Blogger now has an official app for Android users which will allow them to easily compose a post and publish it on their blog from their android phone. While mobile blogging should have been handy for many blogger users previously, apps like these are additional advancement of software providing more functionality. Blogger in its recent post announced the availability of its official app.

“We are excited to announce our first version of the Blogger Android App. 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.”

Android Users can start using the Blogger app by downloading it from the Android Market (for Free).

For all the features of the first version of Blogger Android App, please refer to the blogger post. Here are some of the featured highlights.

As a Blogger Android App User, you can;

• Have access to multiple accounts and blogs that you own
• Write and save/publish posts on your blog.
• Add photos to your post directly from Camera or from your existing gallery.
• Sharing to Blogger blog directly from your browser or Gallery.
• Share you Location inside your blog Post
• View Saved and Published posts on your blog.

Blogger also notifies that it’s working on “supporting other smart phone platforms to allow more of our users to easily post to Blogger on the go”. Being an iphone user, how I always wished there was an app for blogger! Hope Blogger also comes up with an iphone app soon. Anyway, are you using the Android App for blogger? Let us know in the comments below.

Image and News via: Blogger Buzz

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Want to show your blogger love? A blogger T-shirt should be perfect for you to show your respect to this blogging platform. And for this time, you shouldn’t spend any bucks on it. You just need to be lucky and do your bit by taking this blogger survey. Blogger, as to gain some feedback from it users with regard to its monetization features available, is taking a quick survey and if you happen to be lucky survey taker, you will be sent this blogger t-shirt shown in the image below.

The T-shirt is definitely fashionable; so go for this survey to try your luck for it!

It seems blogger is getting more serious with its users and focusing the monetization area effectively. Recently in addition to adsense (which most of the bloggers give a try); blogger also introduced Google Affiliate network to its users.

And I think Blogger should be using this quick survey to learn about bloggers using the monetization methods for their blogs. Monetization has always been an important aspect of blogging and I am glad that blogger is focusing on it. What do you say? Let us know in the comments below!

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is definitely the much talked about topic on the web and so is its importance. Ask anyone how you could drive more readers to your blog and every one of them will include this important topic in their answer. The most important thing after the quality content you produce for your blog is the way you get readers for your content and this is where SEO comes in play. Yes you heard it right; SEO is the most essential component to drive traffic to your blog. How you could optimize your blogger blog for SEO should make another important blog post (Which I will publish after this post) but for now I want to refer an important tool for SEO analysis if your blog. It should warm up the SEO spirit in you and keep it alive till I come up with another post on how you can optimize your blogger blog for SEO.

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post. I have used the tool Free SEO report and have gained a detailed analysis for my blog. This blog post on shoemoney enthused me to use the tool and importance of the tool inspired me to come with this post.

So what is free SEO Report?

As the name suggests, Free SEO Report helps you generate free SEO report for your blog or website for a specific keyword you want to target.

Is it all that free?

Yes, it’s all free for one report of your blog and for a small fee you can go pro which enables you to generate unlimited reports and also the ability to customize them with your own branding.

What do you get?

In a sentence, all you need to know about SEO for your blog. If you think that bit more exaggerating, try it for yourself. You will be seriously blown away by your custom, detailed and in depth report!

Free SEO Report tool helps you to have a detailed overview on several headings of SEO including Document title, Headings (H1, H2, H3), Body text, URL, Sitemap and robots.txt, Meta description, Links, HTML Code and page load time, Images and Meta keywords.

General Suggestions that I really found useful for beginners of SEO from the report are;

• Make websites for people, not search engines.
• Make websites that convert to your end goal… not just rank for keywords.
• Build a brand around a community. One that loves you and will fight for you because they love your services. Don’t shut them off.
• Make your brand so big that search engines need you.
• Don’t focus on just one keyword. Do a proper keyword research to find out what people seeking your products and services are actually using.
• Read Google’s SEO Starter Guide.

