Team Loxly

Online Marketing and Consulting

You are here: Home / Archives for Deborah Carney

Who Owns Your Content?

July 3, 2009 by Deborah Carney Leave a Comment

There are probably more places to host your content for free these days on the internet than there are paid hosts. Between the free sites and social networks where you can have a profile, a page or even a blog, there are many people saying “Why should I host on my own domain?”. And there are just as many people saying “Why would I want to drive people to xxx instead of to my own site?”. Use your own hosted website as a homebase and all those “other places” as traffic cops to get the traffic safely to your home.

You want to own your own content, you don’t want to give it away to another company and you certainly don’t want to worry about being censored or your content “disappearing”. Each “free” host has a catch, each social network has a Terms of Service that allows them to censor your content, and “own” your content. Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.com (the hosted version, not the downloaded version) all have clauses that allow them to remove content that they feel is inappropriate. WordPress.com controls whether you can advertise on your blog there or not. Blogger removed content from a blog that was managed on the blogger host, but was not even actually hosted there! You have the ability to publish from Blogger to your domain and as someone recently discovered, they can remove your content from that domain also. So beware.

Geocities is another example of a place where people hosted for free for years and years and thought they would never have to worry. Yahoo is shutting it down. Several other “free” hosting services through the years have done the same, some vanishing into the night without warning. Hypermart changed from free to paid accounts. If you didn’t upgrade *poof* content was gone.

Free sites have their place, and social networks are certainly great places to have a presence, but keep in mind that all your social marketing should be driving traffic to a central place, and that central place should be under *your* control. A domain you have purchased on hosting you pay for. It can be a simple set of pages that sell your product, a blog that you can change or a complex website, but at the end of the day, you are in control of it. And while we are on the subject, be sure you keep a local backup so that if your host goes down, you can move that content to a new host without worry, and quickly.

Anyone remember NBCi/Xoom.com? More recently, Podango? Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, Flickr, YouTube and a myriad of other sites are wonderful for creating a presence and connecting with people. But don’t use your Facebook page as your presence on the web. Use it as a funnel to send people to your space where you control the content and the ads. Anytime you rely on another company or their business model to host your content, you are playing with fire.

We recently did a podcast on this subject that you can listen to here, and this article is also published in FeedFront Magazine, which Deborah is a regular contributor to.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 6 here

Affiliate ABCs #8 Photography for Webmasters

March 18, 2009 by Deborah Carney Leave a Comment

Today on AffiliateABCs Shawn Collins joins Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly to talk about taking photographs for and using photographs on websites. They cover topics like what camera to chose, how many megapixels, when to use a tripod and how to resize. In addition they talk a bit about video, green screens and when you might need to use a stock photo service. Feel free to post questions here that we can answer either here or in a future podcast!

A little background (or “why you should pay attention to Deborah”): Deborah has been a professional photographer for 30 years, including photographing weddings, other social events and conferences, on location cat shows, as well as a fine art photographer. She has been creating websites for 15+ years, that all included photographs optimized for the web, because back then they had to be since we were all on dialup! A selection of her photos hang in a hotel here and there, homes and offices, and are published in several cat breed books, as well as being scattered all over the web and some newspaper publishing along the way.

Sites and products discussed in the show:
Sony Alpha Series DSLRs (Deborah’s Camera)
Casio Exilim Card Line (Shawn’s current camera)
Casio Exilim EX-FH20 New camera for Shawn? Looks like a nice all around camera.
Fugifilm S Series Another nice alternative for a general use camera.
Flickr Camera Finder – Click on a camera brand and search for images taken with that camera to help you see the image quality and decide on a camera to purchase

Recommended Tripod (It is less expensive than I stated in the podcast! Yay 🙂 )
Targus Tripod

Photo Editing Software:
Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 or 9 – do a search on Amazon or Ebay for copies of this older software. (Sorry Shawn, version 6 doesn’t even show up on searches! 🙂 )
GIMP Free Image Editing software

Green Screen Software

If you need stock photos of subjects you don’t have images of:
iStockPhoto You can choose from pay as you go or subscription.
ShutterstockSeveral plans from a few images yearly to a LOT on a monthly subscription. Good selection, midrange cost.
Jupiter ImagesPricey, but great if you are a publisher that needs a lot of high res images.

If you are looking for an alternative to stock photos check out Flickr and images licensed under Creative Commons:
Creative Commons on Flickr
Creative Commons Licensing
Example of a search for images licensed for use with Attribution and Share A Like License from Affiliate Summit Social Media event.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a comment or email Deborah at dc at teamloxly.com

Affiliate ABCs#6 – Website Basics

February 21, 2009 by Deborah Carney Leave a Comment

For Affiliate ABCs sixth podcast Loxly and NYFalcon talk about some things that every website needs to have and why. Things new affiliates may not think about like Privacy policy and About us.

Sites Mentioned:
NYFalcon.com has the basic templates you can use to customize to your own site needs.

« Previous Page
Next Page »

Pages

  • About Us
  • Advisory Board
  • Costs
  • Past Clients
  • Privacy Policy
  • Speaking, Writing, Podcasts and Awards
  • Testimonials
  • What is Team Loxly Up To?

Categories

  • Affiliate Ideas
  • FeedFront Magazine Articles
  • How To's for Affiliates
  • How To's for Merchants
  • Merchant News
  • Podcasts with Loxly
  • Team News
  • Using Social Media

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in