Blogger Help

Add a series of photos in blog footer

2009-10-04T00:27:00.000-07:00

A reader asked how to put the profile photos of each author in a blog footer. That require a long answer, so I will answer in a post. Actually, the method described can be applied to the Header as well as the footer. You just click the right Add a Page Element in the right section in the LAYOUT.

I will proceed to explain how I put a series of 4 photos in the footer of My photo store. The first thing I did was to find out what is the width of the footer, and to do that, I click the TEMPLATE tab, then the EDIT HTML sub-tab to open the template editor window. I search and found this:

#footer {
width:660px;

That tells me the width of the footer is 660 pixels wide. I plan to put a series of 4 photos in the footer. 660 divided by 4 gives me 165. There are 2 ways to proceed, I will use the method that conserve storage space for my Blogger account and describe a slightly different method later. I will first resize the photos to width 160 using Irfanview (click BACK button to get back to this page). I then uploaded the photos to Photos for footer. I clicked on the photo one by one to get to the webpage that shows only the photo, and for each photo, I click VIEW in the menu bar and chose "View source". I copied the URL of the photo from the source and paste it into a Notepad file for later use. After getting the URLs of all the 4 photos, I then proceeded to the next step.

I clicked the TEMPLATE tab to get to the LAYOUT, click "Add a Page Element" in the footer section (if you want it in the Header, you will click "Add a Page Element" in the Header section), chose HTML/Javascript, then type this HTML for a table:

td>

The actual HTML I used to display the series of 4 photos in the footer in My photo store I give in the scroll box below:

You will have to adjust the method described according to the number of photos you plan to put in the footer.

As promised, I will now described briefly an alternative method with will take up more Blogger storage space. You can upload the photos in its actual size, them for the tag, write the tag as follows:

. Of course, if your footer width and/or the number of photos you want to put is different from mine, you will have to adjust the width="W" according.

Display images in larger sizes

2009-10-04T00:22:00.000-07:00

"why is it that my images are big but when i upload them they become so small?"

When you use Blogger's photo upload icon to display images, you can chose 3 different default sizes - large, medium and small. If your image is very large, Blogger will shrink it to a smaller size for display. However, if you are in the COMPOSE mode, you can use your mouse to grab the edge or the side and drag-drop it to create a displayed image that can be larger or smaller than the default.

Alternatively, you can use the HTML image tag to display it in the original size or use that tag with a width attribute to display it in whatever size you choose.

How to find the width of your blog Header, sidebar and main column

2009-08-07T00:31:00.000-07:00

Got a question from a blog reader about how to go about finding the width of the blog Header, so I thought I might as well make a post to let more people know about it.

To get the width of the blog Header, sidebars, main column, sign into Dashboard. In the section for the relevant blog, click LAYOUT, then click EDIT TEMPLATE. This will open the template editor window. Search through the templates for the following:

#header-wrapper {
width:750px;
margin:0 auto 10px;
border:1px solid $bordercolor;
}

#main-wrapper {
width: 400px;
margin-left: 20px;
float: left;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
}

#sidebar-wrapper {
width: 150px;
float: right;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
}

These codes are from the template of this blog. The first block of codes tells me that the width of the Header is 750 pixels. The second block says the main column width is 400 pixels. The last two block of codes tells me that both the sidebars are of width 150 pixels.

Increase Visitors

2008-09-18T22:59:00.000-07:00

1.SEARCH ENGINE:

It brings lots of traffic to your blog.There are millions of people search in the search engines like Google,Yahoo,msn everyday.So,if your blog has so many good posts and is well indexed by Google,etc..you will get a good amount of traffic via search engines.There are a few steps to look at if you want a decent amount of traffic from the search engines like "submitting your blog site map to Google",yahoo to index you blog pages very quickly.And the other important one is adding meta tags to your blog.If you follow these two simple steps,then you will get a decent traffic.

2.Submitting your blog to Blog Directories:

You may know this before,submitting your blog to blog directories will bring you a good traffic.
Here is a good list of blog directories(there are so many directories,but the below one's will bring you a good traffic).Most of these blog directories ask you to register before you submit your blog.My suggestion is,create a new email address solely for this purpose so,your personal emails are not flooded with the emails sent by the blog administrators,etc.
You can find the Blog directories list here.

3.Participate in forums,groups,etc:

Just go to Google and enter your [major keyword + forum] or [keyword+groups] and search.Suppose,your blog is about blogging,then search 'Blogging forum'.You will find some forums,groups related to your site.Register in the forums and post articles,etc with a link back to your blog(as a signature).Answer questions,clarify doubts and provide a link to your blog.But,Don't SPAM.

4.Social Bookmarking:

Social Bookmarking is another way to build good traffic to your website/blog.If you don't know what Social Bookmarking is
"Social Bookmarking is a practise of saving Bookmarks,tagging the posts with keywords in a website".Bookmarking means saving a specific website URL(address) in your browser that you wish to visit later.There are so many Social Bookmarking sites like del.icio.us,digg,furl,technorati.
One good thing about these Social bookmarking sites is,you will get instant traffic.Just register with them,store your bookmarks,tags,.. and you are done,See your site meter blasting with traffic.

5.Submit Articles to Article Directories:

Submitting articles to article directories is another effective way to build more traffic.By submitting to them,your articles get massive exposure and gain you more traffic.
Some of the popular article directories are goarticles.com,ezinearticles.com,articlecity.com,etc.
There are hundreds of article directories,just Google it.

6.Leaving Comments on other blogs:Leaving comments with a link back to your blog is another good thing to do.Leaving comments in the related blogs is more useful and it also increases your PageRank.Always leave good comments and don't Spam.

You will get much of visitors if you have rich contents.I assure everyone.

50 Great Widgets

2008-09-18T22:53:00.000-07:00

Widgets are a handy, easy and simple way to add some flare to your blog. Whether you’d like to display the number of currently online visitors to your site or simply the weather report for Los Angeles, you can do it with widgets. I have a list of my favourite widgets sites.Here is for you:

(1)MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers - This widget can easily be called a hit amongst blog owners; its popularity even managed to convince Yahoo into buying MyBlogLog. The widget lets you see the avatars of recent visitors to your blog, provided they’re also members of MyBlogLog.

(2)Mashable - Get the latest social networking news from this very site.

(3)Flickr Flash Photo Stream Badge - Display images from your Flickr profile with a handy Flash photo stream.

(4)Preview Anywhere - See a live preview of outgoing links in a small popup which activates on mouseover. Some find this annoying, while others might find it useful.

(5)Twitter Badge - If your life is so interesting that everyone must know what you’re up to all the time, then a Twitter badge is the ideal counterpart to your blog. It’ll proudly displays your recent tweets.

(6)Digg News - Display the latest Digg links on your blog. Themeable and fully customizable.

(7)FEEDJIT - Real time traffic data directly in your blog’s sidebar.

(8)LineBuzz - Inline comments for your blog. Very handy for blogs with frequent lively discussions.

(9)Flixn - Display a stream directly from your webcam, so your blog visitors can always see what you’re up to.

(10)3Jam - Lets your visitors send messages to your mobile phone, without them knowing your phone number.

(11)Jaxtr - With Jaxtr, your visitors can actually call you to your mobile phone; again, your number stays private.

(12)LinkedInABox - Show off your LinkedIn profile. Perfect for personal blogs.

(13)Box Widget - Enable visitors to use box.net’s online storage directly on your web site.

(14)Price of gas - Displaying gas prices on your blog might seem unnecessary to some, but it’s cool if you have a traffic/travel related blog.

(15)iBegin Weather Widget - Display weather information in your sidebar. Just like with Price of Gas, works great with travel-related blogs.

(16)ClockLink - Display time in various time zones with these nifty Flash clocks.

(17)Film Loops - Display the latest loops from your FilmLoops account.

(18)Daily Painters - Display paintings from famous painters on your blog.

(19)WhoLinked - Show your visitors which sites have recently linked to your web site. Works with all major blog platforms.

(20)Criteo AutoRoll - Displays links to blogs similar to your blog.

(21)Bitty Browser - Embed a cute, fully functional mini web browser to your blog.

(22)Leafletter - Create a mini website and embed it into your blog.

(23)WikiSeek - Search Wikipedia with this simple widget.

(24)FeedCount - Show off the number of visitors to your blog with this handy little button.

(25)Technorati Link Count - Display the number of links your website has from one of the biggest blog authorities - Technorati.

(26)MyPageRank - Another good way to show how “big” your blog is is to show off your Google PageRank.

(27)CheckPageRank - In addition to showing your PageRank, this widget also shows your Alexa ranking.

(28)BlinkxIt - Embed a link to related videos directly into your website.

(29)Skype button - Display your Skype online/offline status on your blog.

(30)RockYou Horoscope - Not something I would personally use, but some people are into horoscope. Hell, most people are into horoscope. Anyway, this widget shows horoscope (doh!) and does it in a nicely designed colorful box.

(31)del.icio.us Tagometer - Display how many times have del.icio.us users saved your page.

(32)del.icio.us Linkrolls - This badge shows your latest bookmarks from del.icio.us.

(33)Timelines - Need to create a timeline? Seek no further. This widget makes it really easy.

(34)PollDaddy - PollDaddy lets you create beautiful polls in no time, and display them at your blog.

(35)Vizu - Another poll-making widget, compatible with all major blog platforms.

(36)AnswerTips - Display definitions from Answers.com for various terms on your blog. The definitions are shown in bubbles which are activated on doubleclick.

(37)AnswerBoxes - Give your visitors a chance to enter a term themselves, and get a definition from Answers.com

(38)Now Playing - If you got to share your current playlist contents with the world, Sigamp will do the trick. Works with most popular music players, including Foobar, Winamp, iTunes and others.

(39)BuzzBoost - Display headlines from your RSS feed on any website.

(40)LibraryThing - Show off the latest books you’ve been reading.

(41)Plaxo Address Book - Let your most faithful visitors access their address books direclty from your site.

(42)AuctionAds - A widget that displays auctioned items on eBay, and gives you a percentage of the price paid when sometimes buys an item.

(43)aStore - Similar to AuctionAds, only for Amazon. Create a mini-store on your site and receive profit when someone buys an item through your store.

(44)Plazes - Show your current location on a Plazes map.

(45)Stockalicious - Track your portfolio with this widget, and share it with others. Let everyone know how much money you’ve lost.

(46)Yahoo! For Good - Create a charity badge and ask for donations for a worthy cause.

(47)Giftspace - Your friends never know what to buy you for birthday? Let them know what you really want with this nifty widget.

(48)MixMap - See where are the visitors to your MySpace profile from on a map.

(49)Google Map Widget - Display a searchable Google Map on your website.

(50)Google Video Search - Add a video search form and selected videos to your web site.

(51)Odeo player - Display an Odeo player for and podcast right there in your sidebar.

Keep blogging.

Blogger Templates Helpful Links

2008-09-18T22:15:00.000-07:00

See these links for more help on Blogger templates:

How to install the template in your blog.
How to use your own header image .
How to get excellent images for your blog header?
Try different browser if fail to upload template.
Check out how to turn the Blogger navigation bar on/off.
How to move the Blog Title & Description location?
How to change the opacity level of your blog background?
How to post large images and photos in your Blogger blogspot?

10 TEMPLATES

2008-09-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

WP-Polaroid
Click here to Download

Vibrant
Click here to Download

Template-outono
Click here to Download

Tecnoverde
Click here to Download

Sunset
Click here to Download

Selancer
Click here to Download

Darkworld
Click here to Download

Wp-Premium
Click here to Download

Pro lover
Click here to Download

Black and white Love
Click here to Download

post large images and photos in your Blogger blogspot?

2008-09-17T23:17:00.001-07:00

Using the standard "Add Image" button in Blogger's text editor, you can only post photos or images with limited size, even if you choose the "Large Image" option.

Check out this test blog to see how the image fills up the entire post area. If you use the Blogger's Add Image button, the largest image you can post will be much smaller than this.

Follow these instructions to post large photos or images in your blog:

Store your photos in an online image hosting service. I would suggest the free Photobucket powered by Google.
Copy the direct link to the photo you want to post. In Photobucket, the direct link to your photo is located in the "Direct Link - Layout Pages" tab below your photo.
In your Blogger Create Post panel, click the Edit HTML in the text editor.
To post the photo or image, type the code below in the Blogger text Editor:

click here

Change PhotoURL to the actual URL (the direct link) of the photo you want to post.
Set the width and height of your photos appropriately. If you want it to be the actual size, simply delete the red part. If you just want to set the width and let the height changes accordingly to scale, simply set the width only, not the height.

How to Change Background Opacity?

2008-09-17T23:15:00.000-07:00

You can change the Blogger template opacity/transparency level easily by changing a few numbers in the code. Here's how to do it:

Click on the Layout: Edit HTML tab. Then, search for the code below:

#content-wrapper { margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 3px 3px; width: 805px; position: relative; text-align: left; background: $blogbgColor; border-right: 1px solid $blogBorderColor; filter:alpha(opacity=75); -moz-opacity:0.75; opacity:0.75; }

Change the transparency level by changing the numbers highlighted in red. Vary the numbers between 0 to 100 for the line 1, or 0 to 1.0 for the lines 2 and 3. All the numbers must be at the same level, for example 75 for line 1 is equal to 0.75 for lines 2 and 3. The lower the number, the more transparent your blog is. If you don't want it to be transparent, set the values to 100, or 1.0.

Testing and Viewing in Other Browsers

2008-09-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

Personally, I don't like the stage of testing in other browsers. It's annoying that other browsers might show your blog differently than the blogs you're designing it in. But if you want all to have access to your blog and see it as nicely as you've designed it, then you have to go through this process. As for my blog and my demo blogs, I designed them in Firefox and tested in IE7. I've received comments that people using IE6 have some trouble with the templates, but I didn't test them in IE6, and not about to trouble myself downloading IE6 and debugging the codes. The way I see it, if Firefox and IE7 get it right, then it's IE6 that's got the problem (not my templates) and it's IE6 that has to debug itself. Anyway, isn't that why IE7 is made in the first place?

Personally, I think Firefox is by far above all. If you're not using Firefox, I suggest you download them right now - it's free, fast, not too crowded with useless buttons, lightweight, and just plain great. And if you're using IE6 and don't want to upgrade to IE7 because your computer is not fit enough to take the load, but you know that viewing blogs is prone to bugs - then Firefox should be the way to go. Plus, the download is quick, the upgrading is efficient and fast, and there's a lot more to this - but I'll just let you see them on your own. So, if you want to get rid of IE and use Firefox instead, the download button is on the sidebar...

I don't really have a tip for debugging. You just have to be patient and solve the problems one by one. The way I avoid problems is by writing a stricter code so they won't have a chance to flip flop or get 'loose'. If you want, you can start designing a template starting from any of my own templates. That way, you can maintain the part of the CSS code that's there to avoid any bugs in different browsers. But I can't guarantee they're 100% bug-free!