And much more is so easily explained in the website itself that you don’t need any extra guide to know the features. So give it a try and explore it for yourself and don’t forget to add a comment below with your view.

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1. Top 10 Google Services for Blogger

Well, Spam is increasing rapidly on blogspot blogs as its users are growing day by day. Being an easy platform to create a page and go online on web, many spammers are targeting blogspot and so is malicious content growing on blogspot blogs. Blogger in the context is trying its best to fight against the spammers to stop the abuse. In a recent post, Blogger mentions they have partnered with other abuse-fighting teams within Google to develop sophisticated systems for automatically detecting and quarantining nefarious content on Blogspot.

That’s even a better. Hopefully the algorithms of blogger used to classify and quarantine malicious blogs are also improved with this. Blogger already has a bad reputation of deleting its blogs randomly, one more reason why people don’t want to go for blogger. But I think this should now only be a myth and blogger has worked on trends of pointing out thousands of malicious blogs for years. Spam levels have also comparatively decreased in the recent blogger stats. Despite all, Blogger still encourages you to submit suspicious blogs with its report abuse feature. You can also directly report blogger about such blogs.

Here are some more Practices for Making Blogs safer on web;

A Better blogging (If you are blogger!);

The only way blogspot blogs can be safe is a good practice of blogging from blogger users. Make sure your blog adheres to the terms of service of blogger. You can only make blogging and blogs better!

Help Blogger to help you;

If you want a safe experience you definitely need to help Blogger. However trained the algorithms are; they lack human touch for sure. So go ahead and fill in that space. As mentioned earlier, make use of the report abuse feature if the blog has got a default nav bar. If not, Report them directly on Blogger where they review every submission as soon as possible and take action as necessary.

Make use of Latest Browsers

Latest browsers are undoubtedly more secure and can detect potentially malicious sites easily. Visit the corresponding homepage of the browser you prefer and make sure you have the latest version of it. • Google Chrome ; • Mozilla Firefox ; • Safari 5 ; • Internet Explorer ;• Opera 10 seem to be the most popular ones.

Practice Safe Browsing

Latest browsers have the option for safe browsing, in which the browsers display a warning message for websites they think are spam. They filter spam really well and can enrich your blogs browsing experience.

What other ways can Blogger blogs be safe? Let us know in the comments below.

This post comes as in support of Cyber Security awareness campaign. Think you too can help? Visit Cyber Security Awareness home and their resources page for Banners, Posters and More.

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A short post after a long time! Working on lot other stuff, but this is very useful to bring as a post on blogger user. This is your time to be heard on blogger. Make Blogging better with blogger.

On their Google Products page, Blogger is now looking for more suggestions from its users and to improve its features.

Please use this opportunity to submit your ideas to blogger. You ideas can include the specific features you want or suggestions on how they can improve the existing ones.

The product suggestion seems really helpful to blogger. After they have a handful of ideas from blogger users, the engineers behind blogger can go on working for the features all over the year. What a better way to satisfy users!

Till I publish this post, 4,471 people have submitted 3,109 ideas and cast 101,306 votes; but what do you think? Go for your Ideas.

Image: Blogger buzz

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1. Wishing Blogger Happy 10th Birthday

Official Blogger blog keeps on pointing out a lot of resources that can help you make most out of blogger. Though I like most of them, there are really few that are appealing enough for me to actually use it on blog. This week on Blogger Buzz Viglink CEO, Oliver Roup talks about one more way of making money from your blog and in a simpler way through viglink.
Have you heard about the Affiliate marketing concept? If not, it’s just a marketing practice in which a business (websites) pay you for any visitor or customer you send to them. You can go on learning more about affiliate marketing if you haven’t any idea already. Now this viglink makes the process of affiliate marketing easier. If you are blogging about products or services and actually influencing your readers to buy and use them, you can be really making money out of that. Viglink helps you easily turn your links to affiliate links of products and services and so within minutes you will be practicing affiliate marketing. Its lot easier as you don’t need to worry about joining proper channels and manually doing the codes and everything. With some lines of code you can start making money out of affiliate marketing.

