tuts4blogs

How to Make Money Online

2013-06-27T12:04:00.002-07:00

It's been almost two years since I've started trying to make money online. The road has been tough and I have learned a lot.

Recently I have found it increasingly difficult to keep track of all the different ways to make money online. So I have decided to start a new website, that deals with this issue.

I realized that I need a way to keep all my experiences with money making websites in one place. I also think this will be a good way for me to keep a track record of things I have tried and succeeded at, as well as my failed attempts at making money online.

So, hop on over to my new site, hopefully it will inspire you to start making money online.

What is Link Building?

2012-11-14T02:28:00.002-08:00

Link building basically means “making incoming links to a website”. This can be achieved in many different ways.

Here are only a few examples:

Reciprocal linking is what we call when two webmasters decide to link to each other’s sites.
When you submit your site to website directories, you get a link from these directories to your website.
When you buy blog posts from a blogger, where he or she writes a blog post about your site, and links to it, is also a very important link building practice.
If another site publishes a popular newsletter, and mentions your website, with a link to it, this is also considered link building.

Advantages of link building:

Link building increases quality traffic from relevant sites.
If there are many higher quality links to a website, the website that is linked to, is considered higher quality as well.
Link building puts your website on a map, so to say.
More traffic through your link building efforts, means more income from your website.

Website Redesign With Responsive Layout

2012-11-14T01:45:00.000-08:00

Photo courtesy of Antoine Lefeuvre

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a concept explained by Ethan Marcotte in his article in A List Apart website.

So, what exactly is RWD? In a nutshell, RWD is a web design technique in which a site is built with the aim of optimizing user’s viewing experience. That means that website navigation and reading should be easy, without excessive resizing, scrolling, or panning, and regardless of the device used.

It does not matter if the user is accessing the website from a smartphone, a tablet or a desktop computer. The website should be able to handle any kind of platform gracefully.

Check out this great Hawaii Website Design site for more information. They offer great services for website redesign with responsive layout.

How to Add a Contact Form to Blogger Using Google Forms

2012-08-31T06:42:00.001-07:00

.
Most Blogger users don't have a proper contact form, the likes of which we see on Wordpress or Tumblr platforms.

However, there is a way to add this functionality using Google Docs.

Step 1. Log into Google Docs and Create the Form

Log into Google Docs, Click "Create". A drop down menu will appear.

Select Form, and a new window will open.

Step 2. Fill out the Form, Delete Question 2

Fill out the form as shown in the picture below.

You don't need another question, so just hit the delete icon, as shown in the next picture.

Hit the save button, and you've saved your form.

Step 3. View Your Finished Form

Now go back to your docs interface.

Click on your form (as shown in the next pic).

A new window will open. On the navigation bar (just under the "Contact Us" text), click "Form", and then click "Go to Live Form".

A new window opens, showing your finished form.

Step 4. The tricky bit - Copying the Form Code

Now view the source of your finished form page, hit CTRL F (the find function of your browser), and type in "form action". The browser's find function locates this bit of text and hightlights it.

The line on which this text is located, is the first line that you need to copy. Don't do it just yet, though. Just make sure you remember where this line is.

Now find the line that says - this is the last line that you need to copy.

Now copy the code as described, and save it in a txt file.

Step 5. Pasting the Code in Blogger

Open up your Blogger Dashboard, go to New Post, title it "Contact Us", and label it "Contact". Click "Edit HTML" and paste the code you've just copied.

Save the post.

Step 6. Adjust the Form Appearance

There might be too much blank space on your form page, or the form itself might not fit. It is easy to change the appearance of your form, and solve this issue.

To change the width of the answer box, find the line below:

<textarea name="entry.0.single" rows="8" cols="75" class="ss-q-long" id="entry_0">

Change teh "cols" to a lower value, and it will shrink in width. The lower the value, the smaller the width of the answer box.
Same applies for "rows", only this time, you'll be adjusting the height.

Keep playing with the code of the form to get that perfect look.

How to insert a poll to a single post in Blogger?

2012-08-29T12:46:00.002-07:00

...
Here's how you add polls inside single posts on Blogger.

