We also have to be honest to ourselves about our own limitations. Are we really producing content that's worth reading and worth sharing?

Search the topic you're writing an article about and look at the first page of your favorite search engine. Are your website, your article, your insights and your tips clearly superior to the top results for that topic? Why should your page be listed ahead of all those other pages? What do you provide that they do not?

Here's an analogy to web content: early television. Some of the shows were silly, vapid, shallow and poor production quality by today's standards, and would never get funded today. On the web, by contrast, it costs almost nothing to publish content, so all the amateur work sloshes around side-by-side with expert content. We have more opportunities to get our work published, but that doesn't make us entitled to have our work read. We have to earn eyeballs, just like any other form of published media.

SEO techniques can help us get started, serving as training wheels. It's worthwhile to watch our traffic and learn what questions, concerns, needs and search queries drew traffic to our articles. But SEO or any other techniques cannot make up for lackluster content.

So here's one takeaway lesson: Stop writing articles on things you don't know well or don't care that much about. Who's going to share that? What search engine would link to that?

Instead, concentrate on niches and topics that you never get tired of reading about, things that fascinate or motivate you, things that you care about or are angry about or would truly recommend to a friend. You'll have a better chance of creating content that intrigues others if you write on things that intrigue you.

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eBay Sellers: How Photo Sharing Sites Can Save You Money

Are you an eBay seller? If you are, you likely already know the importance of having pictures in your eBay listings. There are a many eBay buyers who will not buy an item on eBay if they haven’t seen a picture. In fact, many eBay buyers like to see more than one picture. The only problem with this is that posting a number of pictures on eBay can get expensive, especially overtime. However, there is a way that you can give your potential customers what they want, more pictures, without having to go broke while doing so.

If you are looking for a way to have multiple pictures appear in your eBay auction listings, but you are urged to examine websites that are known as photo sharing sites, if you haven’t already done so. Photo sharing websites are sites that allow you to post digital photographs online and sometimes even videos. There are a large number of internet users who use photo sharing sites to upload and share pictures with friends and family members over the internet, but many internet users are also starting to use photo sharing websites to help combat their eBay seller fees, particularly the fees associated with having multiple pictures in an eBay auction.

If you are interested in giving photo sharing websites a try, to help you save money when selling on eBay, you will need to find a photo sharing website to use. To find a number of photo sharing websites, you may want to perform a standard internet search. Your standard internet search results will likely include PhotoBucket, which is a free, well-known photo sharing website. Of course, you can use just about any photo sharing website you want, but you are advised to look into PhotoBucket, as it is free and easy to use.

Speaking of using PhotoBucket and many other online photo sharing websites, you will need to create an account. You should be required to fill out a small form, which may request a little bit of information about yourself, like your full name or your email address. You will also need to create login information for yourself, including a screen name and a safe password. Once you have that finished, you should be able to use the photo sharing website in question, whether it be PhotoBucket or not, to help you start saving money.

When using a photo sharing site, you will see that different sites have different instructions that need to be followed, but the first step will be taking pictures of your eBay items. Then you will need to upload them to your computer and then follow the photo sharing website’s instructions on how to upload your photos to their site. In most cases, this is a relatively simple process, which tends to involve selecting a few pictures from your computer’s hard drive and then hitting an upload button.

Once your pictures have been uploaded, you should see thumbnails or smaller versions of them. With PhotoBucket there are little boxes underneath each thumbnail that can be used to select the picture or pictures of you choice. You will want to select all of the pictures that you want listed in a particular eBay listing. Then, you should be able to find a link that allows you to generate an HTML code. This will lead you to another page with a lot of information on it, particularly HTML links. Many photo sharing websites outright tell you which HTML code links you should use for eBay. Copy the code and paste it in the description of your eBay auction listings and you are good to go; your pictures should appear.

Using a photo sharing site is optional, but it is definitely something to look into. As an eBay seller, you want to profit as much as you can and this also involves eliminating unnecessary expenses.

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