Here’s what viglink has to say about themselves in a blog post of blogger buzz;

VigLink is a content monetization company that makes affiliate marketing very easy for bloggers. We offer a simple snippet of code you can install in your blog that automatically and transparently does all the work for you. We’ve catalogued and signed up for more than 12,500 affiliate programs and we collect all the performance information and deliver you a single integrated payment. In return, VigLink takes 25% of the incremental revenue you earn.

Go through this video as well.

So If you really intrested, You can go on and join Viglink.

Let me also take you through the process of installing viglink on your blogger blog.
1. After creating an account with Viglink, Go to the dashboard and click on “Install” on your left side of dashboard.

2. Copy the Code Provided by Viglink.

3. Now go to your Blogger Dashboard and click on the “Design” of the blog you want to use Viglink

4. Make Sure you are now on Page Elements Tab.

5. Click Add A gadget in your Footer or any other closest area to the buttom of your page.

6. Select to add the “HTML/Javascript” Gadget.

7. Now Paste the Code that you had copied in step 2; in the Gadget Content.

8. Save the gadget.
Thats it. If you want to see if you have installed the code properly you can use the viglinks Installation checker by entering your blog Url.

Let us know what you think about Viglink in the comments below. Is it helping you to monetize your blog?

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1. Adsense Basics every publisher should know

Yes, you heard it right; investing in a domain name is the best investment you can make in your blogging career. A year ago when I started this blog, the first thing I did was find a suitable domain for my blog. I wanted to make this site for blogger users and so Bloggeruser.com was really appealing to me. I quickly bought the domain name with only few clicks, Thanks to Godaddy and configured to work with the blogger hosting. In fact for other sites I went for the default option of buying domain through the blogger itself. (Which I don’t really recommend to you).

So, yes I am suggesting you too to get a domain name for your blog. Well it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the .blogspot.com (of course for blogger users). There are several popular sites still with the same extension but believe me, it will be the best investment you will ever make in your blogging path. Here’s why you need to follow my suggestion.

1. Stand out from the crowd

The competition in blogging has grown so fierce that you need to have something if you need to stand out from the crowd. Blogger being a free service and easy to install, many have started using it for some unfair practices. I mean the spam is growing so rapidly that most of the blogs under that domain are just created for manipulating search engine. So, your domain will make you stand out from the crowd and add some credibility.

2. Your blog owner is Google, NOT you

Yeah, you don’t own that domain. Google owns. Of course you use it, you just have right to use it. Did you go through the Blogger’s ToS? They clearly mention that only the content you write is owned by you, and the platform is the sole property of Google. How this affects is, the blog is not in your hands completely and someday if you happen not to abide by their terms of service, they have right to remove your blog without any notice or reason. Won’t this affect all your hard work till now? Think isn’t having your own domain worth?

3. You have wide range of options

If your blog grows and becomes popular, you start looking for more options and beyond the box. That’s when you might go for your own hosting rather than depending on the free Blogger hosting which has limited options in comparison. You domain will finally come in use. You may want to move to some other CMS such as WordPress, (which most of them do) and then the same domain on which you worked for years will come in use and will have same authority with added flexibility.

There are lot advantages of owning your own domain name but I wanted to write this post just to inspire you to go for your first domain if you haven’t got any. Good luck.

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Your Google Mailbox has got Google Buzz, so why shouldn’t your blog have it? Of course your blogger blog needs to have this Google Buzz option. Blogger officially tried to include the Google Buzz into blogger blogs by adding the new feature of Sharing into Google Buzz and that by integrating into the share button of Blogger. But I know you may not be using that blogger Navbar for sharing or just you want the cool Google Buzz share Button Widget in your blog. Ok so in this post, I will help you to get that cool and colourful Google buzz button in your blog.

First, why you need Google Buzz Button?

