At first glance this lesson might seem silly. It doesn’t talk about making money online, internet marketing, or search engine optimization. Why do you need to know how to take screen shots then?

Blogging is about helping people. If your blog doesn’t provide useful information I can guarantee that it will fail. I honestly don’t know how it’s even possible to explain things clearly to people with using screen shots. I’m always amazed at how lazy even top sites are when they explain certain things. Using screen shots in your explanations can really help you to stand out in a crowd of reproduced information.

When you are telling someone to click this or that, why not give them a picture of what they’re looking for? I did it with my lesson on using Adsense channels, wouldn’t you agree that it makes it easier for the reader? It might have taken an extra ten minutes to add those screen shots and the lesson is obviously twice as useful because of them.

How To Take Screen Shots

A screen shot is actually very simple to take. Here are the steps:

• Get the content you want to take a shot of on your screen. Obviously, if it isn’t on your screen you won’t be able to take a shot of it.
• Hold ‘Alt’ on your keyboard and hit ‘Prt Scr’ (Print Screen). ‘Prt Scr’ is usually found directly to the right of the F12 button on your keyboard. Once you have done that, your computer will have copied what’s on your screen. You will then be able to paste it wherever you want.
• Paste into your favorite picture editing program. Since I know that almost everyone will have Paint, I’ll use that for the purpose of this lesson.

Once you have opened Paint, you can paste it in using the normal methods for pasting, which are: 1) Right-clicking your mouse and selecting ‘paste’ or 2) hit ‘V’ while holding ‘Ctrl’ on your keyboard.

Once you have pasted the document, you’ll need to learn a few ways to manipulate the image, since it will be a screen shot of the entire screen.

Cutting Out The Piece Of The Image You Need

To cut out the part of the image you need, your going to first click on the little diagonal box:

This tool allows you to cut out any part of the image you need. All you have to do is hold down the button on your mouse while dragging the dotted line around the desired section of the image.

When you have done this correctly, it should look something like this (notice that the area with the dotted line around it is what I’m going to end up with):

Once you have the section outlined with the dotted line, you can cut it by using ‘Ctrl X’ on your keyboard. This will cut it out of the image, and you can then paste it into a new document (which means you now need to open a new document in Paint) .

You open a new document by going to ‘File’ (upper left-hand corner) and then ‘New’. It will ask you if you want to save the changes, select ‘No’. You will then be able to paste the section you cut with ‘Ctrl V’ or by right-clicking and selecting Paste. Now all you have to do is save the document and your all set!

What if it’s the wrong size?

Resizing The Image

You can resize the image by going to ‘Image’ at the top of the screen, and then ‘Stretch/Skew’. It will open a little box that will let you shrink or expand the image by percentage. Using 90 in both the horizontal and vertical boxes will make the image 90% of the original size (about 10 percent smaller):

You can alter the size by whatever percentage you want.

Being More Helpful Is Better Blogging

There’s no question that you will achieve better results if your posts are more helpful. If you go out of your way to show people how to do certain things you will improve dramatically.