Update:
I have tested all the templates in all browsers using Browsershots.org and labeled the ones compatible with all browsers (including IE6). There are also some templates compatible with IE6, but have their sidebars pushed down the Blog Posts because their content-box width is wider than the sidebar. So, please check if this is the case if you see your sidebar misaligned.

Tips and problems when installing templates

2008-09-17T22:55:00.000-07:00

Here are some tips you can use to improve reliability on using these templates and some problems you might encounter when installing and how to solve them.

Tips on using background images:
The background images (images of the header, main background, content background, title bar, list background, etc) are stored in my flickr account. I can't guarantee the reliability on fetching these images all the time. So I suggest that you upload the images for a particular template that you're using and store them somewhere else. Simply get the image URLs from the xml code and change the URLs in the code (in red) to point to the new address of the images.

Example of code:
background: #000000 URL(http://...........) repeat left top;

Check all URLs in the CSS styling section and not just the first one you see in the code.

Caution with Header section alignment:
If your Header section look misaligned the first time you upload any template into your blog, that's probably because your Header Title and Description is too long and wrapped into a second line. If this is the case, shorten them or make them smaller. If not, it might be that your Linkbar is empty or your own uploaded header image size is wrong.

Caution with uploading your own Header image:
When you upload your own header image from the Header Layout page, the whole section or some part of it can be misaligned or cut off if your image is not compatible (having the right size) with the template. Read here for more details.

Caution with Linkbar: If you use any template with linkbar, the Header section might look weird and cutoff the first time you upload it into your blog. It's because your linkbar is empty (without any links yet). So fill up you links and the Header section will turn to normal again.

When Blogger can't save your new template:
If Blogger can't save the template because there are more than one IDs (for example ID for LinkList, HTML, Adsense, etc), simply go back to your old template and delete all widgets (also called page elements) except the basic ones (like About Me, Labels, and Blog Archives) and reinstall the template. You can later add the widgets back on.

Report your problems here:
If you face some new problems when installing my templates or if you want to share some tips, put your questions or tips in the Comment section. I'll try to answer them as soon as I can.

Tips and problems when installing templates

2008-09-17T22:53:00.000-07:00

Here are some tips you can use to improve reliability on using these templates and some problems you might encounter when installing and how to solve them.

Tips on using background images:
The background images (images of the header, main background, content background, title bar, list background, etc) are stored in my flickr account. I can't guarantee the reliability on fetching these images all the time. So I suggest that you upload the images for a particular template that you're using and store them somewhere else. Simply get the image URLs from the xml code and change the URLs in the code (in red) to point to the new address of the images.

Example of code:
background: #000000 URL(http://...........) repeat left top;

Check all URLs in the CSS styling section and not just the first one you see in the code.

Caution with Header section alignment:
If your Header section look misaligned the first time you upload any template into your blog, that's probably because your Header Title and Description is too long and wrapped into a second line. If this is the case, shorten them or make them smaller. If not, it might be that your Linkbar is empty or your own uploaded header image size is wrong.

Caution with uploading your own Header image:
When you upload your own header image from the Header Layout page, the whole section or some part of it can be misaligned or cut off if your image is not compatible (having the right size) with the template. Read here for more details.

Caution with Linkbar: If you use any template with linkbar, the Header section might look weird and cutoff the first time you upload it into your blog. It's because your linkbar is empty (without any links yet). So fill up you links and the Header section will turn to normal again.

When Blogger can't save your new template:
If Blogger can't save the template because there are more than one IDs (for example ID for LinkList, HTML, Adsense, etc), simply go back to your old template and delete all widgets (also called page elements) except the basic ones (like About Me, Labels, and Blog Archives) and reinstall the template. You can later add the widgets back on.

Read also some other common template problems , fail to upload template.

Report your problems here:
If you face some new problems when installing my templates or if you want to share some tips, put your questions or tips in the Comment section. I'll try to answer them as soon as I can.

What is a Linkbar?

2008-09-17T22:52:00.000-07:00

Linkbar is just a menu of links at the top of your blog, usually near your Blog Title. Come to think of it, it's better if I just call it Menubar. I don't know why I call it Linkbar in the first place, but I'll just stick to that name because I've used it so many times in my post and my templates.

Below are some example pictures of where the Linkbar is in the blog page, and how you can add links to the Linkbar in the Settings page.

Moving the 'Blog Title & Description' Location

2008-09-17T22:51:00.000-07:00

This guide is meant to be used with the Ourblogtemplates.com designs.

You may see that you have to move the location of your Blog Title & Description (BTD), relative to the header borders or image. For example, if you're using a header image smaller that what was designed for the template and the BTD doesn't appear because it's way down at the bottom of the header border, you then have to move the BTD up. To do this, search for this code:

#header h1 {
display: block;
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
padding: 130px 30px 0px 20px;
color: $blogTitleColor;
font: $blogTitleFont;
text-align: left;
}

To move the BTD up or down, change the number in red accordingly. The smaller the number, the higher the BTD location is on the header, relative to its borders and/or header image.

This is just a basic instruction to play around with the BTD location. If you're more familiar with CSS, than this obviously is just a piece of cake :)

How to Get Excellent Images for Your Blog Header?

2008-09-17T22:50:00.002-07:00

To improve your blog design, you can place your own image in the header section, and add your own text to act as the blog title and description, instead of using the default Blog Title and Description provided in the template.

If you don't have any images to use as the header image, you can look at these websites that offer free excellent blog header images. You can follow this instruction on how to place an image on a Blogger's blog .

How to upload your own header image

2008-09-17T22:50:00.001-07:00

This guide will show you how to upload a header image with Blog Title and Description as part of the graphic. For this to work, you have to hide the default Blog Title and Description texts.

*****

It's much better to use your own header image than the image already defined by the designer or just the simple plain background. For one thing, you can be sure to have a unique header compared to the rest of the blogs. The second reason is that you can write your blog Title and Description with much nicer fonts and color combinations.

Before that, you have to make sure that your image size will align well with the rest of the Header section. Turning the Title and Description text on or off can also mess up you alignment. For my templates, I've already given instructions for perfect alignment.

So, how to do this? Simple...

1. Go to the Layout > Template > Page Element. From there, click the Edit button for your Header. The screen below will pop up.

2. Upload an image from your computer. Make sure to that your image size is correct or otherwise your Header will be misaligned! Save your changes. (Don't forget to fill in your Title and Description in the text box above! You can turn the text off later.)

3. To hide the default Blog Title and Description text, click the Header Edit button again. Another screen will pop up, but with a slightly different option (see the screen below). Select the 'Placement: Instead of title and description'. This will hide your Title and Description from showing up on the blog (but still kept as your blog's information). If you don't want to hide your Title and Description text, simply click the other option.

4. That's it. All you really have to do is make sure that you've got a nice image to put up as your blog's header.

Installing the template in your blog

2008-09-17T22:48:00.000-07:00

Before you start changing your template, make sure you save your old template file just in case you need to start again. And make sure you have a programming-based text editor installed on your computer (to make the codes easier to see. If you don't have one, there are many free programming text editors that you can download. I use Notepad++).

These are some instructions on how to put the template in your blog. There are some ways to do it; I'll explain some of them, starting from the simplest methods.

For tips to improve template usage and common problems faced when installing these templates, read this post, or here if you fail to upload template.

METHODS TO INSTALL BLOGGER TEMPLATES:

Method I. Simplest method - Uploading the xml file:

Download the template that you want and save it in your computer (make sure it is saved as xml file).
Go to your Layout > Template > Edit HTML page.
Choose the file from the Browse... button, and then press the Upload button.
It may ask you to delete some widgets - so just delete them. (Widgets are the extra page element added to the sidebars).
You're done! View your new blog.
If your contents doesn't look aligned, that's probably because you don't have any widget on one of the sidebars - so add your widgets.

Method II. Copy-paste the template codes into the Blogger text editor:

If you don't want to download the file first, or prefer to paste the code into your Blogger editor, this is how to do it.

Open the template file that you want and copy all the codes.
Got to your Layout > Template > Edit HTML page.
Click the Expand Widget Templates (EWT) button. (If the EWT button is on or clicked, all template codes will be visible; if it's off or unclicked, then some codes related to Blogger Data are hidden so that the HTML codes look less messy - most of the time, you don't want to change or add codes inside the Blogger Data area).
Select all the codes in your Blogger editor and delete them all. Then paste the codes for your new template.
It may ask you to delete some widgets - so just delete them. (Widgets are the extra page element added to the sidebars).
You're done! View your new blog.
If your contents doesn't look aligned, that's probably because you don't have any widget on one of the sidebars - so add your widgets.

Method III. Copy-paste the CSS styling only into the template code:

The annoying part about using the two methods above is that you have to delete some widgets that you've made (maybe some Adsense codes, Text contents, HTML codes - usually the widgets About Me, Labels, and Blog Archives are not deleted). If you don't want this to happen, you must copy and paste the CSS styling part only. By changing the CSS part only, you don't change anything related to the Blogger Data including the data about the widgets that you've made.

CSS styling is the code that controls everything about the template style or appearance - the font size, colors, background images, header size, post layout, sidebar size and locations, etc.

But to do this is a bit tricky. You have to make sure the basic layout of your old template with the new one is the same. For example, if the old template has 3 columns (2 sidebars and 1 main), your new template has to be 3 columns too. The arrangement of columns will follow the old template; for example SMS or MSS or SSM. If the old and new templates don't have the same content layout, it won't work! If you're not sure about this, just use the first 2 methods above.

If you still want to change the CSS styling part only, read on below.

In the template, look for the code section in between the b:skin tags. In my templates, I've labeled the start and end of the CSS styling part. (In the code, the 'Page structure tweaks' code are actually part of the CSS styling too, but just leave it there.)

So, these are what you need to do to change the CSS part only:

Open the template file that you want and copy the CSS styling code only.
Got to your Layout > Template > Edit HTML page.
Don't click the Expand Widget Templates (EWT) button because you don't have to change the Blogger Data code.
Select the existing CSS styling codes in your Blogger editor and delete them. Then paste the codes for your new template.
It may ask you to delete some widgets - so just delete them. (Widgets are the extra page element added to the sidebars).
You're done! View your new blog.
If it doesn't work, you can always use the first 2 methods above and add the widgets later.

Fail to Upload Template?

2008-09-17T22:46:00.000-07:00

This happened to me just now when I tried to upload my own template using Firefox browser. I got an error message from Blogger.

But it worked fine when I uploaded the template using Internet Explorer browser. So if you have the same problem on Firefox when uploading these templates, try using the Internet Explorer. I don't really know why, but as long as it worked, that's all that matters.

How to Add the Language Translator Buttons?

2008-09-17T22:45:00.001-07:00

Here's the code you can add to create the flag buttons (above) to translate your blog into different languages, depending on which country flag the visitors click. Simply copy all the code below and paste them into a widget (aka a Page Element) and all the 9 flag buttons will appear.




click here to get the code

How to Add the Technorati Favorites Button?

2008-09-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a few codes that you can implement to add the 'Add This Blog to My Technorati Favorites' button to your blog. The purpose for this button is to let your visitor s have an easier option to add your blog to their list of Technorati favorite blogs. This increases your blog popularity in Technorati listing.

I'll put down 3 codes for you to choose from, each with a different Technorati Fav buttons. Don't forget to change yourblogname.com to your own blog's URL.

Button 1:

Button 2:
The Technorati image is rounder for this button.

Button 3:

How to add META tags into your blog?

2008-09-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

Do you want to improve your blog value, get more hits, and ranked high on search engines? Then you must optimize how your blog is indexed in a search engine.

While there are lots of factors involved in building quality blogs that can draw huge traffic in, having simple things right in the beginning is as important. One of this simple thing is getting your blog indexed properly with the right description & keywords to optimize search engine rankings (known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO).

To get information, search engines use automated software agents called spiders, crawlers, robots, or bots to collect the a few words from a site or blog (typically the URLs, blog name, and blog description, and maybe some words in the early part of sentences or paragraphs) that will later be used as keywords to index the blog.

Because you cannot be certain which words are taken as keywords pertaining to your blog, it's most likely that your blog won't be indexed properly in search engines - in the worst case, your highly relevant keywords might not even be used to index your blog. When this happen, searches on keywords relevant to your blog may have your blog buried at the far end of the list of thousands and millions of pages. What a waste!

To have a control of what is read by crawlers on your blog to be indexed, you have to build what is called a META tag - basically a bunch of words that makes up the most relevant description and keywords of your blog. If the META tag exist, this is what the crawlers will read and index and get displayed on any searches related to your keywords.

Here's what a search on my blog looks like on Google. The description is exactly the one I have written in the META tag. The 1st search on the list shows the new META tag description that was made a few seconds before the snap. The old META tag is shown beneath it (22 hours ago).

There are basically 2 parts to a META tag: first is the META description and second is the META keywords. The description are what appears on a search. As you can see, if the description is too long, it'll be cropped as search engines only uses a few lines to describe the blog. An optimum number of characters to use for META description is 150 (including spaces and dots).

For META keywords, you can use as many words as you want, but don't repeat the same word too many times (more than 5) to avoid keyword spam. Crawlers can identify keyword spamming easily - which won't make it good either for SEO.

To create a META tag, simply copy the code below and rewrite your META description and keywords (the red text):

Write your META description here. Keep it less than 150 characters.' name='description'/>

Write your META keywords here as many as you want separated with commas. Keep word repetition less than 5 to avoid keyword spamming.' name='keywords'/>

Then, place it in between the ..... section near the top part of your template XML code. It's best to put it just below the <data:blog.pagetitle/> code.

For more details:
Go to this Free META Tag Builder tool. It directs you easily to build a META tag, create the HTML or XHTML code, and guides to paste it into your blog template XML code.

Just for the fun of it, you can analyze your blog's original description and keywords by submitting your blog URL at the Free META TAG Analyzer before placing the new META tags in your blog - so that you can compare how it is indexed before and after the change.

Testing in different browsers using Browsershots.org

2008-09-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

If you're a template designer or happen to redesign your blog on your own, you must want to know how it looks in other browsers than the one you're using.

It's easy enough to open up the few browsers you have installed in your computer and test your newly designed blog in it. But to know for sure that it works ok in all the browsers out there is next to impossible. Just to test in 2 different version of browsers, IE6 and IE7, are tough enough - as I've faced with previously.

I have the IE7 and can't have the IE6 installed in the same machine. There are options out there to install a virtual PC in your machine so that I can install IE6. But it requires quite a large space for the virtual PC alone, and there are some other things to get out of the way to get everything in place. So, thanks but no thanks!

Recently, a reader here mentioned about using Browsershots.org to test a new template in all the browsers out there. All of them! I tried it and basically this was where my testing problem ends. All the testing works beautifully.

Browsershots.org is an online free service that takes the URL of the blog to be tested and opens it up in all the different browsers on their machines. Screenshots, or snapshots, of the blog page in each one of the browsers are then taken and uploaded back within a a few minutes into the main page for your viewing pleasure/displeasure. From there, you can immediately see which browser works or not, and zoom in to a full page ( top to bottom of page) to see the details.