Step 1: Logging into Blogger Layout

Log into your blogger account. Go to Dashboard >> Layout (old interface: Design >> Page Elements)

Step 2: Adding the Poll gadget to Sidebar

Select "Add a Gadget" in your Sidebar area, scroll down to "Poll" and click it.

Step 3: Filling out the Poll form

Fill out the form. For Question, I wrote: "Was this information useful?". Fill out the rest of the "Create a poll" form.

Step 4: Viewing the Poll

When you've finished, click save. The newly created poll will show in your layout screen. View your blog in another tab, and your poll should be included in your blog.

But... it's not in the post, it's on the front page of the blog? That's ok. Keep reading to see how we'll deal with this.

Step 5: Locating the Poll code in the Source

Use your browser's menu to select Tools > View Source (in Chrome, at least).

A large file will appear. Don't be concerned, just hit CTRL F and type the poll Question from Step 3.

Step 6: Copying the iframe code

Select everything from the beginning of the iframe tag to its end. Copy the selected code, and paste it in a .txt file (for example, in Notepad).

Step 7: Adding the iframe code to your blog post

Go to the Blog Post that needs to have the poll in it, and click Edit HTML.

At the bottom of your post, type the desired title of your poll, then in the next row, paste the iframe code from your .txt file. Publish your post.

Step 8: Removing the Poll from your Sidebar

We don't need the Poll in the Sidebar, so go back to layout and remove the poll. This won't delete the poll from your blog post, only from the Sidebar.

Refresh you blog's frontend page, and have a look at your post with a poll in it.

Step 9: Thanks for sharing...

View live example of a poll on this site

Check out another article on tuts4blogs.com, for a working example of a poll.

How to Disable Right-Click in Blogger?

2012-08-29T06:33:00.009-07:00

If you are concerned about people copying content from your website, there is really no way to prevent this, but at least you can make it a bit more difficult by preventing the right click on your blog.

How to do this?

Step 1.

Visit the javascript code page, and copy the code.

Step 2.

Sign in to your Blogger Dashboard >> Layout >> Add Gadget >> HTML / Javascript and paste the code in the new HTML / Javascript Gadget. Save it.

Step 3.

View your blog. If your try to right-click, it will give a warning message: "Function disabled". You can change this rather bland notice into something like "Sorry, this content is copywritten". Or you could write "If you would like to copy the content of this page, please contact us and we'll probably let you do it, if you link back to the source article".

Further steps

As there are many content thieves online, some of them won't be ward off by this. So what else can you do? Visit copyscape.com.

This website gives you a list of pages with duplicate content. Once you see the list, you can visit individual websites and contact their webmasters.

If you have ideas on how to improve this article please let us know in the comments below.

Did you like this tip?

Getting Around Blogger's Autocomplete Suggestions

2012-08-29T05:39:00.004-07:00

Has this ever happened to you? You had a "really long phrase" as a label in one of your previous posts, but in your new post, you just want to have a label that reads "really". How to do this? Instead of letting you put a comma so you can add the next keyword, blogger autofills your label with "really long phrase". There actually is a simple way around this. No coding necessary, no complications, and it works!

When you finish your newest blog post, type the label only in the last line of it. Then, cut the label with CTRL X and copy it in the labels bar with CTRL V.

Voila, you've done it!

Tutorial: Html Blogger Menu Background Instead of a Color?

2012-08-29T00:20:00.003-07:00

Step 1.

Find the background that you want to use. Save it on an easy-to-find location on your computer, like the desktop.

Step 2.

Upload the background to an image hosting site. A good one to use is tinypic.com. The reason it is good is that it requires no registration, so it is really fast.

Step 3.

Once you've uploaded the image to tinypic.com, you'll get a screen that says "Share This Image". Copy the code under "Direct Link for Layouts", marked below:

Step 4.

Go to your Blogger dashboard, and click on Design >> Edit HTML. Download a backup of your template. This is very important, if you make a mistake, you can just upload the saved backup of your template.

Step 5.

