LinkMoney.org

You want to create a logo for free!

This post should be renamed “How to Make a 125 Banner.”

Ok, no big deal you say right? Making little button ads that link out to a website somewhere is a piece of cake. Easy stuff, no big deal. Well it is a big deal to me because as I have said before I HATE programming!

It was only nine months ago that I decided to veer life’s course toward learning how to make a little moohlah off the Internet. I had been hearing all these fantastic claims of millionaires being created from nothing more than putting ads on their websites. I had been publishing stuff for free on the web for over ten years. It’s my turn dammit!

Well that’s a joke. There are many people that do make a lot of money, but it is not by slapping a couple of AdSense groups of ads on your favorite website and then sitting back to light up a stogie. It’s a Hell of a lot of hard work.

I put in at least 10 14 to 14 18 hours per day, EVERY day of the week, trying this, tweaking that, reading mmo Blogs, learning the domaining game, writing, writing and writing. If it wasn’t fun, I would NEVER work this hard at a real job.

A few months ago I couldn’t have told you the difference between a <b> and a <br> in HTML code. Not because it was that difficult to learn, I just never wanted to, or had a need to…

So here’s the deal. When I first started reading Garry Conn’s Blog about six months ago, I was struck with how common sense this game could be. That’s if you don’t let it overwhelm you. Those of you who know Garry, and if you are reading this I can’t believe any of you don’t know him, well he is occasionally a tiny teensie weensie bit opinionated. That’s just part of his charm.

Early on I asked Garry how to learn enough HTML to learn how to make some slight code changes in WordPress themes or plugins, when needed. He gave me a very positive reassurance that learning that crap was EASY! He he he. Needless to say he got me. It isn’t easy, it’s a damned struggle.

Well today I am a Ninja coder ready to do battle. Not really but I always wanted to be a Ninja something or other. So you know those little 125X125 pixel button banner ads that are all over everyones websites? I HAD to know how to make one.

So for those of you that want to create a logo for free, here is how I did it. Maybe some of you will laugh and call me an idiot for doing it this way, but it worked for me, and if you need to learn how to create a logo for free, then it will work for you also.

First you have to find an image you want to use and then you have to crop it to some size that is workable. I have an old version of Adobe Photoshop that still works good enough for me, so I took part of my banner at the top of this Blog site, the lovely Carribean beach, and I cropped a chunk of it to about 400X400 px so I could see what I was doing with it.

Then I was going to use WORD to just type out the visible label that you can see which says LinkMoney dot org, and then paste it over the image as a layer. Well I decided I had absolutely NO idea how to do that, so I used the “T” text tool on photoshop to type that label in the cloudy sky of my image area. OK, so now I have an image, with a visible label.

Now how the Hell can I insert the magic code that makes your mouse pointer turn to a little hand and then allows you to click on the image to go to somewhere else? Well I used a search on Google which was something like “how to create 125 banner ads.” None of the sites gave me the exact info but I started to get the picture that hey, why not go and look at some and see how they are already set up on your own sites?

Great, now I’m getting somewhere… Er, sort of.

Well I realized that there were two parts to the code. One was for locating the image itself, and one for where the link should take you to. Now when I looked at some of the buttons using the mouse right click and “properties” I have on my own websites, it really was not very clear because the codes all seemed to be very long and like CRAZY stuff. I can tell you now, that is because those images and links are on the advertisers own websites or sites that they have designated to keep track of some very specific stats.

The easiest way is to make it work on your own website first. I have about a dozen sites that are doing nothing, nothing at all because I just don’t have enough time to write content or to do any promotions with them yet. I’ll get a Round Tuit soon enough.

courtesy mundoo/flickr

So I uploaded my image as a post on one of these dormant sites and then started playing with the link code.

You have to use the href command first. That’s the sound my Dad used to make when he would come into the dark room where my date and I were on the couch. So that little command is the one that is going to take you to another location. Here is what I ended up using for the first command line:
<a href=”http://linkmoney.org”> (Which will bring you to this website.)

Then I had to decide where to park my image because that would be permanently in the code and must always be available. You could just park it on your own computer somewhere, and call it up, but then your computer would have to be on all the time. No good. Your web hosting company probably has some storage space for files or images that comes with your hosting package, but I didn’t want to bother to dig into how to do that.

(Note: Since I wrote this post several months ago it has become my most popular of all, thanks to you readers. I did learn that it is very easy to go into your WordPress root and create a folder named “images” then upload all images to that folder and when you want to use them just link to them in the html code.)

So I said to myself, self ! Why not one of the photo hosting websites? They’re all over the place. I had an old account at HELLO which was part of Picassa/Google, but too late. Google has shut HELLO down. So I set up a quick account at photobucket.com and resized my image now to 125X125 and uploaded it to photobucket.

Below each image in photobucket there are some little pieces of html code that allow you to copy and paste images into your posts or emails at will, and I also was able to doctor that code up a little to be able to work with my new 125 ad.

So here is the secod part of this code.
<img border=”0″ src=”http://i457.photobucket.com/albums/qq295/LMDO_photo/125copy.jpg” width=”125″ height=”125″
</a>

What that all means is the img (image) src (source) is located at photobucket with their identifier and jpg extension. Then just for good measure I stuck a couple of dimension commands on there. Not sure I had to do that or not, but I don’t argue with success!

It worked, the damned thing worked, woo hoo ! (Ninja speak)

So now boys and girls, you are going to see that little ocean beach scene all over the place.

125X125 Linkmoney dot org Banner Ad

You can do it too!

Now if you have any questions, you have my permission to ask Garry and he will very politely tell you that “that crap is EASY !”

I’m Rich !

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