Here's the Browsershots.org main page:

Here're the screenshots (you can zoom each one to a full page):

There are limitations in that you can only have a number of screenshots (~300+) per day per IP, and ~60+ shots per website per day. Limitations can be lifted up by signing up into their service or paying for an extended period of priority processing.

At least for me, having only a few hundreds of screenshots is much better than not knowing how it looks in other browsers at all. My own experience is that almost all browsers work great with my templates - except IE5 and IE6. Since knowing this Browsershots service, all my new templates are good to go with IE5 or IE6.

In some cases, you may see that your new template doesn't open up well in one or two obscure browsers. Before you try to do more tweaking to solve the problem, check to see that browsers' usage statistics. It's not worth your effort to pull up your brain power just to make it look okay in a browser used by one person for every million internet users. W3schools can provide you a record of the current browser usage monthly statistics.

How to Get 2000+ Subscribers in 3 Months

2008-09-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

Tina Su wrote a clear guide as a guest post at Problogger.net describing her strategy to get 2000+ subscribers within only 90 days of starting a new blog from scratch, without having any previous blogs or blogging experience.

She laid out 3 important things one should do, in proper order, to build a successful blog. This guide is based on her own strategy and experience building a successful blog in a short time. I have summarized the essence of her article below.

1. Creating Concrete Goals
Before starting a blog, you have to know why you are doing it. In her case, she wanted to share her knowledge and experience in the topics of self empowerment and well-being as well as to build financial independence. Having the right reasons to start a blog will become a powerful drive and motivation for you to continue making sure that your blog will succeed.

Once you are motivated with the right reasons, you have to create a set of clearly defined goals or targets that you can measure. An example of a clear goal is ‘I want to have 500 unique visitors within the first month’, rather than just saying ‘I want to have huge traffics for this blog’ which does not set any measurable quantities.

These targets have to be clearly defined so that in time you can look back and evaluate your progress. Having clear targets also help you to focus and put all effort in to plan and make sure they’re achieved within a set time frame. Tina herself writes her blog progress and evaluates her goals in a separate journal periodically. Clear targets, proper planning, and focused effort are keys to building a successful blog.

It is important that you build your blog on a specific niche and know what audience you want to target. The blog then have to be centered around this niche and target audience, not centered around what you want to write (if you want to build a successful blog with loyal readers). Having too many topics to write about would confuse people reading your blog, and won't make them stick around or come back to visit in the future.

2. Building Quality Content
The most important part of a blog is its content, so it’s crucial that you focus most of your effort building quality content. But this should be done only after your have set clear goals.

To know what content is quality content, you have to think back on blogs that you read regularly or subscribe and why do you like them. Most of the times, these popular blogs that people like have high value-package content, practical solutions to readers’ needs or problems, or that they simply entertain, inspire or motivate readers with their own unique content and writing style.

If you were to write your own blog, wouldn’t you want your blog to have these qualities? Observe good qualities in other blogs and try to model upon them. As a basic rule, one should write with the intention of creating work that have values and benefits to others.

Other tips from her blogging experience:

Bloggers must have total honesty and strong intention to produce the best content possible.
Using personal examples can add positively to readers’ experience as they can relate more realistically to you or to their own stories.
Using pictures appropriately can enhance your posts.
Exercise good writing techniques and habits, be concise rather than verbose, and edit your articles thoroughly before posting.

3. Promoting the Blog
The next stage is to expose and promote your blog to others - there’s no point of having quality content if others don’t know about it. The techniques that Tina used to promote are very much straight forward, starting from people closest to her. But again, without having quality content in your blog, promoting it doesn't make any sense.

Email & offline - telling families, friends, co-workers, new people she met, friends on social networking, and basically everybody she can, to subscribe to her blog.
Connecting with readers - responding to every comments and emails, treating each and every reader nicely and warmly, or visiting and participating in niche groups in social networking e.g. facebook.
Leaving your mark - giving thoughtful and relevant comments in other blogs especially with related topics, without spamming. It's very likely that people would want to know you (and your blog) more if you participate lively in other people's blogs.
Networking - reaching out to other bloggers and building a good network with online friends and new bloggers as well. Be genuine when introducing yourself to others without asking them directly to promote your blog. People in your network can have strong potential to promote your blog to others.
Linking - create link to other blogs genuinely without asking them for favors in return. In time, the favors will come by itself as others start noticing your 'kindness' in linking to them.
Social media & networks - become power users in social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc. by promoting other blogs’ quality posts. As your profile becomes more well known, others will start noticing you and have your quality posts promoted as well, as what you have done to other blogs’ posts. Network with others in these social media sites to build up your profile. She doesn’t recommend people changing their names or avatars as this confuses people and affect negatively to building a good network – in fact, she keeps the same profile and name across all media sites to help people recognize her easily.

My Comments
Having had some, but little, experience in blogging, I'd say the strategy of having the right reasons and goals is really the make-it or break-it point of building a monetizing blog. If this basic foundation doesn't exist, you'll just be dragging yourself trying to make it through, pointlessly. You might want to read her original post as she spiced it up with personal stories that make you aware of what you have to have to do well quickly, online at least.

Photo by .Tatiana..

How to get 1000+ Subscribers in 3 Months

2008-09-17T22:37:00.002-07:00

Skellie at Skelliewag.org gave out the tips to get 1050 subscribers in just 3 months of blogging from scratch. She did it despite being the sole author of the blog and spent zero $$$ on marketing and promotion. And she said that it doesn’t matter what niche or audience you’re targeting; she did it although the niche has already matured and crowded with other blogs targeting the same audience. The gists of her tips are summarized here.

Know Your Target Audience
Most important of all is that you have to know who your audience is. You must write for your target readers and not just about the topics (because you may diverge away from the readers’ needs if you centered your content around topics to write).

Your target audience must be convinced that your content is written for their needs and unmissable. What they want is a 100% relevant content so that their times are not wasted. Even if your content is just 70% relevant, there’s a big chance that they won’t subscribe to it – because some of your content can be missed!

It’s a good trick to write clearly at the top of your blog to whom is it for so that they know right away without even reading the content yet.

Write Good Stuff, But How?
Content is the heart of your blog, so make it a great one. Write posts that give values to the readers, not just for the sake of making more posts. One post packed with values is worth so much more than many posts with little or no values.

If time is hard to come by, it’s okay to post less but make sure each piece have great values to offer. Make your readers’ time worthwhile. Readers will subscribe if they learn a lot from your content.

Expose Your Blog - To Your Target Audience!
There are two ways for people to get to your blogs – links or social media. These are the place to put your effort to build your blog’s exposure.

Links: There are two types of links:

1. Links you make in other blogs:

Links from your comments in other blogs.
Your forum or social media signature.
Your by-line as guest-posts.

2. Links you get from other blogs:

Write great articles that people will link to.
Ask them to link to you or exchange links with them.

The most powerful links that you can make or get are from popular blogs, sites, and forums related to your blogging niche. Not all links are equal - some links are better (in sending readers to your blog) than others. But it’s better to have all these links than to have none or just a few good ones. It’s unmistakable that if you have great and valuable content, links will come naturally.

Try also to write as guest-posts especially in popular blogs. But first, show that your content is worth it.

Social Media: The tip on social media (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) is simply to be an active user. If you vote for other posts, they tend to vote for your article as this is naturally the easiest way to repay the favor. Once your article has been voted, other people will easily build it up the ladder on.

Some principles that guarantees her success are to be friendly, treat every person you interact with respect, always help out in the best way you can, focus on mutual benefit, and give more than you take.

Other Little Things
Without all of the above, the little things won't work. But once you have the essentials covered, consider putting some effort on the extras

Make your feed button easily visible (e.g. at the top part without scrolling)
Add the option to subscribe at the end of each post.
Put effort on blog design. Readers see that authors’ are more serious with their content if they are serious about their blog design.

Tips to Increase Your Blog's Traffic

2008-09-17T22:37:00.001-07:00

Susan Gunelius at About.com shared 15 tips to increase your blog’s traffic. If your purpose in blogging is making money online, getting large traffic is a must. The problem with the blogosphere is that it has more than 100 million blogs. So, how can you make your blog visible? The essence of her tips is summarized here.

Write often and write well with quality and meaningful content to keep readers interested.
Submit blogs to search engines to make sure it is listed (it may take time for it to go up the list).
Link to others using Blogroll. Owners of the blogs you link to will most likely link to you back and have their visitors use the links to go to your blog.
Use comments efficiently. Increase your readers' loyalty by responding and interacting with your commenters. Leave thoughtful and relevant comments on other blogs to draw others to visit your blog.
Syndicate your blog using a feed so that others can get updates to your blog easily. (Read more on how to increase your subscribers.)
Use links and trackbacks. Links to your blogs are powerful 'vote of confidences' that are counted in ranking your blog. You can create internal links from your posts to your other posts too (works best when you use the right keywords to link). Trackbacks are links in other blogs’ comments that link back to your blog. They’re created when you link to these blogs' posts in your posts. Some blogs either don't have or don’t allow trackbacks to appear.
Add tags to your posts. Tags increase the chance of others finding your content in search engines.
Submit your posts to Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc). If your posts are excellent, others will vote for them as well and make them more visible to other millions of readers.
Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Use the right and relevant keywords relevant that can draw large number of readers to your posts. Using keywords that’s not searched often will decrease visibility of your blogs in search engines.
Use images with the right keywords. Other people don't just search for contents, they search for images too!
Try to write posts in other blogs as a guest blogger. The more popular those blogs are, the more traffic they’ll send to your blog.
Participate in forums and social networking with people of relevant interest.
Promote your blog outside the blogosphere. Add your blog URL in your email signature or business cards. Basically, tell others about it.
Nominate yourself (or other blogs) for blog awards to get more attention to your blog.
Don't be shy to do all of the above.

My Comments
These tips are not explained in detail to give you the bigger picture of the overall strategy. It's important to understand them as a whole before going deep into details. You can dig(g) into each of these tips by Googling or Yahoo!ing more about them.

Best Tips to Generate Money from Adsense

2008-09-17T22:36:00.001-07:00

Sharon Housley gave out top Adsense tips to help webmasters or bloggers profit from Google Adsense to generate money online using websites. The main ideas of these tips are summarized here.

Sites rank better on search engines if they have specific niche and clear theme and therefore will get the best revenue out of Adsense if the topics targeted have sufficient number of ads available.
Target decent or moderate paying keywords as your specific niche. Sites targeting highest paying keywords will find it difficult to rank well because of the high competition from established sites.
Older websites generate better ads revenue simply because it will rank better in search engines and the ads will become more relevant (relevant ads have better click-throughs).
Use Tracking Channels in Google Adsense program to study the ads that make the most money, best performing sites (if you have more than one), and ads placement. Make sure to let those ads run for a week and compare results on a weekly basis to see what ads work best.
Blend ads with site content (e.g. create ads without borders close to content). It's best that ads links should be different from the content colors to increase click-throughs. Randomizing ads link colors frequently is also a good practice so that frequent readers don't filter the ads.
To serve the most expensive ads on your site, compromise with the number of ads displayed. This is because the value per ads decreases as you increase the number of ads displayed (up to a max of three ads units).
Ads placed on hot spots and without scrolling will generate higher click-throughs (according to Google). Based on this hot spots map, the best place is near the beginning of the content. Experiment with the type of ads (text or image) to see which works best.
According to Google, the best ads sizes with highest click-throughs are the 336 x 280, the 300 x 250, and the 160 x 600, but these may be different for different web layout. Again experiment with these yourself to see which works best.

My Comments
These tips look very compact and may not seem to contain much detailed explanation, but these tips cover everything possible in general for you to know to get the best out of Adsense. It’s easier for you to study all of these in more detail later on than not having a compact and complete list like this to give you an overview. I’m sure some of the tips above are easy enough for you to experiment with right away on your blogs without having to study them in more detail.

Photo by ul Marga.

Adsense vs. BidVertiser - Which is the Best?

2008-09-17T22:35:00.001-07:00

Rafael Enriquez wrote the pros and cons about using BidVertiser and compares it with Adsense to see which one is the best money-making contextual advertisement program online. Because BidVertiser ads are similar to Adsense ads, both of them cannot be run at the same time on the same page.

Using BidVertiser: Pros

Adsense pays using check but BidVertiser pays through Paypal, which is faster.
Adsense’s minimum payout is $100 but BidVertiser’s minimum payout is $10, which is quicker.
BidVertiser allows you to choose the ads to open in a new window, which lets your web/blog stays open and hopefully to have visitors come back easily to your site.
You can approve ads manually with BidVertiser, not with Adsense.
You can test to see the final ads template with BidVertiser, not with Adsense.
You can choose to display eBay auction ads with BidVertiser, but not with Adsense.
With BidVertiser, you can see the amount of money advertisers are bidding on the ads that will be displayed on your site. With Adsense, you have to use other system (e.g. AdWords) which is not as easy.

Using BidVertiser: Cons

There are complaints of slow page loads using BidVertiser, not with Adsense. This creates major problems for users.
Adsense ads are more relevant and thus get higher click-throughs. This is because Adsense has more advertisers in their pool to offer the right ads for any keywords.
Because there are more advertisers competing in Adsense, chances are ads in Adsense pays more per click.
There complaints that BidVertiser doesn’t pay on time after reaching the min payout of $10. Adsense reputation in payment is better.

The decision which is better to use is left for individuals to take.

Photo by Helico.

Great Money Making Schemes for Your Blog

2008-09-17T22:34:00.001-07:00

Everton Blair gave out great money-making programs that he’s optimized in his blog to earn him a collected annual income of about $180K. He has been blogging for more than two years after loosing his day job. His main advice to bloggers is that they must take advantage growing the revenue when getting large volumes of traffic, rather than taking some time out relaxing and passively ripping income from those traffic. Here is the list of the schemes he recommends:

Affiliate Schemes

TNX – Offers amazing lets you sell contextual links and have great referral schemes.
CashCrate – Have scheme that pays you money directly by completing offers and have a referral scheme that pays you not only by sending referrals to them, but also getting paid for the referrals from your referrals. You’ll get 75% for completed offers and up to 30% of your referrals’ earnings.

Advertising

Adsense – The most popular ads program that serves high click-through-rate (CTR) contextual advertising.
Text Link Ads – For some bloggers, TLA is their biggest earner. The advantage is that the process of finding advertisers, signing them up, and renewing their monthly campaign is done automatically via TLA.
ReviewMe – Publishers get paid $50 - $500 per review of a product, service, blog, or website. The ReviewMe pool of advertisers that’ll pay publishers for writing reviews are growing each month.
Chitika – Works best to product-related blog as the Chitika eMiniMalls display product offers.
Vizu – an innovative and reader-friendly way to monetizing your site. CPMs are in the range of $1.50 - $3.50. Revenues are generated through the addition of Polls in your site that matches the content.
Vibrant In-Text – Only accepts sites with 200K+ page impressions a month. Their in-line ads are quite profitable.
Tribal Fusion - Only accepts sites with 200K+ page impressions a month. Payments are based on CPM as opposed to CPC with relatively high rates depending on the placement of ads.

Photo by greg westfall.