Edit the code of your Blogger Template. It is really simple, even for complete beginners. In your browser, hit CTRL and "F" to open up a "find" utility.

Below is a screenshot of the "find" function in Google Chrome:

Paste this text in the search bar that you've just opened:

body{

and hit ENTER (RETURN).

The browser will locate and highlight the place in your template that has "body{", as shown below.

Now just under this highighted "body{" bit of code, insert this line:

background:url(put the copied code from tinypic here)

Step 6.

Save your template, and you've done. Now open a new tab in your browser and check out your blog.

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas on how to make this tutorial better, please let us know in the comments section.

How Do You Keep Blogger From Counting Your Pageviews on Your Blog?

2012-08-26T02:18:00.005-07:00

Step 1.

Step 2.

Go to your dashboard, click on "Stats".

Step 3.

Below the page views, locate "Don't track your own pageviews". Click this link and your own pageviews will no longer be tracked.

Would you like tuts4blogs.com to answer a question of your own?
Email us at:

contact[at]tuts4blogs.com

and we'll try our best to give you a satisfying answer.

Add a Facebook Like Box Under Every Post

2012-08-25T14:00:00.004-07:00

This awesome facebook like box will enable your readers to share each of your posts and become a fan of your fanpage on facebook. This is an excellent way to increase facebook likes to your blog. Post high value content, add this like box to your blog, and watch likes grow.

How to add Facebook Like Box to your blog?

1. Backup your blog.

2. Login to Dashboard > Design > Edit HTML > Expand Widgets

3. Find the closing b:skin tag, that looks like this: ]]></b:skin>

4. Just above the closing tag paste the following css:

.fb_like_box {

margin-top:10px;

-moz-border-radius:10px 10px 10px 10px;

border-radius:10px;

background-color:#3B5999;

border:3px solid #2B2B2B;

margin-bottom:10px;

padding:10px 7px;

width:560px;

}

.fb_like_top {

overflow:visible;

padding:0;margin:0 0 5px;

width:349px;

height:24px;

background:url("http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-

g0Uu_u2oQx8/TlNMnZjF1UI/AAAAAAAABbY/TZAJwulTqdY/s1600/Facebook_logo.jpg") no-repeat

scroll left top transparent;

}

.fb_like_top a {

height:24px;

width:114px;

background:url("http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-75VArcE9Tzk/TlNMxuzswHI/AAAAAAAABbc/sSnUuD1jyF

8/s1600/Become+a+Fan.jpg") no-repeat scroll left top transparent;

display:block;

margin-left:445px;

text-indent:-5000px;

}.fb_like_button_holder {

-moz-border-radius:10px 10px 10px 10px;

border-radius:10px;

background:none repeat scroll 0 0 #FFFFFF;

padding:12px 12px 0 12px;

width:535px;

height:42px;

}

4. Now find <data:post.body/>

5. Just below it, add this code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>

<div class='fb_like_top'><a rel='nofollow' href='Facebook fanpage URL'>Become a Fan</a>

</div>

href=" + data:post.url +

"&layout=standard&show_faces=false&width=100&action=like&f

ont=arial&colorscheme=light"' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='border:none;

overflow:hidden; width:450px;height:30px;'/>

</div>

</b:if>

Replace the words Facebook fanpage URL with your facebook fan page address. Save the template, and it should look something like what you see below.

Tutorial: Earn Money with Adf.ly

2012-08-25T13:59:00.010-07:00

How to Earn More Money? That's something that many aspiring bloggers are concerned with. Even earning just a little bit extra income is a great boost for a blogger's morale. In this tutorial, we will briefly explain the advantages of adf.ly.

What is Adf.ly?

Adf.ly is a link shortening service that pays you money for shrinking your long urls. How does it work? See it in action by clicking this link.

Some of advantages of adf.ly for webmasters are:

- easy to set up
- earns you passive income

Best of all, you don't even have to have your own website. It's enough to just put a link anywhere on the internet, be it a youtube upload, a useful or funny site that you'd like to share.

There is also another way to make money with adf.ly, and that is their referral program.

