Writing Success: How to Turn your Blog into a Citizen Journal

So you want to be a citizen reporter aka what we call in our area a KEY-POH or a Busybody. It's plain simple to become a citizen report. Tools of the trade is a keen eye for details and well, a digital camera. You don't need a fancy camera like Canon EOS 400D which cost about $2000 as it is more of a hobby, but if you want to make some decent money out of it, by selling the photos etc, it may be worth your investment.

Anyway, tools of the trade:
Computer with huge hard disk space.
Broadband Internet connection.
Digital Camera (with loads of memory)
Some skills
Some sort of dictation of chronological line of events.

Software wise:
Picassa (very important)
Photoshop ( You get some limited edition ones with your camera)
And your skills....

Server Side:
Blog Software
Photo Gallery

You may want to invest in your own domain with some decent hosting like with 1000GB space or so to stack up your photos.

Bloggers love to use Wordpress as it's very flexible and you can place up photos, slideshows etc.

Anyway, on target, Now you are setup. Snip Snap some photos and then you edit. Make it catchy and worth the thousand words.It could be anything. The Food or an accident. Since it's Election season, it's best to get snappy for the Political Elections and it's related topics.

To write a real worth someone's time article is actually harder than it looks. Just look at this place, a minimum or 350 words.

So, what can you write within the article?

You can write basically about the event, how that happen, who attended them, what characters were there, everything just as the CSI Team would have done it. It's a hard work actually but you never know if something worth reporting just happened at the right moment.

So back to the issue at hand.. what else?
Journals like Blogger is free, but you can't customise your site as much. Wordpress free edition is abit harsh on advertising so you can't get revenue from blog advertising like InLinks or Text Link Ads, but you can try.

Investing in a proper Photo Gallery is a must. Photos are huge. The bigger they are, the better the quality and resolution. Most bloggers snap at at least 1500x1500 pixels photo size with resolution of at least 3 or 5 megapixels. Yes you can use your cellphone camera but does it do the job properly?

I used many galleries, like Singapore, Gallery 2.0 and now I invested in PHP PhotoPost Pro which handles my large photos well, into a photo forum and allows people to print them too at an online shop (and allow me to get a commission)

That allows me to make thumbnails and allow me to choose the what image to resize them into to fit to my picture post in my Blog.Anyway, alot of people can say much, but for more info, you can look at this lady who writes about ...well food. ( http://www.marlindaradzi.com )

Well, Food sells better.Good luck