How to Reduce Ad-Blindness

2008-09-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

Skellie gave out some tips to prevent ad-blindness – the tendency to overlook the ads after frequent visits. Reducing ad-blindness increases your click-through-rate (CTR) and brings more revenues to your blog. Here’s the gist of her tips.

We, the readers, don’t go through a blog’s page inch by inch. Things get bypassed including those ads. So how do we reduce this bypassing and to increase CTR?

Many people think that to get higher CTR, they need to:

Put up more ads.
Make ads bigger.

This is not true. It’s more likely to cause the ads look clustered and obstructive - and thus gets filtered away.

Here are tips to get more attention to your ads:

Put elements of high interest nearer to the ads – your readers’ may stumble upon the ads too. But don’t put too close to trick your readers to accidentally click the ads. It's is simply irritating.
Put fewer and smaller ads. Readers may actually look at the ads because they stand out more and not many of them to cluster the page.

The real key is to experiment with ad-placement, number of units, sizes, and colors as well for a week before making any changes to see real results.

The bottom line is, clickers are readers – they’ll click only when they mean to do it after thinking about it. To let them have the chance to think about it is to allow them proper attention, both to the content and to the ads – and the best way to do this is not to clutter the page by having too many ads covering too much space.

Photo by brtsergio.

Advice on Promoting Blog

2008-09-17T22:31:00.000-07:00

To make money from blogging demands you to have large traffic, and to have large traffic demands you to work on promoting your blog early on. Here are some pointers on promoting your blog.

1. Search Engines Take Time
New blogs will take a few months to get significant traffic from search engines. Doing SEO is one way to improve on this. Other traffic sources, such as networking or social media, can boost up your visitor numbers quickly if you have the right strategy – so don’t focus on search engines only.

2. All Traffic Are Not Equal
Responses from visitors to your blog in terms of time spent, depth of pages, interest in content are best if they found what they’re looking for. Generally, these kinds of visitors arrive at your blog from either search engines, subscribers, and from recommendation from other blogs with similar niche. Traffic from social media has been commented to be less responsive and even unlikely to return back to their blogs. Try to consider what type of traffic is best for you when promoting your blog.

3. Post Consistently
Most successful bloggers post consistently and regularly even when they already have large search engines traffic drawn to their older posts. The reasons for posting new content consistently are to grow the number of subscribers, get new pages in search engines, and keep the blog fresh to get votes in social media. So why stop when you can get more?

4. Traffics Are Inconsistent
There are days that traffic goes up, and at times down. It’s natural. Be ready for anything or you might get upset. The most important thing is to get your mindset focused and not let down by a few hurdles.

5. Get More Repeat Visitors
The heart of successful blogs is repeat visitors. Unique visitors are great too, but nothing can guarantee they’ll be back. So, it’s good to really focus on getting more subscribers. They are also the most responsive in terms of giving comments, votes, etc.

6. Get Inbound Links
Having other blogs link to you helps in many ways. They bring visitors in, expose your blog more, and boost your search engine rankings. These links also signify that your content is valuable, trusted, and worthy to pay a visit to. Not only they help with search engine traffic but also build your credibility.

7. Get Traffic from Multiple Sources
Getting huge traffic from one type of traffic, say search engines, doesn’t guarantee it will always stay that way. For example, Google penalizes blogs that violated their guidelines. Likewise, other types of traffic can’t guarantee giving you consistent traffic all the time. So, diversify your traffic sources.

8. Don’t Ignore Small Traffic
Traffics that come from resources such as your comment or forum links are relatively small. But most of the time those visitors find your blog to be very relevant to what they’re searching for and are likely to become loyal readers. So, keep them coming.

9. Build Your Network
To be successful in blogging, you must have strong network. People in your network can provide you valuable advice, link to you, vote for your posts, inspire and encourage you, and even become partners in future projects. To build a strong network you must first be proactive and willing to meet and help others.

10. You Can Buy Traffic
You can buy advertisement to drive traffic to your blog quickly. PPC ads can be efficient and inexpensive if you bid on the right keywords. StumbleUpon also offers an advertising option where you buy traffic at $0.05 per visitor. Running these ads for a few months will drive significant traffic and give you good exposure at low costs.

Photo by mikebaird.

Optimizing Adsense for Higher Money Returns

2008-09-17T22:30:00.000-07:00

Having Adsense setup in your blog doesn't guarantee great success generating money with it. It needs to be optimized and tweaked accordingly to ensure that you get the best outcomes from it. There are many factors determining Adsense success, or its failure. In this post, you'll learn what all these factors are and what to focus on when optimizing Adsense. All the materials are presented in a very compact form to help you learn the most important points fast, quickly, and easily found if you want to come have a look at it again.

Before reading through them, it's best if you have already understood what Adsense is and what its policies are. Also, be sure that your blog is acceptable by Adsense.

Photo by alexdecarvalho.

Factors for Success
There are 4 major factors to make Adsense more successful to bring money in:

Traffic Levels - As the number of visitors increases, so does the total number of clicks.
High Paying Ads - Ads that cost the advertisers $3 per click will add more to your revenue than ads that cost $0.01 per click. Finding the right keywords to be the niche of your blog that targets these high (or at least moderate) paying ads are very crucial before you start a blog. Targeting niche keywords that pay very little is not worth your effort.
Relevant Ads - Ads that are more closely related to your blog are more likely to interest your visitors to click upon. 'Public Service Announcement' or ads that are not related to your content are less likely to be clicked upon because generally, they don't spark any interest in your visitors.
Optimal Ads Position and Design - Ads position, colors, sizes, number of units, and borders do affect visitors' behavior in looking or clicking at them. Finding the optimal design and position is crucial to maximize your Adsense income.

Each one of these factors are as important as the other. Do not only focus on one or two of them and leaving the other parts weak. Your Adsense success is as good as the weakest part. This is a fact adviced by many probloggers. For example, having high paying ads served on your blog but with only a small number of visitors won't result in good amount of conversion. More details on these factors are explained below.

How to Increase Traffic
These are some practical tips to increase traffic levels that have worked well for many experienced bloggers.

Build useful, quality, interesting and original content - Reflect on the blogs that you read often and think again why you read them.
Good blog design - Do you tend to think that a blog has quality content if the design is terrible?
Link to others - You'll only have others linking to you if you have shown your generosity in linking to others first. Linking helps in two ways: (1) Bring more visitors. (2) Increase your ranking.
Comment on other blogs - Interact with others genuinely (not spamming) by giving thoughtful comments in other blogs. People will grow their interest in your blog as you interact more with them.
Update frequently - a significant part of large traffic comes from frequent readers, who wants to see fresh contents all the time.
Interact with readers - Interact with your readers actively. Answer comments, questions, create memes, games, etc.
Optimize for search engines - Visitors that tend to click on the ads the most come from search engines. Doing SEO will increase your revenues and your rank as well.
Add your blog add in your email signature - This can help increase visitor numbers to your blog too.
Create RSS feed - Let your readers have the option to subscribe easily to your blog's content. Visit Feedburner.com for more details. This method eases their connectivity to your blog.
List your URL in directories - This increases the chance for people of relevant interest finding your blog easier through many mediums and portals.
Submit to search engines - Send your blog URL to search engines too and similar sites such as Technorati. Use the right and relevant keywords to describe your blog as this is the most crucial information that connects your blog to your visitors.
Create a newsletter - This is another option to update your readers of new postings.
Get involve in other blog projects - Make yourself visible in the blogosphere by actively participating in other projects or memes. The more visibility you have the better.
Participate in forums - This are the places to find other with similar interest. You can draw visitors to your blog by making yourself visible through helping others in the forums.
Promote your posts - Send your great posts to others or submit them in social media if you think they have a chance to get votted up. Be selective of which posts to promote to avoid being too annoying.
Add an 'Email a Friend' button - Add this button below each of your posts to let your readers have the option to email their friends.

High Paying Ads
It's pretty obvious that you should target high paying keywords to get a higher money return from Adsense. There are some sites on the internet listing out a limited number of keywords that are high paying ones. The downside of targeting these keywords are that they are highly competitive too: others are doing it as well. It's now becoming more difficult to rank well in search engines on these keywords. But that this does not mean that you shouldn't do it if you're confident to write excellent and quality content on those keywords.

A more common high paying keywords are the ones related to technology products as those are expensive products and businesses are willing to pay more to get advertised. Examples of successful blogs running these types of contents are Engadget, Gizmodo, and PVRblog just to name a few.

Targeting these high paying keywords alone doesn't guarantee success. The rules of getting high traffic still applies - and you have to be able to build high quality content for that. If you're more comfortable writing on moderately paying content and get more traffic on these niches, then this is a better strategy to do.

There are some strategies and tools to use to find and research more on these high paying keywords:

Do these keywords serve ads? - The first thing you want to check is whether the keywords you want to target serve ads. Simply type those keywords in Google and see if ads are served. If not, then your content related to those keywords are unlikely to serve ads too. By searching this way, you can also see other sites and blogs focusing on those keywords.
Buy them - There are many professional tools available at a cost that gives you hundreds of thousands of these keywords.
Use WordTracker - They have the best tool available related to finding and researching on keywords. They also tell you the number of other competing sites/blogs on any specific keywords.
Use Adwords - If you are ready to invest some cash, try becoming the advertisers yourself and see how much people are bidding for any keywords and get a better feel how to optimize the keywords you use.

Remember again that you have to focus on building high traffic levels too. If you're not able to do this using the extremely high paying keywords, then they're not worth it. Try the more moderate paying ones, as long as you can build quality content on it. But at the other extreme, targeting those low paying ads is not worthwhile.

Relevant Ads
Imagine a blog that wants to target 'making money online' as keywords but have the word 'blog' or 'blogging' too many times throughout the content, even the title and URL. The keyword 'money' or its related keywords are not frequently used. As a result, the ads served are more related to 'creating blogs' and not entirely relevant to the whole content of making money online. This is one example scenario of irrelevant ads.

There are a few things that you can do to get more relevant ads served on your blog:

Are there ads available? - Make sure the keywords you're targeting have ads available to be served on your blog. If not, look for other keywords or different keywords with similar meaning that serve more ads.
Increase keyword density - Words that are used more frequently bound to be recognized as the main keywords of your blog. Try to increase the number of keywords in your content, title, header, URL, sidebars, footer, menus, outward links, bold text, etc. But don't repeat too much to the point that it becomes to obvious and annoying to the readers. Keyword Density at SEOChat.com is a good tool to use for this purpose.
Reduce irrelevant keywords - Check for words that are not your keywords but have quite a high density in your URL, header, menus, content, sidebars, footer, etc. They may be recognized as important keywords by Adsense bots. Make sure that the ads served are not related to them. Otherwise, you have to change them a bit to reduce their density.
One topic per page - Do not focus on too many keywords per page. This confuses Adsense bots to decide which keywords are the most relevant. If this happen to you, it's better to split the text into a few series in different pages.
Block irrelevant ads - Adsense gives you the option to block ads unrelated to your blog content that may appear without you wanting it to be there.

Optimal Ads Position and Design
Adsense allows a number of different ads design and position to choose from. Depending on your blog design and content, some of these ads position and design work better than the others. Which ones the best for you?

One thing for sure, it work differently for different people and different blog. The best way is to test them all. But there are some pointers to follow to cut your work short:

Blend content and ads - Most Adsense users found success when ads and content are blended together as if the ad blocks are not advertisements at all. A few tricks to do this is making the ads background and borders the same color as the content background, ads titles and links to be just like the content links. Many guides mention that blue is the best color for ads titles because they are the most common link color.
Place ads in content - Ads will blend better with content if they are placed together with the content. For example, see this page where you have the ads wrapped with the content just below the Post Title. But too much ads wrapped with the contents can annoy your reader. So try to do this moderately. You can look for examples in well-established blogs and see how the pros do it and adapt those strategies into your own blog.
Above the fold - Above the fold means that you put the ads where readers can see it without needing to scroll down the page. A substantial amount of visitors just check out sites for a few seconds only. Any ads that need scrolling would have missed their eyes.
Follow the heat map - The heat map below has been produced by Google based on the statistics of visits to Adsense ads. Clearly, based on this map, the best place to put ads is just at the beginning of the post, blended with the content itself. The other good section is on the left and above/below the post.
Not too much ads - The main purpose of a blog or site is to serve information to its readers. Crowding it with too much ads defeat the purpose, and people are not blind to see what you're trying to do. Avoid over-crowding yours with ads. Find a balance. There are other types of sites that are more commercial in nature - serving quick infos with lots of outward links. This maybe a place for you to place more ads to provide your visitors the option of finding the best products (i.e. ads) to go to.
Keep changing ads position and design - Regular visitors and frequent readers to your blog are more 'blind' to your ads, meaning that they've seen it too often that they know where NOT to look at. Avoid this 'Ad-blindness' by frequently moving around the ads position and changing their designs. Many bloggers found that this technique improved their click-through-rates after the changes, until the next ads-blindness kicks in again.

Bringing All Together
The key to Adsense success is to work on all these 4 different areas. Working on only 3 and leaving 1 factor behind will mean that your return is as good as the weakest one that you leave behind.

There are other small things that you'll want to consider in addition to the core tips above:

Not too much outgoing links - The less outgoing links you have, the less 'exit doors' your visitors have to leave. But not having any links at all would mean that you're not focusing on building quality informative site which is suppose to provide options for additional details. So, provide your readers with these outbound links but don't have them too excessively.
Using frames - if you're using frames, place your ads and contents within the same frame. Otherwise, Adsense bots will not recognize the connection between the two.
Don’t click your own ads - This is obvious. Google knows well. They'll even know if somebody else is doing this dirty 'deeds' for you. It's all in the IPs and correlating the click patterns. Don't even encourage your readers to do it by giving some incentives as this violates the rule and will get you banned from the program. Basic rule - don't do it.
Monitor your statistics - One good tool to use is Adsense Tracker. This isn't a freeware. But, it does provide many options for you track your Adsense performance. It logs the performance of individual ad units, every pages, and basically answers the where, when and what ads are clicked. With this information, you'll be able to develop strategies to optimize your blog content and ads design and position.
Use alternative ads - There may comes a time when Public Service Announcement (PSA) ads, that doesn't add to your revenue, are served on your blog. Get something more profitable to appear instead. In Adsense page, you can select alternative ads to be served, such as Amazon or other affiliate ads program.

What It Takes to Build a Successful Money-Making Blog

2008-09-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to make a comfortable living from blogging? Steve Pavlina launched his blog on October 2004. Within six months, he made $120/month from it. A year and a half later, the revenues increased to $30k/month. It cost him only $9/year on domain, $149/month on hosting, and $0 on marketing or promoting. So, he is making a pretty good living from it.

Photo by aubergene.

He wrote a long 7000+ words article on how to build a blog capable of generating such income, added with some reality-check scenarios to caution some overly-optimistic minds of what to expect: only 1% will succeed. I've summarized the main points from the article into a much shorter post (62% less) for a lighter read.

