Add a series of photos in blog footer

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

"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.

Great Money Making Schemes for Your Blog

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

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

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.

What It Takes to Build a Successful Money-Making Blog

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

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?

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.

Start Blogging

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

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

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.

Ways to Increase Back link

Back link Building Tip #1:

Increase Google page ranking by adding your website to the free Qassia directory. You'll get unlimited quality back links (as opposed to "no-follow" back links), and you don't have to add reciprocal back links.

Back link Building Tip #2:

Host your own affiliate program on your own server. Sure it takes more work: you have to set it up, administer it and pay out the affiliate checks. However, if you use an affiliate service, such as Commission Junction, the links point to the affiliate service and get redirected to your site. A more effective strategy is to host your own affiliate program, so all those affiliate links point directly to you. You can find affiliate programs, some of which may be free at The CGI Resource Index (Bill Gentry with Look Sharp Designs)

Back link Building Tip #3:

Increase Google page ranking by finding linking opportunities within discussion lists related to your site’s topic. Warning: do so responsibly and carefully (in other words, don't join a discussion list for the sole purpose of getting back links. Participate and add value to the discussion group). Try Yahoo Groups, which has thousands of topical discussion groups on almost any topic. I often send short posts to appropriate lists with links for my clients’ sites, and if you do so properly, it is very effective. (Eric Ward, President, Net POST and URL wire)

Back link Building Tip #4:

Anywhere you can leave your link, do it: in chat rooms, guest books and social networking sites (the warning from tip #3 applies here as well). You would be surprised at where your link turns up on search engines when you start doing this. And if the search engine has found it, then it adds to your link popularity. (Don Hammond at Dolomite.com)

Back link Building Tip #5:

Now that Google indexes the content of newsgroups, if you post to related newsgroups, be sure to use a signature line with your link and appropriate link text. (Robin Nobles of Search Engine Workshops, Online Search Engine Marketing Courses, and the TNT-Guides for Successful Web Sites.

Back link Building Tip #6:

Ask a question at a site that has a question and answer page and include a link. Post questions on forums that allow links. Post into the newsgroups. Include an e-mail tail tag. Put it on your T-shirt. Include it as a sticker with each shipped order. Tattoo it on your forehead. Tell your mom. Get a vanity license plate. (Michael Campbell with Internet Marketing Secrets)

Back link Building Tip #7:

The number one way I've built link popularity is by offering a good information product or service, establishing a good conversion on the site, and then getting super affiliates. I've found that getting super affiliates multiplies the number of regular affiliates I'm able to get. All of this leads to hundreds of inbound links. It takes a very disciplined approach, but one I've found very effective. (Jon Keel with Improved Results)

Back link Building Tip #8:

I'm surprised at how many people don't have their link in their signature line of their e-mail. (Don Hammond at DonOmite.com)

Back link Building Tip #9:

Don’t get a link from “links” pages on sites as these are about 1% as useful as your signature link on the 7th page of a forum thread, unless of course the Page is a PR 9 with a lot of back-links itself.

Back link Building Tip #10:

If a site wants to link to you from a page with 100 links on it you can basically forget it as the strength of the link is shared by, well, 100 others!

Back link Building Tip #11:

So if you have a site about Dogs you might want to link out to Crufts or the Kennel Club or Wiki a good one.

Back link Building Tip #12:

You need to get into the good neighbourhoods. Try and get links from the neighbourhoods at the top of Google for your key phrases after all Google likes these sites enough to rank them! Find that circle of sites where all the big boys in your industry link to and are linked from and get involved. For instance, try and get a link from a .gov site!

Back link Building Tip #13:

See who links to your competitors and try and get a link as well (or pay money to have their link replaced with yours.

Back link Building Tip #14:

Use Yahoo and type “link:yourcompetitors.com” and see who links to them. Yahoo is kind enough to rank pages virtually by the number of back-links sites have in site explorer - making it one of my most used seo tools.

Back link Building Tip #15:

Don’t waste your time with seo tools! Join Social Network tools like Delicious, Technorati and Stumble. There’s three links right there, although to be fair, they are not actually counted as linksby Google becasue of the Nofollow attribute. Digg links count, though.

Back link Building Tip #16:

If someone, anyone wants to link to you accept, just don’t always reciprocate with a link back to them (negates the value of the link, almost) and could see your site lose trust. Remember Google says it is impossible for a site to hurt your site by simply linking to your site, but you can hurt your site if you link to another site with a ’shady’ backlink profile.

Back link Building Tip #17:

It doesn’t hurt to get a link from a low or high Google Page Rank page. Today’s No-PR page might be a PR 5 page in reality, as Google Toolbar is out of date.

Back link Building Tip #18:

Good Google rankings is not all about who you get a link from it’s who you link to - this is thought to be the measure of the trust of a site and seems fairly reasonable to me. Link to authority sites in your industry as well as other sites that look like quality upcoming sites, and stay clear of suspect sites.