Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Promoting Your Blogger blog

This is in no way a science or guarantee; it's simply a few suggestions with which many bloggers have found success.

Set your blog to Send Pings. The Let search engines find your blog? setting determines whether or not your blog will be included in Google Blog Search and if it will ping Weblogs.com. If you select 'No,' everyone can still view your blog but search engines will be instructed not to crawl it. You can find these settings on the Settings | Basic page. When this setting is activated, your blog will be included in various "recently updated" lists on the web as well as other blog-related services.

Activate Your Navbar. Do this and you might start to see the effects right away! One of the features on the Blogger Navbar is a button called NextBlog - click it to visit the next Navbar-enabled blog.

Install Email This Post. If you use Email This Post on your blog, people will be able to forward your posts to friends. This may not have an immediate impact on your site stats but it enables others to publicize your blog for you.

Turn on Post Pages. By publishing every post as its very own web page with Post Pages, you ensure that your entries are way more link-able and more attractive to search engines.

Turn on your site feed. When people subscribe to your site feed in their newsreaders, they're very likely going to read your post.

Add your blog to Blogger's listings. When you add your blog to Blogger's listings by active the checkbox on the Set Displayed Blog page, it shows up in Nextblog, Recently Updated, and other places. It's like opting-in to traffic.

Write quality content and do it well. If your "style" is bad writing, worse grammar, no punctuation, and an ugly design, that might be okay for a niche crowd. But the idea here is to achieve mass appeal, so fix yourself up a bit.

Publish regular updates. Simple: the more you blog, the more traffic you'll get.

Think of your audience. A good way to build an audience is to speak to one in particular. When you keep your audience in mind, your writing gains focus. Focus goes a long way toward repeat visitors.

Keep search engines in mind. There are a few things you can do to make your blog more search engine friendly. Use post titles and post page archiving. This will automatically give each of your post pages an intelligent name based on the title of your post. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search.

Keep your posts and paragraphs short. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on.

Put your blog URL in your email signature. Think of how many forwarded emails you've seen in your day, and just imagine the possibilities.

Sumbit your address to blog search sites and directories. People look for blog content at Technorati every day, are you on their list? You should be. Submit your blog's url to Technorati and any other site of that ilk you come across.

Link to other blogs. Links are the currency of the blogosphere and it takes money to make money so start linking.

Install a blogroll. It's a very simple yet effective social networking scheme and it has the same result as a simple link if not stronger: traffic! So if you don't have one yet, sign up for a blogroll and get that link-list going.

Be an active commenter. This is in the same vein as linking. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least. So if you feel inspired, leave a comment or two in your blog travels. It behooves you.

Enable Following on your blog. Following a is a great way to keep your friends updated on the latest activity on your blog. New blogs will have this blog feature enabled by default, but for older blogs you will have to enable it from the Design | Page Elements tab.

Monday, February 21, 2011

If your blog contains adult content

If your blog contains adult themes or language, you may want to consider choosing to have a Content Warning page appear before readers can enter your blog. A Content Warning page will warn visitors that some may consider the material on your blog objectionable and will give them the chance to either continue to your blog or to cancel; this is especially useful if you would like to keep minors from accidentally stumbling upon your blog.

To add a Content Warning page to your blog, just toggle the setting titled, "Adult Content?" in your Settings | Basic tab.


* Please note that if your blog contains adult imagery, Blogger may apply the Content Warning page to your blog even if you haven't altered your settings.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Free Blogspot Templates: Your blog template

Preview: http://yourblogtemplate.blogspot.com/

  • From your Blogger dashboard, go to Design | Edit HTML
  • Make sure to back up your old template before install this new one by click on the "Download full template"
  • Check on the "Expand Widget Templates"
  • Now copy/paste this code to replace all the code in the HTML code section
  • Click Save Template button and you're done.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Blogger Android App

Have you ever wanted to write up a quick blog post on the go? Now there is an easy way to do this on your Android phone! The first version of the Blogger Android App is released today. Using the app you can easily compose a post, attach a photo that you just took with your phone, and either save it as a local draft for later or immediately publish it to your blog. If you are an Android user, you can start using the Blogger app today by downloading it for free from the Android Market.


Feature highlights
  • Multiple accounts and blogs: You can easily switch between different accounts and blogs that you have author rights to. Simply choose your account and blog and you are all set to go.


  • Write and save/publish: You can write a post, assign labels, and then either save it as a draft or immediately publish it. Saving as draft is handy if you need to wait until you have Internet connectivity.


  • Photos from camera and gallery: If you see something interesting, you can take a photo directly from the app and include it in the blog post. You can also browse your gallery to include the ones you like.


  • Sharing to Blogger from gallery or browser: Blogger is one of the available sharing options. If you come across a photo in the gallery, or a website while browsing, you can share the content to the Blogger app directly from the sharing menu.


  • Share location: You can share your location by activating the location bar and selecting the correct location. This information will be included in your post.


  • View saved/published posts: By switching to the List View, you can view all your drafts and published posts that you wrote using the app. By performing a long-press on a published post you can invoke a menu that includes the option to view your post in a browser.


Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Free Blogspot Templates: Angel Blogger template

Preview: http://angelbloggertemplate.blogspot.com/
  • From your Blogger dashboard, go to Design | Edit HTML
  • Make sure to back up your old template before install this new one by click on the "Download full template"
  • Check on the "Expand Widget Templates"
  • Now copy/paste this code to replace all the code in the HTML code section
  • Click Save Template button and you're done.