Commit Yourself
The first question to ask yourself before diving down a blogger's path to monetizing is 'Do you want to do this?'. It's a simple question and the straight answer is simple too, but the reality isn't obvious. What people see is that making money from blogging is straight-forward and think that it can be done effortlessly with great result.

But what's not told are the challenges you'll be facing. To really achieve real success, you need to commit yourself fully to it. Do it or don't do it. There's no 'just try it and see what happens' approach. It's not gonna work that way and will just waste your time down the drain.

Decent Income from Blogging?
It's definitely doable to make great money from it and many bloggers have done so superbly. If it's done right, you can achieve 5 or 6 figures annual income from blogging. The difference is in how long it takes you to get there. Doing it part time will take you a while longer than if it's done full time.

The fact is that not everybody can achieve success doing it. 99 out of 100 people will fail generating any reasonable amount of income from blogging. Only 1% will make a healthy and even great living out of it. And the recipe for this success is very simple - you have to be smart in the web-savvy kind of way.

Know Enough About Web Technologies
If you are web-savvy, or can learn to become web-savvy, then you have a great chance of making a real amount of money from blogging. Web-savviness doesn't mean that you have to be a hardcore programmer. You just have to have a decent functional understanding of web technologies, particularly the ones related to blogging and monetizing blogs.

Some examples of these web technologies that matter are blog publishing software (e.g. Wordpress), HTML/XML/CSS, full or partial RSS feed + feedreaders, pings, comments & trackbacks, blog or post directories, search engine ranking and optimization (SEO), page rangking, social media & bookmarking, contextual advertising (e.g. Adsense), affiliate programs, and traffic statistics - just to name a few.

Being web-savvy in these areas doesn't necessarily mean that you are an expert or have an in-depth knowledge, but enough knowledge to understand the basics and apply their functionalities efficiently where needed. Even if you're hiring somebody to do the grunt work, you need to have enough savviness to make any strategic decisions.

If you don't know much about web technologies, then either blogging for money is not for you, or you need to spend some time first learning those things. It's not worth an effort to drag yourself into trying to make big bucks if you're not ready to pick up the skills required. Having no knowledge at all in, say SEO, will put you at a disadvantage to the bloggers who know better what SEO is and how to use it to get their blogs to rank much much higher than yours. But knowing just SEO is not enough. Other areas are important as well and must not be left behind.

What makes things more delicate is that monetized blogging is not just about being web-savvy but also about optimizing your effort to fulfill the needs of so many: you, your readers, advertisers, search engines, etc. Each of these entities may have the same but sometimes differing needs. For example, when giving a post its title, its best to give a title that reflects the whole content and easily and directly captured by your readers. Sometimes you'll want to give it a catchy title that best reflect your ingenuity and wittiness. But, to get the best from SEO or advertising, the title may have to be re-thought to incorporate some critical keywords in it that may skew your original title in the first place.

The whole process is a balancing act, to find what works for everybody. And you can only do this well if you have the functional understanding and skills of the right web technologies.

It may be great to be an expert, but in the case of maximizing your revenue from blogging, this isn't so. Time is better spent if you learn five things just enough to apply them than if you concentrate on one thing to become an expert of it (unless of course this is the topic that you want to blog about). You need to strategize yourself to learn as many things as you can within a short period of time.

Keeping Up with Web's Fast Pace
Web technologies evolve and grow at such a fast pace that it's challenging to keep up with it. New tools keep popping up, that if used, can put you at a serious advantage ahead of your competitors. New opportunities to monetize your blog keep showing up as well. What's hard is the decision to either spend some time learning these new opportunities and use them or forget about them and just focusing on building content. The growth is so rapid that to really learn the new things needs a full-time commitment.

When it comes to decide what's better to do, the ground rule is that you'll be taking a huge risk not to update yourself on what's new. Your success is measured on how well you compete with others (that's what Alexa ranking basically is). To do this well means to keep up with changes in the web and to take advantage of it while you still can. Making mistake isn't the one that will cost you, but missing opportunities is. Each missing opportunities means a lost chance of growing your traffic, audience, and revenues. A good practice is to subscribe to others who are consistently updating their blogs with new opportunities. Darren Rowse's Problogger is a great place to start subscribing as he keeps an update of new monetizing and blogging-related opportunities.

Strategize How to Generate Income
Monetizing blog isn't just about setting up Adsense and affiliate programs and then have a go at it, blindly, hoping you'll cash out in the end. You must have a strategy of how best to generate income from your blog, depending on your overall philosophy and goal of your blog. Blogs that focus more on building long term readerships may have less ads compared to blogs that provide infos on products with lots of ads to help readers choose the best offers.

It's not only the amount of ads that needs careful thinking but also the source of income. You have to think what's the best revenue source for your blog. Is it advertising, affiliate programs, product sales, donations, or any combinations of those? Decide which one is the most important and optimize your dentent, design, and layout around that. Each monetizing platform is unique and require different approaches. it's important that you recognize the differences.

Strategizing also means that you have to create concrete goals, or targets, that you want to achieve within a certain period of time. Once you've set your target, you have to work at it to achieve it. It may sound trivial but will keep you focused on achieving your targets, and know when to say no to new opportunities that doesn't match your blogging strategy. Here's a more detailed account on why creating concrete goals leads to successful blogs.

Learn from other established bloggers (that have similar niche to you) on how they strategize their site and monetization methods. Their technique must have worked well so it's a good hint for you to start there and even imitate their style. Of course, copying the template and content exactly as it is is wrong and will get you in trouble later on.

Traffic
Without doubt, traffic is the most important factor to monetize blogs. Stevepavlina.com's blog, for example, receives over 1.1 million visitors and 2.4 million pageviews a month (on April 2006). Traffic is important simply because it's a direct function of traffic: more traffic = more money (i.e. more clicks, more affiliate sales, more product sales, more donations, more consulting opportunities). It also means simply that your content do gives values to your many visitors.

The main focus of any beginners must be building traffic. Until you've got significantly large traffic levels, monetizing your blogs doesn't make much sense. It's even better not to work on putting ads at all on your blog for the first few months, so that you can focus a 100% on building traffic.

As your traffic level increases, your chances of monetizing your site gets easier. Why? traffic doesn't just mean there are more people coming to your blog, but also more links to your site, more votes to your articles, and more exposure to you and your blog at many levels, both online and offline. All this synergizes to bring so much more, even in terms of monetizing revenues, and it all starts from just building traffic. As the saying goes, 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts'.

Guides to Building Quality & Original Content

2008-09-17T22:24:00.000-07:00

The single most important aspect on your blog that affects everything else is its content. It has to be unique, original, of high quality, and gives value and meaning to its readers. There are some pointers that you can follow to guide you towards writing these type of contents:

Photo by Thiru Murugan.

Add value - The most common ways of finding good topics to write about is by reading other blogs to see which topics create the most buzz. But rewriting it without adding new perspectives or new thoughts simply means that your post is valueless. So, be original, independent, and add something new.
Add personal experience - Adding your own experiences relevant to the topics does not only add uniqueness to your posts, but also get your readers more interested to learn from it because the value is real. Draw conclusions from your experience and share them with your readers.
Brainstorm - Writing post isn't simply about typing whatever crosses your mind. A good writing has good ideas, substance, and structure. To achieve any good writing level requires you to do some initial planning and brainstorming. Here's an article that discusses some brainstorming techniques for bloggers.
Write a journal - Ideas doesn't only popup when you're sitting in front of your screen. It comes in whenever it wants to. If not recorded, it'll be gone, never ever to come back. Writing any ideas you have on a journal keeps you organized. Journal also helps you refine the many ideas you have into a few solid ones that can grow into valuable articles. A post is better written only with proper planning, brainstorming, and editing - which can systematically be done if you make writing a journal a habit.
Be patient - Some ideas can grow into something complete easily, but not always. Whenever you have a writer's block or have some ideas that couldn't materialize into something meaningful, just be patient and write them in your journal. Small unfinished ideas can be combined into larger and more substantial ideas.
Be unconventional - When writing on critical issues, there's always two sides to it. The easy way is to go with the flow. But if you can build your arguments to go against the conventional thinking, it'll have a greater chance to strike more interest and be remembered.
Expand old posts - Looking at some of your old posts (or even other bloggers' posts as well), you'll find that there are a few more popular ones than others. Look back into it and think about how you can broaden its scope or solidify it into something more substantial.
Add more details - There are many posts that cover only the general information and the basics of some topics, scratching only their surfaces. Try to build on these topics by uncovering more details about them. Put effort to provide in-depth explanations and higher-level knowledge to your visitors.
Grow your knowledge - What separates you from other bloggers writing on similar niche are your knowledge. Target yourself to be an expert, otherwise you'll never stand out among others.
Solve problems - People commenting on your blog doesn't just praise or critic your blog. Some presents problems to you, hoping that you might be able to help them out. Choose the right problems to tackle on, work on it, and publish it as a substantial article.
Act quickly - If you have new great ideas, or think they're great, write and publish them right away. Original and new ideas have a good chance of pulling huge traffic. If you wait, others might write about them first. You'll then loose the only opportunity to be original and the chances of pulling any traffic.

My Comments
The heart of a blog is its content. Without it, it's almost impossible to get anything else: high traffic, large readership, top positions on social bookmarking and directories, and large monetizing revenues.

Question
I haven't encountered any discussions on the style of writing (writing technique, intonation, structure, etc). Does it have any influence on readerships? For example, is writing with straight-forward conversation-style writing better than proper textbook writing when it comes to writing blogs? What about broken English? Better means drawing more visitors, of course.

What do you think? Which style do you like best, or don't you have any preference at all?

How to Produce Persuasive Writing?

2008-09-17T22:21:00.000-07:00

If you're blogging with a serious goal in mind - building reputation, making money, selling products - you'll want to be heard and trusted. To achieve this you must first be able to persuade your readers. Telling them what your ideas are seems pretty straight forward, but making them believe what you're saying is a completely different thing. It is this ability of persuasion that will put you ahead.

Photo by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL.

In essence, people tend to agree with others when it benefits them more. The challenge to writers when persuading audience is to create a win-win situation and to present their case well and clear. Below are guides to improve yourself to become a more persuasive writer:

Repeat your ideas - Not everybody gets it the first time. Repeat your ideas, again and again. But do it in different forms so that it doesn't get boring. Use examples, stories, analogies, or rewording to restate your ideas.
Give reasons - People will ask 'Why?' to anything. Support your ideas or products with good reasons why they're so or why they're built. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Reasons that make sense convince people. The ones that don't invite debate and trouble. Think carefully before giving any reasons.
Be consistent - Inconsistent thoughts show confusion, uncertainty, hesitation, and many other bad things. Being consistent shows that you have sound logic, rational thinking, and believable character. A powerful technique to show you're consistent is to present your case at the beginning. Then, convince your readers by supporting your case with evidence, examples, and proof throughout your writing consistently, while repeatedly referring back to the initial argument at the beginning of the article.
Support with authority - An idea that has been well accepted socially, supported with scientific facts, or backed by prominent figures with strong credentials will easily get accepted by others. Your challenge is to convincingly show them how your case is supported.
Compare with established ideas - Comparing or relating your case to the ones already established can help convince people. It helps to use metaphors, similes, and analogies. Readers are convinced more easily this way as they only need to see the connection between your ideas to those already established as true.
Relate to your readers - When you're posting an article as a solution to a problem, don't just solve it. Present the problems clearly and make your readers know that you know well the stakes at hand and empathize with their trouble. Your readers will likely be reading your post because they're facing that problem. They'll trust you more if you can show them that you've dealt with the same situation before and know exactly how to solve it.
Belong to a group - When you're writing on articles that target specific demographics (group of people), get into their heads and be (or try to be) part of them. You'll be more persuasive if you understand the specific needs and wants of your target group. Then focus your writing to fulfill those needs, rather than trying to generalize your writing to target the whole masses.
Address disagreements - Not everyone will agree with your ideas. There'll be objections, counter-arguments, and debates. Assessing what those disagreements are and addressing them immediately will save you some trouble and improves people's perception towards your credibility on the subject matter, which increases your persuasive ability. Of course, you can't always think of everything that people will object.
Tell stories - Unfolding your ideas gradually by telling stories first and relating them back to your core ideas is an effective technique. People believes in stories much easier than they do with dreary arguments. The challenge is for you to tell good stories and to relate them to your ideas. The better the stories you tell, the easier it is to get people to believe you. Hope that you're telling them the right thing then.

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This article is a shorter adaptation from a longer version Ten Timeless Persuasive Writing Techniques by Brian Clark at CopyBlogger.com (Alexa rank: 12,307). The original post of 1043 words has been reduced by 38% to 647 words.

Adsense Smart Pricing is Bad but How to Avoid It?

2008-09-17T22:18:00.000-07:00

The first thing you should know before blogging for money is the Adsense smart-pricing. It's a technique to improve value to advertisers by reducing the price they pay per adclick, ultimately reducing the pay publishers get per adclick. If you are in the categories whose blogs are smart-priced, then you'll be earning much less than what you were supposed to if you're not smart-priced. This article explains what smart-pricing is, what factors affect blogs to be smart-priced, and how to avoid being smart-priced. This guide is a summary based on Google facts and best tips on smart-pricing from top blogs.

Image credit: josef.stuefer.

What is Smart Pricing from Google standpoint?
Smart pricing was intoduced in April 2004 to improve advertisers Return On Investment (ROI) by adjusting the price of certain clicks. Here are some facts and implications on smart pricing based on the Goggle AdWords announcement:

Prices per click for advertisers are adjusted based on Google network's data of click conversion to advertisers' business actions (e.g. sales, registration, etc).
Cost-per-click (CPC) is reduced if that action improves value to advertisers.
Ad price estimation is affected by many factors such as keywords and types of blogs. For example, an adclick on videocam placed on a general photography tips blog may cost less than a click on the same ad placed next to specs and reviews on videocam.
The estimation of click values is done continuously and on an ongoing basis that ultimately saves advertisers time and money.
Advertisers get greater value and performance as the ad costs are appropriately set based on the quality and relevancy of information provided by sites/blogs to their customers.

Google explained further in its official Adsense blog about the facts on smart pricing as there are some misconceptions to how it's being implemented:

Ad prices are determined based on many factors: advertisers bid, quality of ad, other competing ads, ad campaign time period, and advertisers' conversion rate.
Click-through-rate (CTR) doesn't affect advertisers' ROI. Smart pricing is introduced to benefit advertisers, and the only thing that matters is the percentage of click conversion to ROI. Publishers' CTR has nothing to do with advertisers' ROI. What matters is clicks that bring in highly relevant customers that result in business actions.
Advertisers gain more from sites that bring in quality clicks (due to readers interest in their quality and relevant content). Generic clicks do not convert much to value for the advertisers. To gain most from Adsense, publishers should improve content quality, bring in targeted traffic, and improves the relevancy of content to ads.
The system of determining ad prices is updated regularly to improve the value to advertisers.