If you are a social media user and want to promote and grow your blog then this is a must need widget for you. Google Buzz button will help you and your readers to share your blog posts to the buzz stream of Google. With just a click, you can share your posts and this will help you start conversations, go with comments and make the social media engagement more interesting. Who wouldn’t like to spread his/her blog?

SO you interested in having the button for your blog ? Follow the steps below to add the google Buzz widget in your blogger blog.

1. Go to Layout >Edit HTML in your Blogger Dashboard of your blog.

2. Remember to backup your blogger Template before making any changes.
3. Make sure to check the “Expand Widget Templates” box.

4. Search for this line of code (or similar) in your template:

<div class='post-header-line-1'/>

5. Place the below code of Google Buzz just after the above line.

<div style="float:right;padding:4px;">
<a expr:href='&quot;http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title + &quot;&amp;srcTitle=&quot; + data:blog.title+ &quot;&amp;srcURL=&quot; + data:blog.homepageUrl ' rel='nofolloW' style='text-decoration:none;' target='_blank'>
<img alt='Buzz It' src='http://i48.tinypic.com/idyc04.png' style='border:0px;'/></a>
</div>

6. See if it works. Didn’t work for you? Don’t Worry, Try this. Search for the Below line of code.

<data:post.body/>

7. Place the above Google Buzz code under the code you have searched for above.

8. Save your Template and That’s it.

The above code will just add the simple Google Widget Button. If you want to have the widget that includes the share count button, then you need to go through the steps below.
1. Find the below code in your template.

<div class='post-header-line-1'/>

or

<data:post.body/>

2. After the code, add the below code of Google Buzz in your template.

<div style="float:right;padding:4px;"> <script type='text/javascript'> njuice_buzz_url = '<data:post.title/>'; njuice_buzz_title = '<data:post.url/>'; njuice_buzz_share = 'reader'; </script> <script type='text/javascript' src='http://button.njuice.com/buzz.js'/> </div>

Customization

You can change the style of the widget by making changes to the following code.

njuice_buzz_size = 'small';

or

njuice_buzz_size = 'simple';

just after

njuice_buzz_share = 'reader';

These codes will help you get your desired Google Buzz widget (as you see in the above pic) for your blog. I am sure you going to like them for your blog.

Have you got this buttons in your blog ? or are you just enjoying the default way of sharing posts through navbar? Which one is a cool idea ? Let us know in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Use Google Buzz to Share your Blogger Blog posts
2. Facebook Like / Recommend button for Blogger Blog
3. Related Posts Widget with thumbnails for Blogger

Are you looking to increase page views of your blog? This should be a must have widget for your blogger blog. Related Posts with thumbnails is not just a one more related posts widget. This widget really looks good with the content and thus adds something worth to the overall design of your template. It helps your readers to go through the similar posts they were reading and so helps to decrease your bounce rate by increasing page views. Wow! Both design and better functionality at same time.

In this post we will go through the steps of adding the Related Posts Widget with thumbnails for Blogger. Ready to add to your template? Go through the steps below.
1. Go the Blogger Dashboard and Navigate to the Layout button of your template.

2. Go to the Edit Html of your Blogger Template.

3. You Need to check the “Expand Widget Templates” check box.

4. Now look for

  </head> 

and ABOVE the code; copy the following code.

<!--Related Posts with thumbnails Scripts and Styles Start-->
<!-- remove --><b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<style type="text/css">
#related-posts {
float:center;
text-transform:none;
height:100%;
min-height:100%;
padding-top:5px;
padding-left:5px;
}

#related-posts h2{
font-size: 1.6em;
font-weight: bold;
color: black;
font-family: Georgia, &#8220;Times New Roman&#8221;, Times, serif;
margin-bottom: 0.75em;
margin-top: 0em;
padding-top: 0em;
}
#related-posts a{
color:black;
}
#related-posts a:hover{
color:black;
}

#related-posts  a:hover {
background-color:#d4eaf2;
}
</style>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var defaultnoimage="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_u4gySN2ZgqE/SosvnavWq0I/AAAAAAAAArk/yL95WlyTqr0/s400/noimage.png";
var maxresults=5;
var splittercolor="#d4eaf2";
var relatedpoststitle="Related Posts";
</script>
<script src='http://blogergadgets.googlecode.com/files/related-posts-with-thumbnails-for-blogger-pro.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<!-- remove --></b:if>
<!--Related Posts with thumbnails Scripts and Styles End-->

5. Now find the below Code in your template. Remember easy way to locate codes if by using the Find option (ctrl+F) and copy pasting the code.