Adf.ly referral program

The adf.ly referral program is an easy way to let people know of this great service and to
earn even more money with your short links. Whenever you refer others to their program, you get 20% of their earnings forever.

For example, you can send all your friends your adf.ly affiliate link, and any one of them who signs up with adf.ly will get you that extra bit of money.

Do you have webmaster traffic? Referring that traffic to adf.ly will earn you a 5% commision for every advertising order made by your referrals.

Setting up Your Account with Adf.ly

1. Login to your Adf.ly account or get your Free Registration here.

2. After logging in, click Referrals at the top. You can see an example referral link here:

2. To get your referral banner, click Banners as shown in the next picture:

There are several banners to choose from, so pick the one that works the best for your site design.

3. Just copy the code from the box and paste into your site.

Conclusion

If you're looking for an easy way to make money online, adf.ly might be it. Just take care not to violate their terms of service (if you thought of spamming with links, that's against their policy). My suggestion is that you need to provide high quality content and embed adf.ly links in some parts of it.

A downside of adf.ly might be that your visitors will be irritated if you put it on each of your website links. Be careful about this, and think about your goals. You need to make some money, and not lose the traffic in the process.

Do you like our tutorial? Give us your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below.

Tutorial: How To Create Featured Posts In Google Blogger

2012-08-25T13:59:00.008-07:00

Are there some posts on your site that you'd like to be featured on the homepage? Would you like to have this post stay on top even after you publish newer posts? Here's a quick tutorial on how to do this.

1. Write the post that will be featured on the top of the homepage.

2. Publish your post.

3. Click on Edit post.

4. When the Edit post page opens, locate "Post Options". You can find it in the bottom left.

5. Click on Post Options, and change the date and time. If you'd like the post to be featured for the next 7 days, select the date that is 7 days from today. This will make your new post stay on top of your blog for the next week.

6. When you have changed the date and time, Publish the post again. Please remember that you can only create a featured post on an already published post. In other words, first publish the post, then make it featured, using Post Options as explained above.

If you’ve found this post useful, please help us make it even better! Post a question or a comment and we’ll be glad to answer. Thanks!

Tutorial: How to Make a Blogger Template from Scratch?

2012-08-25T13:58:00.004-07:00

Are you trying to find a perfect blogger template for your blog, but come up short? If that’s the case, why don’t you look into building your own blogger template? In this in-depth tutorial, we will guide you step-by-step in making a blogger template.

We hope you enjoy it and learn how to make a blogger template the easy way.

What you will learn?

When you have completed the tutorial, you should be able to:

1. Understand the basic structure of a blogger layout
2. Understand how static html page can be converted to a blogger xml layout
3. Be able to adjust the layout in the tutorial to your own design
4. Be able to make your own blogger templates (with a bit of practice)

You can see the finished blog here.

What you need to know before you start?

We have tried to make this template tutorial simple to follow. Our approach when writing the tutorial was that it should be easy to understand even for newbie bloggers.

Practically, anyone should be able to follow this tutorial, but there might be difficult parts for complete beginners. Knowing html and css and how they interact is a major advantage here. If you get lost anywhere during the tutorial, e-mail us at: contact@tuts4blogs.com. Or check out the html and css tutorials on the w3schools website.

Tutorial Overview

This is how we’ll be making our Blogger template:

Step 1. Download the support files
Step 2. Examine the file structure
Step 3. How to covert a static html page to Blogger xml and how to upload it to blogger.com?
Step 4. Converting the static template to a b template
Step 5. Tips and trick for further adaptation

If you are ready, let’s start with the tutorial!

Step 1. Download the support files

Download the support files here. Extract them to a new folder on your computer. We’ll call this folder “static html”. When you open the “static html” folder, you will find:
- Images (folder)
- Index.html
- Skin.css

Note: The zip file you downloaded contains only the static html. This is the starting point of the tutorial. Why did we only include the static html site here? Because it is an important part of the learning process. Later on we will download the Blogger xml file. But for now, we’ll check out the static html page. Open the index.html file in your browser.

This is the basic structure of index.html:

Now let’s examine the file structure.