How Smart Pricing Affects Bloggers/Publishers?
Many bloggers have had some experiences on Adsense smart-pricing that affect the type of niche they choose and how they blog. Some of these experiences weren't highlighted by Google's guides. In essence, bloggers need to be aware of smart pricing and careful when first finding a niche to blog about if they want to gain the most from Adsense. I have compiled the most important 'facts' about Adsense smart-pricing based on these experiences around the blogosphere:

Reduced earning - Smart price means that the earning per click is reduced if your blog is being smart-priced. For example, you might earn $0.05 per click on an ad that could actually bring you $0.50 if you're not smart-priced. It also means that the advertisers pay less per click on ads these ads than the actual bidding price.
Affects entire account - Smart-pricing affects the entire Adsense account. If you have multiple blogs and only one of them is actually being smart-priced because it brings in low conversion rate to advertisers, then all the other blogs under the same Adsense account will be affected also eventhough these other ones converts well.
Won't know if you're being smart priced - You won't know which sites are being smart-priced and which are not, and you don't have any data to make any correct guess. What you can do to know whether your blog is being smart priced is by observing its performance or make educated guesses based on your earning per click or CTR.
Smart-pricing can be reversed - If your account is affected, remove Adsense ads from sites that you think are actually being smart-priced to avoid being smart-priced on sites that convert well.
Updated on weekly basis - Smart pricing is evaluated on a weekly basis. Changes are likely to occur the week after you've made any changes that affect smart-pricing.
Setup additional account - Some bloggers have set up additional Adsense account to serve different sites so that well-converting sites are not affected by smart pricing. But this requires approval from Google and actually difficult to get. Publishers need to provide additional company details or have different names for different accounts.

Does CTR Affect Smart Pricing?
Some bloggers say that blogs with low CTR will be smart-priced. This is contradictory to Google's statement. But many have experienced that the earnings per click is less when they have lower CTR, which then forced them to delete Adsense from these accounts so that it won't affects other blogs that do well on CTR. Courtney gave a tip that blogs with CTR less than 3% should not put Adsense to avoid getting smart-priced on the entire accounts.

Although Google says that CTR doesn't affect smart pricing, it can affect smart pricing indirectly. Blogs that have low CTR most likely are serving ads poorly targeted to the content. Some readers that do click on these ads tend to not be interested by the services/products offered on the advertiser sites as they're not targeted to the readers interest. So, in a way, low CTR blogs do seem to be smart-priced because of their poorly targeted ads. Accidental clicks on poorly targeted ads also convert to low CTR.

Traffic from social networks are well known to convert to low CTR compared to traffic from search engines. Visitors from social networks come across blogs/posts because of their reputation or popularity, not entirely because they are searching for them. They are not likely to click on ads. On the other hand, visitors from search engines come across blogs/posts because they are searching for those targeted contents and are likely to click on targeted ads to know more about those products/services that interest them.

Blogs about blogging (e.g. making money using blogs, blog tips) typically also convert to low CTR as bloggers are more familiar with the concept of contextual advertising and aren't likely to click on ads (hint: think about your tendency of clicking ads on blogs about blogging). This is not to say that these blogs will automatically be smart-priced, but many bloggers blogging on these topics do experience a huge drop on CTR and earnings per click compared to blogs on other niche topics. The key is about bringing quality customers that convert to advertisers business. If your blogs do provide high quality content and do bring in quality customers that improve advertisers' ROI, then there's no good reason for your blog to be smart-priced.

Tips To Avoid Being Smart-Priced
These are tips that have been compiled from many top blogs on the topics of smart pricing:

Create highly targeted content to search engine traffic.
Improves blog with highly targeted content and high quality articles that draw more interest to visitors on products/services being discussed or reviewed.
Improves Adsense design and placement to improves CTR.
Avoid blogging about blogs to avoid audience that don't tend to click ads (i.e. don't target us!).
Avoid building contents with the intention of targeting only social networks.
Delete Adsense on blogs that are being smart-priced, have low CTR (less than 3%), or generate low earnings per click (around $0.10 or less).
If possible (but extremely difficult), ask permission to create multiple Adsense accounts - one for blogs that convert well, and another for blogs that you suspect are being smart-priced.

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This post is a summary based on Google announcement and tips on smart pricing from top blogs. The post length is 1342 words

Methods to Make Money Online from Blogs

2008-09-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

Darren Rowse has written a long article describing methods available for bloggers to earn money online directly from their blogs. The essence of this guide to making money online, added with some entry of my own, is summarized below.

A number of different monetizing methods are available for bloggers to use. Selection of which methods to use depends on blogs' niche, number of visitors/subscribers, impressions and expertise, among other things.

1. Advertising

Contextual Ads - This is a pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC) ads system based on blog contents (e.g. Adsense, YPN). It is a good system for blogs with specific niche topic. General blogs or blogs without any niche will not work well because the systems do not have any context to 'lock' on to when selecting what ads to display (resulting in displays of some very general ads).
Non-contextual CPC ads - Display ads without having to relate to context, such as Chitika’s eMiniMalls.
Impression-based ads - Payment are made based on the number of people viewing the ads; only good for blogs with large traffic). Examples: Fastclick and Tribal Fusion.
Text Ads - A text-link on your blog sold as ads by text-link ads programs (such as AdBrite, Text Link Ads, and Bidvertiser). These programs sell your text-links to their own pool of advertisers; the benefit is that you don’t have to go through the hassle of finding your own advertisers. You also have a degree of control over what ads to run and what prices to set.
RSS Ads – Many ads programs display ads in RSS feeds. Some programs only offer this option to blogs with a certain number of traffic, impressions, or subscribers.

2. Sponsorship
Well established blogs with large traffic have better chances of directly finding their own advertisers or sponsors to display ads. Typically, blogs with specific niche have more chances of getting sponsors with the same niche (e.g. blogs about camera getting Nikon or Kodak as sponsors). Ads are sold in the form of banners, text-links, buttons, or newsletters. Another type of sponsorship is sponsored posts: bloggers are paid to write specific posts as required by sponsors, or posts reviewing sponsors’ own blogs (positively I suppose).

3. Affiliate Programs
Affiliate program providers (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Linkshare, Commision Junction, Clickbank) pay you commissions for sending readers to purchase their products/services. Participating in these programs may require you to put more effort (than needed to setup ads in your blog) to influence readers to buy the products or services.

4. Selling Blogs
Well established and profitable blogs may be (and have been) sold at lucrative prices. An example is Weblogs Inc. which were sold to AOL for $25 million. But, to reach that level of success is extremely difficult and rare. Some smaller blogs have been sold at auction sites like eBay and SitePoint.

5. Donations
Only a very small number of blogs have been successful at making profitable income through donations. Most of them have large number of loyal readers.

6. Merchandising
Successful bloggers have used their influential blogs as brand names to be sold as merchandises (T-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc).

7. Paid Subscriptions
Selling blog contents to subscribers is an option to bloggers but a difficult one to profit from because similar contents are available free online. Bloggers would need a certain degree of expertise or exclusivity to have readers wanting to pay for these contents.

8. Blog Networks
There are two ways to profit from these methods: (1) Start your own network and pay bloggers to write in your network while profiting from the seven methods above. (2) Join other networks as a paid writer.

My Comments
If you're new to this, getting too excited to try everything on the list at the same time would be a big mistake. Building your blog from the basics up the ladder - with patience - is the key. It's tempting to try all the different monetizing methods and see if it works more than others, but you'll end up wasting your time too much learning on how to get the most out of the different methods. It's best to start from the most common ones (most likely Adsense) and build up your experience getting the most out of it. Your experience then will make it easier for you to learn other new methods in time. Anyway, Adsense has been reported to bring in the biggest chunk of revenues to many popular bloggers.

Start Blogging

2008-09-15T23:54:00.000-07:00

Blogger is a free blogging tool. It is now one of the oldest and biggest blogging tools around and today has more than millions of users. You will be able to blogging within 10 minutes of coming to the site, and in fact does deliver on that.

The biggest hole in Blogger's offerings is the lack of post categorization, followed closely by the need to know HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to make custom changes to the templates provided. Unlike some of the most complex hosted services, Blogger doesn't make customization easy, but it does provide some attractive skins to choose from.

The most interesting thing is that one unusual feature of Blogger is the integration with the Audioblogger service. Program the Audioblogger number into your phone, and you can put audio recordings on your blog quickly by simply calling the number and recording yourself. This offering is unique among blog software packages.

Of special note is that Blogger does allow you to FTP the files generated for your blog to your own Web site. Used together with customization of the Blogger template, this fairly unique functionality means that your readers may never realize that you are using Blogger. It also means that you can publicize your own domain name, rather than the more usual Blogger URL: blogname.blogspot.com.

Very few professional Bloggers stick with Blogger for very long, if they even start there. Because it is so simple, and perhaps because it is free, most professional bloggers choose to use blogging software that has more prestige (read: is harder to set up and install). However, it is an ideal tool to use when first beginning, especially if you want to test blog for a couple of weeks before devoting any serious time or money to a blog.

Cost: Nothing
Time to launch: 10 minutes

Create an account now.

How to start with blogger (Tutorial)

WordPress is a solid, powerful blogging system ideal for publishers who are on a budget but who don't want to give up any functionality. Professional blogger Darren Rowse maintains nearly 30 blogs using WordPress, from his popular ProBlogger to an Athens Olympics Blog. In two weeks the Athens blog received close to 2 million readers, said Rowse – a real testament to WordPress' ability to handle heavy traffic loads.

Each WordPress post is formatted with search engine friendly URLs that also look good to humans. Comments can be extensively moderated: you can review them before they go live. You can also filter comments containing certain words or more than a certain number of links.

WordPress' built-in blogroll management tool allows you to categorize blogs, set criteria for the display order of the links, and turn off and on visibility. You can also import an existing blogroll from some link manager services.

This software has inspired numerous developers to write plugins and extra features for use with WordPress, which makes plugin installation a quick and painless affair. You will find that the selection of additional themes (or skins), for instance, numbers in the hundreds, and that WordPress fans and friends have developed tools for adding photo galleries, a music player, an event calendar, and even geo mapping.

Cost: Free
Time to launch: 20 minutes

Start Sign Up Now on Wordpress.

Why wordpress is better then blogger?

Typepad is one of Six Apart's hosted half blogging software services (read about Movable Type below) and one that has proved very popular with journalistic blogging efforts. Jim Romenesko uses Typepad for his Obscure Store blog; Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post writes Achenblog using Typepad.

The Typepad pricing scheme and features are divided into three levels: Basic, Plus, and Pro. Design customization is extremely limited at the Basic level and only fully accessible at the Pro level. If you want to run a group blog, or give some people editor access and others publishing access, you must go with the Pro account.

At all account levels, Typepad has a built-in feature called Typelists that allows you to build lists, associating each item with a URL. These lists can be added with a minimum of fuss to the left- or right-hand column of your blog – no need to touch the templates. Use a Typelist for your current reading list, links to other blogs, or links to new stories.

In some ways, it is actually more usable than its elder brother Movable Type. Typepad is a good option for users who want to get started quickly but still want all the bells and whistles. Customization is possible, but complicated, so it's also a good option for those who just want a blog that works without fussing too much over how it looks. However, Typepad Plus and Pro do a better job than most blog software at allowing you to configure layout options without having to go into the templates.

Cost: $4.95 - $14.95 monthly.
Free trial: 30 days
Time to launch: 20 minutes

Blogware
Tucows is the creator of the Blogware blog software package, a robust system with a great selection of the top blogging tools. Blogware, like Typepad, can be difficult to customize, even for an experienced HTML jockey. However, it also provides a fair number of options within the administration interface to let you set up layouts and styles without getting into the templates.

Purchasing a Blogware blog is a little different than some of the other blogging software packages; you must get your Blogware blog through a reseller, so expect prices and packages to vary. It's a good idea to shop around to get the best package for your needs. A good reseller to start with is Blog Harbor.

Cost: $8-$15 a month
Free trial: Usually offered for 30 days
Time to launch: 20 minutes

Movable Type, created by Six Apart, is perhaps the best known of all blogging software tools. Built by a husband and wife team looking for a better tool for blogging, the system is powerful, but not simple to install or use. Although it has been used to create Web sites that don't look entirely like blogs, doing so requires quite a bit of code tweaking. Movable Type is used by blogger Joshua Micah Marshall to create Talking Points Memo, and by Kevin Roderick who writes the L.A. Observed blog.

The least attractive functionality of Movable Type is the need to rebuild the blog whenever you make a change to a template, a configuration setting, or add a new category. Waiting for the rebuild is annoying, to say the least, and certainly slows down any customization work you do to the design or layout. This can be addressed by turning on dynamic page-building, but some users have found that the server load that occurs as a result is unacceptable to their Web host.

For the non-technically inclined, installation of this software can be quite a challenge. Don't attempt it all if you aren't already comfortable with uploading and downloading files to a Web server. There are several Web hosts that offer Movable Type installation as part of their package of services.

There is no trial period for Movable Type, but there is a free version of the software that you can download and install. The paid license entitles you to support, some promotion, and discounts on future upgrades.

Cost: $199.95.
Time to launch: 2 hours

Expression Engine
pMachine's Expression Engine isn't well-known, but that shouldn't stop you from giving this powerful and extensible software a try. It is technically more accurate to call Expression Engine a content management system, rather than just a blogging software tool. However, it grew out of blogging and has all of the blogging bells and whistles: moblogging, Trackbacks, archiving and so on. Dennis Lloyd uses it for the independent information resource iPodlounge.

In addition to the usual set of blogging functionality, Expression Engine has incorporated modules for image galleries and a mailing list. Uniquely, you can crop, resize, and rotate images in the Expression Engine photo gallery tool, in addition to batch processing a set of images. The people and search engine friendly URLs the system generates are of particular interest to bloggers looking for good search engine listings. You can run multiple Weblogs through the same installation of Expression Engine, and each "new post" page can be customized exactly to fit the use. Most blog software limits you to title, entry, extended entry, and excerpt fields. With EE, you can rename those to suit your publication and add more as needed.

Templates are editable online through a simple textbox interface, but you can set up the system to generate files you can download and edit with an HTML editor. Learning how information relates and how to link across the site is a challenge: expect to spend several hours learning how to use this system. Your reward will be incredible flexibility in building a site that has constant updating needs, blog or not.

Expression Engine is ideal for publishers that need to do more than just blogging; this system is ideal for handling hundreds of members, multiple user groups with different editing privileges, and sites with several blogs. Technically speaking, it's not for the faint of heart.

Cost: $149
Free trial: 14 days if installed on your own server, 30 days with a hosted version.
Time to launch: 2 hours

to launch: 2 hours

Other Free Blogging Opportunities

**Live Journal **Thoughts **My blog site **

Enjoy Your Blogging.

Successful Blogging

2008-09-15T23:53:00.000-07:00

Start Successful Blogging

This topic is for the blogger who are very interested about blogging and still not found any idea how to start perfectly.Many blogger start with many blogs and someone start with only one blog.But the question is that which one is the best? This article will show you how to start successful blogging in a short way.

1. Pick a topic

Remember that in order to have a successful blog, you need to have a good readership. People like to read blogs that are focused, on one single topic. Pick a topic you are interested to share with people about. Is it tennis or golf or hockey, or computer tips, or creativity or stress management? Decide on one. Just one.

