’t have the time or energy to devote to daily or regular blogging.

The solution I came up with a few weeks ago was to shift my efforts from a singular blog to a multitude of “mini-sites.”  The first of these was about tax credits and tax benefits for higher education.

Although I’m pleased with the site, I neglected the promotion part of things.  I didn’t plan on promoting it a ton, but I did plan on writing some articles on AC, posting some articles elsewhere, and building up a small link profile to the site.  Again, real life intervened and I lost momentum shortly after the site went up.

This portfolio is now an attempt to refocus myself on these mini-sites.  It won’t be regularly updated like my old blogs.  It will simply be updated when I do some work on an existing project (like Education Tax Credits) or start working on a new project.

In a month or so, I should have a pretty healthy amount of free time.  I’ve got some ideas floating around, and hopefully that free time can turn into some productivity.