Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Rufus Went To Town

Well, now look at what you've done, Rufus. Got an Editor's Pick over on my favorite Camera Channel. Sonaova(gun)? Gotta be professional, here, Sonavabee, might not be PC !

Anyway, first thing I want to do is thank Nancy Harder over at Matador Life for putting my buddy in the spotlight. I really owe alot of people over there on my favorite Travel Channel, the Matador Network for the things I've learned and friends I've made but, this isn't exactly the Acadamy Awards so, I won't rattle off all their names.

What's really important to mention, though is all the neat tricks you can learn by thumbing through the magazine pages and picking-up little handy gadgets to make more people see a photo of yours. Whatever they use for tools to advertise articles, you can use for photos, too. I got everything they got, and more. Installed so many tools on my dashboard the monitor got top-heavy and fell off the bar one day. I caught it just before it hit the floor.

I really have no idea what all this SEO stuff means (Secret Envelope Opener,or something)and don't want to waste my time trying to figure it out. Analytics, bah, that's for analytical people. I just take a photo like Rufus after he hits the wire somewhere and post it everywhere, paste in some links and start whackinum with all these tools. Magic happens, quicker than overnight. Go home for lunch, take a nap and when I get back, over 100 views showed up on a photo. Could be robots or the CIA lookin' at my pictures for all I know.

The day my dog hit Life at Matador, here's where I put him, besides on this blog:

JPG Photo Magazine 250 VIEWS

Flickr 80 VIEWS

BetterPhoto Published at Matador LIfe in the caption.

Now, the Editors over at Better Photo, who judge these contests aren't your typical magazine editor. They're all professional photographers, the kind of folks whose pictures are in Outdoor Photographer and most of my other favorite print magazines.

That photo of Rufus has been entered at least 2 or 3 times in the contests there, before. But, he never got an Editor's Pick. So, here's my way of analyzing things; ask the readers. You're the ones who keep me writing. Was the photo selected because:

A. Technical excellence

B. Title

C. It's been published

D. SEO From Tweets/Stumbles/Digg/FaceBook/Ping/Reddit

E. All of the above

This isn't a quiz, just an unscientific survey. I value your opinions, everyone.

Cheers,
Mike





5 comments:

Sabina said...

Mike - I saw your note on FB about the music, which is what brought me over here this time. I like it! What a nice and unique touch!

And I think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is very important. Use the right keywords and it will drive more traffic to your site! There is a lot of studying up to be done to learn how to achieve this most effectively, which I'm currently doing, and it's actually very interesting and informative reading. I think if you implement SEO techniques, you'll probably get more hits.

RyukyuMike said...

Sabina,
Probably be a good idea but, I think this technology just changes faster than you can learn it. Tags and titles at the top of the list today can be ancient history, before bedtime tonight.
If the truth were really known about the picture of Rufus, the answer may be None of the Above; they just got tired of me entering the same photo over and over and picked it this time around so I'd quit !
Just for the heck of it, someday I'm gonna post a photo on Flickr with no title and no tags. Then tweet it 100 tomes and see what happens!

Thanks for coming by and commenting. Everybody else must be busy this week.

Cheers,
Mike

Nancy said...

I would say all of the above. (I just love this pic of Rufus!)

Nick said...

Hmm, it's a difficult one. I would also go for all of the above, in different forms. But I reckon it helps shed-loads to have that big net footprint of yours, doing your magic. I find SEO in terms of keywords tedious too. I'm sorta resigned to not appearing high on page results for my blog, but on trying to get traffic through social media. We'll see.

Btw the image of your monitor falling off the bar cracked me up!

RyukyuMike said...

Nancy and Nick,
Glad you dropped-in and commented. I should start bringing my camera to the bar so I can show you what I put these poor laptops through in a day's work.

Cheers,
Mike