2. Get started with Blogger

The next step is to quickly get started with the blog already! Getting started with the blog is the simplest step! Just head on to Blogger.com, and follow the steps. You can get started in less than 10 minutes! Do your best to pick a URL that is consistent with your blog topic.

3. Start your first few posts

Start writing a post a day, don’t worry about marketing your blog yet. Really, explore different writing styles, try writing at different times of the day. Make sure your blog is at least a week old with at least 5 - 10 posts before you start to decide to market your blog. Many blogs don’t even get past this stage.

4. Market your blog

When you have more or less got comfortable with writing on your blog, then its time to market your blog. This way, when the visitors come, at least they have a short archive to read rather than one pathetic post!

5. Keep updating

Keep updating your blog on a regular basis, respond to comments. As you start to write, you will start to write better, and slowly you will start to create a writing personality. At the same time, keep up with the marketing, keep surfing around for blogs and commenting. Also observe how people craft their posts, and do your best to write better posts that would entice comments. Soon, you will find reader coming back everyday for updates.

6. Publish your site through the Web

Your site visitors does not know your blog URL. So you need to publish your blog URL via some ways.Such as:-
*Search Engines
*Article Submission
*Social Book Marking
*Directories
*Social Networks
*Link Exchange
*Traffic Exchange
You will get many visitors through those networks I have listed. Keep continue.

Submitting Blog

2008-09-15T23:52:00.000-07:00

Submitting your blog to search engines is very important for a Blogger.If you have a new blog site, make sure take a few minutes to submit it to the most popular search engines to ensure your pages and posts are indexed as soon as possible. While it's likely that the major search engines will find your blog eventually, it doesn't hurt to speed up the process by manually submitting your blogs for inclusion. URL

The process will boost your blogsjump start the process of growing the number of visitors to your blog. traffic. It may not bring huge numbers of visitors overnight, but it will jump start the process of growing the number of visitors to your blog.

Install XML & HTML Templates

2008-09-15T23:50:00.002-07:00

Ways to install a Blogger HTML template

Make sure you have backed up your template before installing a new one.
You'r about to be ensured your previous page was saved properly. Then you can install HTML templates

1.You have to choose a Html Template .Then Download the template.

2.Copy the code (Ctrl A: Select All, Ctrl C: Copy).
Select all and copy the code from the page source.

3.Go to your Blogger Control Panel - Edit HTML

4.Revert to Classic Template (You can return whenever you want).

5.Paste the code into the Template area (Ctrl A: Select All, Ctrl V: Paste)

6.Then click through view blog and see what have happened.

Ways to install a Blogger XML template

1.You have to choose a XML Template and then download the code.

2.Save the XML code to your hard disk drives.From where you could easily find out it later.

3.After downloading go to your Blogger Control Panel - Edit HTML

4.Browse the XML file you have saved and upload it.

That's all. Now see what have happened to your blogger.

Ways to increase traffic

2008-09-15T23:50:00.001-07:00

Ways to increase traffic in your websites

You should know the ways to increase pagerankings to get more traffic to your blogsites.Every blogger wants more and more traffic towards his blog. So, to increase traffic to your blog here are some tricks for blog exposure.

Keywords

This is the first step to increase traffic towards your blog. make sure that you have enough relevant keywords in your blog post so that people may find you on search engines.

Tagging

Tagging is also similar method which involves creating keywords that your articles will be read under. You may use sites like Technorati to do this.

Pinging on post updates

You should submit your RSS feeds to Yahoo and Google search engines so that site will be indexed and notified when the posting is done. Ping sites help to increase blog exposure. Whenever you add a post to your blog you should ping it so that a ping site like Ping-O-Matic will be able to recognize it as updated.

Link Trading

This can free or paid. You may deal with some another blogger to have link exchanging. Also, their are some sites which provides widgets for site link exchange. You may use Entrecard or Blogrush for improving traffic. This helps to increase blog exposure because the blog you link to will recognize you and promote your blog as a result.You may go to the site:
www.linkmetro.com, http://onewaylinkexchange.net, You could also search for "free oneway linking" in Google.

Article Marketting

Post some articles in some Directories and add your blogsite there.They will linking you blogsite.You may go there: "suggest my link to the linkpartners.com directory" by Google

Advertising

Advertising lets the user know about your site and attract him towards it. So, if you can pay some bucks for advertising, you may sign-up for Advertising networks such as Adwords, Adbrite and Bidvertiser. There are many more present but here I’ve suggested some popular and cheap programs.

Back-linking

I’ve already mentioned about backlinks and how to get them easily. Backlinks denotes your site’s popularity on web-world, its direct effect is that your Alexa ranking improves gradually. So, High ranking websites get High-traffic rate.You may conact through e-mail with the websites having good page ranks.

SEARCH ENGINE

It brings lots of traffic to your blog.There are millions of people search in the search engines like Google,Yahoo,msn everyday.So,if your blog has so many good posts and is well indexed by google,etc..you will get a good amount of traffic via search engines.There are a few steps to look at if you want a decent amount of traffic from the search engines like "submitting your blog sitemap to google",yahoo to index you blog pages very quickly.The other important one is adding meta tags to your blog.If you follow these two simple steps,then you will get a decent massive traffic if your content is good.

Submitting your blog to Blog Directories

You may know this before,submitting your blog to blog directories will bring you a good traffic.
There are so many directories.Most of these blog directories ask you to register before you submit your blog.

Participate in forums,groups,etc

Just go to google and enter your [Keyword + fourm/groups] and search.Suppose,your blog is about blogging,then search 'Blogging forum/groups'.You will find some forums,groups related to your site.Register in the forums and post articles,etc with a link back to your blog.Answer questions,clarify doubts and provide a link to your blog.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is another way to build good traffic to your website/blog.If you don't know what Social Bookmarking is
"Social Bookmarking is a practise of saving Bookmarks,tagging the posts with keywords in a website".Bookmarking means saving a specific website url(address) in your browser that you wish to visit later.There are so many Social Bookmarking sites like www.del.icio.us.com,www.digg.com,www.furl.com,www.technorati.com
One good thing about these Social bookmarking sites is,you will get instant traffic.Just register with them,store your bookmarks,tags,.. Then see your site meter blasting with traffic.

Submit Articles to Article Directories

Submitting articles to article directories is another effective way to build more traffic.By submitting to them,your articles get massive exposure and gain you more traffic.
Some of the popular article directories are www.goarticles.com,www.ezinearticles.com,www.articlecity.com,etc.

Leaving Comments on other blogs

Leaving comments with a link back to your blog is another good thing to do.Leaving comments in the related blogs is more useful and it also increases your pagerank.Always leave good comments and don't write spam.

3 Freinds for Blog traffic

2008-09-15T23:49:00.001-07:00

Need Blog Traffic !!

(1)Free Traffic with Link Referral

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Striving to provide an affordable alternative to search engines and banner ad campaigns which give mediocre results. Our four pronged approach to developing free traffic for our members is described below.

Members directory traffic - By joining, you will be included in our members directory which is visited by our community of over 140,000 members, and thousands of outside visitors on a daily basis. You'll have the opportunity to earn a ranking at the top of your category, absolutely free! Receive valuable feedback from visitors of your website, network with your peers, and give your opinion on other websites in the directory. The more you participate, the more you get in return!

Referral based traffic - You are probably familiar with the concept of network marketing, well this is a free version of that marketing method - by registering and promoting your linkreferral affiliate link, an exponential growth of 5 levels of referrals can be created (ex. you refer 10 people who refer 10 people each who refer 10 each....), potentially 10,000s of visitors/day all viewing your link prominently in the top spot of our 'Featured Sites' section on our home page for your referral ID. It works because its free, fast to register, easy to implement and no risk. People that are referred from your site will have nothing to lose and everything to gain, just like you.

Search engine traffic - By registering, you'll benefit several ways, including,

1) having your webpage listing indexed more quickly - the major search engines continuously spider our site, and the sites listed in our directory.
2) Improved search engine rankings and SEO optimization.
3) Indirect search engine traffic via linkreferral.com. Pages such as your directory listing and your affiliate page listing feature your link and description, are picked up by all the major search engines. Your sign-up description, combined with our strong traffic base (a prime ranking factor for most major search engines) can pull in a significant immediate steady stream of traffic to your listing on linkreferral.com and then on to your web site etc.

Linkreferral forums traffic - By participating in our forums on a daily basis, you'll build relationships and your reputation within the linkreferral community and improve the odds of successfully converting visitors to your end goal. Promote your listing by asking questions and giving comments, each post you make actively displays your link, category and member profile.

(2)Free Traffic For Your Site At Super-Clix

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Free Traffic For Your Site/Blog

Super-Clix is a free contextually based, text ad advertising system designed to achieve maximum, highly targeted web site traffic for website owners. Through Super-Clix , a member’s text ad is continuously displayed prominently on hundreds of site targeted web sites by category.

Every web site owner knows that the success of any web site depends on quality web site traffic. Up until now, the only way to achieve this was through expensive pay-per-click (ppc) campaigns that virtually erodes any money the web site makes. To use ppc advertising for any decent campaign requires very deep pockets.

Not any more. We, at Super-Clix, have developed our very own text ad advertising system using the latest proprietary technology. We are thus able to serve a member’s text ad to hundreds of content specific, targeted web sites on a continuous basis, 24/7 - at no charge to the member whatsoever. If your web site needs quality, content targeted web site traffic, then join Super-Clix now.

How it works

Simply sign up for a free account and place a 2-3 line text ad with headline. Copy and paste the snippet code on your own site. This snippet code enables your web site to host a few text ads in return. Within 24 hours, after ad approval, our robot visits your web site and once it detects that your snippet code is up, your very own text ad goes live and our system serves your ad to hundreds of wbsites on a continuous basis.

Features

Totally free traffic
Quality web site traffic
Highly content targeted free traffic – your ad only appears on web sites that have similar content as yours
Change your ad as many times as you like
Complete stats showing you how your ad is performing, how many clicks your ad is getting, etc – thus enabling you to take full control of your campaign
Your ad is served on a continuous basis, 24/7
Fully automated system

(3)Free Blog Traffic with SavvyClicks

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One of the most highly effective method for free website traffic is through a traffic exchange. A traffic exchange is an Internet Marketing Service that provides a system for webmasters and website owners to exchange visitors with each other.

Savvy Clicks will provide you with a GUARANTEED continuous stream of free website traffic which can drastically boost your website visibility. Your websites will be displayed to tens of thousand of viewer worldwide who are eager to visit your websites and possibly purchase your products. Savvy Clicks is designed in such a way that the more you actively use our system the more exposure your websites will receive.

Directories and Social Bookmarking

2008-09-15T23:48:00.000-07:00

20 Essential Blog Directories & Top 10 social bookmarking sites

20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog

Here is a list of some essential directories.

1. Best of the Web Blog Search La Crem de la Crem, Best of the Web’s Blog Directory is very selective and only lists aged and valuable blogs. A link from here is majestic and well deserved.

2. Eaton Web Blog Directory is a real jewel with many aged inbound links and a blog rating system. You may have to pay a fee for your blog to be reviewed, but like Yahoo, the review fee is well worth the few dollars.

3. Blog Hub offers a drop down category and member blog list. With its “new blogger” list and hot topics, Blog Hub is a great directory to list your site.

4. Upon visiting Bloggernity, you find a crisp, clean, and easy to navigate site. Scrolling down, you find the new blogs. As there is little advertising on the home page, it is pleasant to the eye of the reader as well.

5. Blogarama has an impressive listing of over 65,000 blogs. The site is well designed and follows the same content categories as many other sites.

6. One of the most selective Blog Directories on the web (and Wordpress powered), Blog Search Engine is owned by Performancing’s parent company and serves search results powered by Ice Rocket.

7. Blog Catalog features a vast directory of categories, from academic to writing, while offering the ability to search by country, language, or user. It has a no frills design, but offers convenient member access through simple blog registration.

8. Globe of Blogs has too many features to list. In order to be listed on the site, the blog must not be commercial. The site may appear to be busy, but I like the features of being able to search by title, author, or subject. Narrowing the search becomes easier on this blog.

9. The ultimate directory of British blogs connotes all things British. It is not directed by location, but by the culture! It is asked that blogger be genuinely “Britisher.” Being listed in this blog reaches readers all the way across the pond!

10. Blog Universe is the perfect place to promote your video or podcast themed blog. Its layout is easy to navigate. Although the content is limited, it is an all around good directory site worthy of submission.

11. Bigger Blogs is a relatively new blog directory with only a few blogs registered. The blog is intertwined with a business directory. The blog section is difficult to find, and it is located through a link on the right side of the business directory page. However, the benefit is that the earlier you are accepted on a blog directory, the more exposure your blog will obtain. In addition, a back link is indeed a back link, so this can help with your search engine placement.

12. Bloggeries has the best categories and subcategories home page on the Internet. The layout is clear and concise, and readers are able to find what they are looking for in a snap!

13. Bloggapedia has an interesting and eye catching homepage. Readers are easily connected to the top blogs and newest posts. Innovative categories and a colorful design make this blog directory a hit.

14. Spillbean is a well-designed blog directory site with categories such as health, society, internet, and personal. The site is aesthetically pleasing, but there are not many listings yet.

15. Blogging Fusion is a blog with over sixty categories. These categories include photo blogs and family focused blogs. Blogging Fusion has an good amount of blog listings within the directory, and it also has visitor stats available.

16. Blogflux is not only a tool for blogger, but a directory that has the listings in alphabetic order. The blog listings are organized and clear. It is definitely an effective blog directory in which to be listed.

17. The blogs on the top listings of Bloglisting are fun, colourful, and catch the attention of the reader. Bloglisting displays the page ranking blogs, which is a helpful tool when determining with whom you want to exchange links.

18. Blogio may be a small blog directory with few listings, but it worthy of a submission. Despite its small size, there are quality blogs and a solid ability to search on this site.

19. Blog Explosion claims to be the largest blog promoter on the Internet. They have a vast directory but do not seem to have direct links. However, the listing in the directory can still show up in SERP’s, so keep this in mind.

20. Super Blog Directory is a great site that offers tools to posters that others do not. You can see the latest submitted links and blogs on the site, which is a perk that draws traffic into the directory.

Top 10 social bookmarking sites

1. del.icio.us
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that has rapidly taken off even more in popularity since being purchased by Yahoo. I use del.icio.us probably the most out of all these top picks, particularly to post interesting sites that I've found around the Web. I also subscribe to quite a few del.icio.us tags, such as popular and reference, and I get all the sites tagged with these keywords in my RSS reader of choice, Bloglines.

2. Digg.com
Digg is social bookmarking and social networking gone a little crazy due to the fact that anyone can submit a Digg (site), and then anyone can comment on those same Diggs. For me the most interesting feature of Digg has to actually be the comments on the sites and stories, since the Digg community is not shy about letting folks know how they feel about a particular Digg. Primarily focussed on geeky, technology-type items.