<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>

or

<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>

6. After you have located those codes, copy the following code and add it AFTER the code.

<!-- Related Posts with Thumbnails Code Start-->
<!-- remove --><b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<div id='related-posts'>
<b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>
<b:if cond='data:label.isLast != &quot;true&quot;'>
</b:if>
<script expr:src='&quot;/feeds/posts/default/-/&quot; + data:label.name + &quot;?alt=json-in-script&amp;callback=related_results_labels_thumbs&amp;max-results=6&quot;' type='text/javascript'/></b:loop>
<script type='text/javascript'>
removeRelatedDuplicates_thumbs();
printRelatedLabels_thumbs(&quot;<data:post.url/>&quot;);
</script>
</div><div style='clear:both'/>
<!-- remove --></b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'><b:if cond='data:post.isFirstPost'>
<a href='http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2009/08/related-posts-thumbnails-blogger-widget.html'><img style="border: 0" alt="Related Posts Widget For Blogger with Thumbnails" src="http://image.bloggerplugins.org/blogger-widgets.png" /></a><a href='http://www.bloggerplugins.org/' ><img style="border: 0" alt="Blogger Widgets" src="http://image.bloggerplugins.org/blogger-widgets.png" /></a>
</b:if></b:if>
<!-- Related Posts with Thumbnails Code End-->

Widget Configuration

To change the widget’s default configuration, you need to edit the following lines for respective settings.
1. To change the total no of posts displayed in your blog posts, Edit the following line of code.

var maxresults=5;

2. To Edit the title of the widget, change the following line of code.

var relatedpoststitle="Related Posts";

3. To edit the default thumbnail (the image which is displayed when no image is there in your post), edit the following line of code.

var defaultnoimage="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_u4gySN2ZgqE/SosvnavWq0I/AAAAAAAAArk/yL95WlyTqr0/s400/noimage.png";

4.To Change the Colour of the Splitter Line , edit the following code.

var splittercolor="#d4eaf2";

You can make additional changes according to your need. This plugin was developed by Aneesh from Blogger plugins. Thanks for him for developing a really useful widget.
Are you using this widget or did you run into any problems with the widget ? Let us know in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Related Posts Widget for Blogger / Blogspot
2. Related Posts by Categories; Blogger Widget
3. Recent posts Widget with images for Blogger

Here’s a good news blogger users. Blogger in draft has added a better preview option in our editing framework of blogger. But yes, it’s still in blogger in draft. You need to go to Blogger in Draft Dashboard (http://draft.blogger.com) and need to create post from there.

What’s really the change?

The older version of preview used to show just the miniature preview with the formatting options applied and now the newer version actually allows you to preview the post directly in your blog along with the template you have applied. (Yes, similar to the wordpress feature.) I know most of you play with your WYSIWYG editor and want to preview it lot of time before you click on the “Publish Post” button.
This feature will actually help you to see how your ongoing post is going to look with your blogger template (along all your styles if used) and thus blog. Did you see that Preview icon band on the side of your blog? See the screenshot below to see how this post looked in preview with blogger.

Ok one more thing before you go and start using this feature. You need to refresh the page or click on the”preview Button again if you changed the content. Basically it means, the page wont refresh automatically. Blogger In draft did let us know about the new feature with its new blog post. Do you try the blogger feature before they are released ? Are you going to try this one ?

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1. Post Summary – Read More Feature for Blogger !