3. Listible
Listible hasn't been around very long, but already it's one of my must-visit sites. Probably because I have a weird thing for lists. Anyone can start a list about pretty much anything; I've seen lists for Firefox extentions, TV theme songs, and much more. Listible users can rate the items on the list and add comments.

4. Furl
Furl, a service of LookSmart, gives users the ability to save copies of any Web page, search within your own personal archive of Web pages, and share what you find. People use Furl to create their own personal shopping lists, real estate directories, job searches, student research papers, etc. This may just sound like a fancy way of saying bookmarks; but the thing about Furl is that you can access it from any computer, which means that your Favorites will go with you.

5. Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta
Yahoo my web 2.0 is a social search engine, which means that people and search sociallyare working together to create both better searches and a better search experience. From the site: "What if you could tap into a directory of favorite web content bookmarked by thousands of people? And what if that content was organized so that you could browse through it by keyword or instantly search to find content on a particular subject?" It's a great way to network and bookmark at the same time.

6. Flickr
Flickr is a social bookmarking and social networking site with a twist: it's all about photos. Users can upload and tag their favorite photos, then other users can bookmark those photos as favorites and share them with even more people. You can also comment on individual photos and share why you like (or dislike) that image.
7. Slashdot
Slashdot is the original social bookmarking site. Slashdotters can submit stories or links they find interesting and then users comment on them (usually the comments are extremely active). The only drawback of Slashdot is that stories and sites have to be pre-approved; this has actually driven a lot of very fervent Slashdot users to other social bookmark sites such as Digg.

8. YouTube
YouTube is another social bookmarking site with a twist; it's all about videos. Users upload their favorite videos and their fellow YouTube users can comment, pass these videos on around the Web, or paste them on their web site or blogs. YouTube is a great way to find popular homemade (mostly) videos.

9. Simpy
Simpy is a social bookmarking site that allows users to "save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users' links and tags." There's a lot of technology-related stuff here but then again, there's also a lot of very eclectic links on here as well.

10. Popurls.com
Popurls.com is one of my must-read sites every day. Popurls is a lovely conglomeration of about 10 different social bookmarking sites, some of which I've already mentioned in this list. Popurls is a great way to get all your potential bookmarks in one place.

Increase unique visitors

2008-09-15T23:40:00.000-07:00

Tips to increase unique visitors to your site:

Once you have come to accept that traffic generation will take some
time, you can proceed in considering the techniques you can employ.
Here are some tactics that are especially designed to garner unique
visitors:

Viral marketing :
Viral marketing is the most powerful way of
generating unique visitors at a consistent pace and at an
exponential rate. Think of it as the online equivalent of
word-of-mouth advertising. 5 visitors can become 25. 25 visitors
can become 125. 125 visitors can become 875. And it will never
stop. The number will just keep increasing. There are many viral
marketing tools that you can distribute for free, each of them
should carry your business message, i.e. a link to your website.
Because it's free, people will, by nature, be encouraged to
distribute it to the own networks, resulting in the exponential
spread of the same for the benefit of your website.So do the smart things now.

Article marketing :
Article marketing is often resorted to for its
power of creating back links for your website. But this strategy
can instantly transform people into unique visitors for your
website. Write an informative article and readers will immediately
view you as an expert. They'll trust what you have to say, and
they'll seek out what you have to share. Article marketing is not
only for the establishment of many back links. Its true power lies
in its branding capabilities.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising :
If you have some money to spend,
then PPC advertising can prove to be the fastest and even the most
efficient way of generating high quality traffic. The reason?
Because with PPC programs, your link can appear prominently on the
results page of every relevant search. You won't have to compete
with millions of websites anymore. All you have to do is to enrol
yourself with a program like Google AdWords and pay the same a
certain amount corresponding to a bid you would have made. You'd be
charged every time a user clicks on your link.

Create High Quality Articles:
It is the simple way to increse unique visitors.You have to create high informative articles to do this.

There are more strategies, but I am only concerned with
unique visitors in this article. By employing the tactics I have
mentioned above, you're sure to generate a lot of them in due time,
once the seeds you have planted would gestate. Please check
out my site below for lots more targeted traffic.

Increase Pagerank-Special Tips

2008-09-15T23:24:00.000-07:00

Make Your Own Sitemap

2008-09-15T23:23:00.001-07:00

How to make a sitemap?
After Google,yahoo and Microsoft agreeing on using on sitemap configuration for indexing any website or blog its going to be an important factor to come into search engines.Sitemaps aren’t any scary thing.To make them is a peace of cake just remember to not change your links too often else it will break your indexing on search engines.For Bloggers:
There are two plugin implemented for wordpress and it works on 2.0.I have implemented both of them.
* Sitemap.xml Generator…….Demo on my blog here.This plugin is great.It can build your sitemap and ping google about it too.It rebuilds your sitemap every time you make a post or page and ping again.Buy my suggestion is after you create a sitemap,you should go and submit by telling the location of your stitemap individually. This will be helpful in SEO.
* Visual Sitemap Generaor.…..Demo on my blog here.This one is useful for viewers who are looking for a particular category.They can just go the page and find and then click on it to read the post.Too good. This can be helpful for new readers.

Sitemaps XML format:
The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.The Sitemap must:

* Begin with an opening tag and end with a closing tag.
* Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the tag.
* Include a entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
* Include a child entry for each parent tag.

How to make a sitemap for blogger:
It’s very simple in Blogger. It only requires you to go to the Google Webmaster Central and ass your site feed and the sitemap is automatically created. You can get detail instruction on this here.Make sure that you submit your full feed and not partial one.

There are lot of free online and downloadable sitemap generators.
Here’s a simplified listing :

Python Scipt - This is the most difficult one to install. But if you are familiar with python, then this is the best one around.It’s automated and requires no additional support.I don’t recommend it for a beginner.Requires technical knowledge.

Online sitemaps - This is best for small websites. It’s easy, simple and online.Just go to this site and submit your url.Fill in some basic details like time and priority settings for the files and click go!The whole sitemap will be generated online.You will get both ROR file and the Google sitemap XML file.If you are interested only in Google, use the XML sitemap.The format is according to Google sitemap protocol and is faultless.
Best choice for beginners and small websites of less than 500 pages.

Gsite Crawler - This is a downloadable application. If your website is a bit large and you have time to tweak some settings and is serious about sitemap, then i would recommend this guy for you.
This is the way i have made a sitemap for a blogsite. You need to upload the sitemap in atom.rss page.That's all.Thanks.

Website Traffic Using Google Image Search

2008-09-15T23:22:00.002-07:00

Ways to Increase Website Traffic Using Google Image Search

Google search engine indexes images in your web pages. When someone uses Google Image Search to find images on the web, what chance does your website have to show up in the search results?

If you know how to optimize images in your web pages, your images will have high rankings in the image search results. Using higly relevant and properly optimized images in your web pages will bring quality traffic from Google Image Search. Use the techniques described below for optimizing Google Image Search.

>>1. Use the alt attribute in the html img tag. This is the most important one. Use a specific keyword or a key phrase that identifies what the image is all about. If the image is a new car, use the key phrase 'new car', instead of car or traffic, in the alt attribute.

>>2. Use the title attribute in the img tag. The title attribute is what people see when they hover the mouse over the image. You can use the same text for title that you use for the alt attribute.

>>3. Use both the width and the height attributes for the image. If the image height is unknown, use the image width. You should always use the image width from a design standpoint. Unknown image width can break your horizontal layout forcing your web site visitors to scroll horizontally which is very annoying.

>>4. Put some description texts just beneath the image. For example, 'a red rose blossoming in a quite morning' for the red rose image. Make the key word, red rose, bold. When Google displays the image in the image search result page, the result page will also display the texts surrounding the image.

>>5. Don't use image1, image2, etc. for the image file names. just use descriptive names. For example, use new car for a new car image file. You can use the same text that you use for the alt attribute. Just hyphenate the words if it is a key phrase.

>>6. Choose your anchor texts in links to images carefully. Instead of 'click here for larger image' as the text link to an image, you can use 'a large red rose picture is here' as the anchor text.

>>7. Put all your images in a root folder and, if you prefer, categorize your images in sub-folders under the root image folder. Make sure that your robot file does not limit access to the image folders. Use the img and src tags for images on your web pages. Avoid all types of java script tricks. Goolge search engine spider will be able to index all your images. If you have descriptive image files names, they will have high relevancy in Google image search results.

>>8. Use Google trends to find hot topics. Use your creativity to establish a credible relevancy between you images and the hot trends. For example, if 'Hunt for red December' is the hot topic, you can use 'Hunt for red December Rose' as your image text.
Google image search build a huge traffic in any site.So that's important for every site.

Increase Alexa Page Rank

2008-09-15T23:22:00.001-07:00

Ways to increase Alexa Page Rank

What is the Alexa Rank?
The Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

Here are some tips for my blog readers to increase Alexa Page Rank.

Use My Space :Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the My Space Crowd.
Try Alexa auto-surfs: It maybe for brand new sites. They are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like AdSense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so use it with caution.
Hire forum posters: Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
Use Pay per Click Campaigns: Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help to increase traffic.
Create an Alexa category: Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.Finally helps you to increase page rank.
Optimize your popular posts: Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines. Include a widget at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
Buy banners and links: Buy banners for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.
Install the Alexa toolbar: FireFox’s Search Status extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
Put up an Alexa rank widget: Put it on your website. You will receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS FireFox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPS are used.
Write or Blog about Alexa: Webmaster and blogger love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
Write content: Write that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
Use Alexa redirects: Use it on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.doshdosh.com . Replace with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
Post in Asian social networking: Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.
Create a webmaster tools: Create a tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s web page on SEO tools is a very good example.
Get Digg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.

Why Word press

2008-09-15T23:19:00.000-07:00

Word press

Wordpress is a free blogging platform that anyone can use. A “blog” is an online journal, and is proven to be the most effective way of building a website from scratch with no experience.

But don’t let the words ‘journal’ fool you.

It’s not just a ‘diary’ to record your personal experience and daily ramblings.

With a Wordpress blog, you can build an entire website on a particular topic and dominate the entire industry. The gurus call this an ‘authority’ website.

Now the average joe like me actually has a chance to build a mega-site with hundreds of pages and thousands of visitors a day...

..and yet still have time for myself and my family.

The reason I’m yakking on about Wordpress is because hundreds of smart entrepreneurs are already using it and I don't want you to be left out!

Look at it this way...

By the time you create your first page they have already created an entire profit-pulling niche website and are making much more than you do now, while spending only a fraction of the time and money you’ve invested.

The good news is that you can catch up too, if you start taking action now.

Why not Blogger ?

Blogger is Easier? Maybe.Better? Definitely not !

Yes, it’s easy to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Blogger also has built-in functions to add Adsense codes directly into their platform.

In fact I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why:

Google Owns Your Content – Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You have no control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.
Lack of advanced options – Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also add as many plugins as you want easily and even add audio or video to your content.
Publishing with Blogger is a pain in the ass – It can take forever to post articles on the Blogger platform, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website.
You can't brand yourself – Of course with Blogger you can publish to your own domain, but you can’t do significant changes to it. I can identify Blogger sites immediately, but with Wordpress you can customize and brand almost anything you want. You can also install Wordpress on an existing website as a sub-domain or sub-directory if you want.
Limited promotion options – When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

In fact, there are other platforms like MSN Spaces, Typepad, and even MySpace. But these solutions are severely limited.

Adsense CTR Tips & Tricks

2008-09-15T23:15:00.002-07:00

Adsense CTR Tips & TricksAdSense is one of the best tools you can use to draw dollars to your site. Remember that there is no easy way to make money on Adsense... it takes a lot of work. Adsense publishers on blogspot.com can integrate Adsense directly from Blogger Interface.Here are some adsense Tips for building CTR to earn more money:

>> Strictly adhere to the google Polices and TOS. If you are not aware, here it is:
https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US

> Do not ask your friends or visitors to click on your Google ads. Do not offer incentives for users to click on google ads. Don't label the Google ads with text other than "Sponsored Links" or "Advertisements"

>>Do not click on your own ads. Google can find it out easily and if it does, your account will be banned and all your money earned is gone. Do not reload your pages excessively. If you are testing your website layout with Google adsense, you can try the google adsense preview tool. Google does not account any clicks made in the ads displayed in the preview tool.

>>Blend AdLinks with other navigation links or place horizontal adlinks at the top of your webpage. AdSense publishers are permitted to click on link unit topics on their web pages, provided that they do not click on any Google ads on the resulting page.

>>Request your friends or colleagues to navigate your website, watch their activity, it will provide vital clues about which regions on your website draw more user attention. Try putting ads near those areas.

>>You can put upto 3 adsense units on a page. Try putting a large skyscraper on the right navigation sidebar of your website. That area is close to the browser scrollbar. You can also add 2 AdSense for search boxes, 1 adlink unit and 1 referral button per product (i.e., 1 AdSense referral button and 1 Firefox plus Google Toolbar referral button).

>>The first few lines of your content are an important factor for determining what Ads are served on your webpage. That's the right place to put keywords in bold (strong or tags) or header tags (h1, h2, etc).

>>Always select the setting to open Google Adsense search box results in a new browser window, so you won't lose your visitors. Click the Open search results in a new browser window checkbox and this add target="google_window" to your form tag.

>>Not everyone has an RSS reader. Use RSS to Email services like FeedBlitz, Bloglet or Rmail to let users subscribe to your blog by email.

>>The AdSense for search Top Queries report shows you what your users are looking for, by listing the 25 most common searches conducted through your AdSense for search boxes. Use this report to identify additional topics to add to your site, or to keep track of your most sought-after information. Focus and improve that content.

>>Block low paying advertisers with Filters. Why to loose a visitor for 0.01 cents. Use Overture or Google Adwords Keywords tool to discover keywords that are less popular with advertisers.

>>For low CTR pages, try changing titles or adding more content to get better focused ads.

>>Maximum people think the search box is on the top right corner. So you know where to put it.

>>Always put ads above the main fold. Just have the following heatmap as a reference before placing your ads on your pages.
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-heatmap-2.htm

>>Organize an Adsense Party for your friends and colleagues - Request them to navigate your website, watch their activity - it will provide vital clues about which regions on your website draw more user attention. Try putting ads near those areas.

>>Use URL channels to determine performance of individual pages. I track my most popular pages with Google Analytics, Statcounter and create a channel for each of the URL. You can even track Adsense Clicks with Analytics.

>>Don't start a "adsense asbestos" or "home equity loan rates" website merely to make money from accidental clicks (accidence). You will never make money out these "made-for-adsense-only" websites. Instead, write on topics what you are passionate about. Don't waste your money on high-paying adsense keywords lists.

Yahoo Publisher Network YPN and Chitika eMiniMalls offer interesting Adsense alternatives. You can use this free online Sandbox tool to compare Google Adsense, Chitika eMiniMalls and Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) Program.

Enter any keywords or a website address (URL), choose a geographic location (for Google), customize ad colors or choose from an existing color set and click "Udate Ads Display". You can try the Adsense, YPN or Chitika Services without signing up for any of these services.