Step 2. Examine the file structure

Return to your “static html” folder. Right-click index.html and open it with your favourite text editor. I prefer to use Notepad++.

Once you have opened index.html, look through the file. It is just a standard html file.

Do you see the comments between the html tags? These comments delineate the structure as shown in the picture in step 1. Basically, there are 6 sections in this template:
1. Outer Container
2. HeaderMenu
3. Menu
4. Top Image
5. Content (2 separate areas: Posts and Sidebar)
6. Footer

Step 3. How to covert a static html page to Blogger xml and how to upload it to blogger.com?

Ok, first things first here. You have got to have a registered blog with blogspot.com (blogger.com). This blog should be just for testing purposes while you’re following this template tutorial. My suggestion is to open a brand new blog.

Before we can upload the static html template, we need to adjust it a bit, so that it’s readable by Blogger. This is a very easy thing to do. Look at the beginning of your static index.html in Notepad++.

Now select the code at the very top, starting with <html>, all the way to the </head> closing tag.
Replace the highlighted code with the one below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>
<head>
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
<b:skin><![CDATA[

/* Insert CSS Here */

]]></b:skin>
</head>

Now click save as, and save the file with an .xml extension (in Notepad++, that’s the second-last option in the Save As drop-down list).

Go to your blogger dashboard, click Design, click Edit HTML. Choose upload file, and locate your new .xml file. Upload your file.

This is how the new blog template looks right now.

To get the same layout we had in the beginning index.html file, we need to add some css to the blogger xml file.

How to add css to blogger xml file? Open the file skin.css in Notepad++, copy everything, and paste it between <b:skin><![CDATA[ and ]]></b:skin>.

There’s a lot of code here, but the reason for it is that it controls all the design of your blog. Now save the .xml file and upload to blogger again. Click View Blog.

Excellent! There it is! (If your xml file doesn’t work or you lack time, you can pick up your copy of the xml file here. Note that this is not the final blogger template, it is just the file covering the tutorial to this point, i.e. to the end of step 3).

Step 4. Converting the static template to a b template

Great, everything works fine, but… there is a bit of problem here. This blog is not really a blog. It’s just a static html page, and we want to be able to add posts to it, and some more functionality, maybe add followers, or blog archive, etc.

To start this step of the tutorial, download the final xml template file here. Now you need to have both your static blogger template xml file, and the final blogger template xml file open in Notepad++.

Simply, what we’ll do in this part is just copy from the final file and paste into the static blogger template. This way, you’ll see step by step how to convert the static template into the dynamic one.

We’ll replace the code for all 6 of our major sections, so let’s get to it.

Step 4a: Outer container

In the finished template, locate the code between tags:

 and .

Go to the static template, and replace the code between the same tags.

Step 4b: Header

In the finished template, locate the code between tags:

 and .

Go to the static template, and replace the code between the same tags.

Step 4c: Menu

In the finished template, locate the code between tags:

 and .

Go to the static template, and replace the code between the same tags.

Step 4d: Top Image and Page body

In the finished template, locate the code between tags:

 and .

Go to the static template, and replace the code between the same tags.

Step 4e: Content

In the finished template, locate the code between tags:

 and 

Go to the static template, and replace the code between the same tags.

Step 4f: Page Footer

In the finished template, locate the code between tags:

<!—End Content --> and 

Go to the static template, and replace the code between the same tags.

Now you have 2 options:

a. Save your static file and upload it to your test blog. If you followed all the steps correctly, it should work without problem.

b. Just upload the finished template .xml file to your test blog. This way you don’t have to worry about any possible errors you could have made while copying and pasting.

View your blog :)

Step 5. Final touches

Ok, now for some final tweaks. Pretty much it is all a matter of combining colors and fonts. Maybe spreading out text some more in some areas of the template, styling the author signature, etc.

Conclusion

We have covered a lot of ground in this tutorial, and if you liked it and it helped you understand the blogger structure and how to make blogger templates, we’re happy about it.

If you need some help, or would like to let us know what you think about the template, please comment below.

Note that we are already preparing another free blogger template and a tutorial to accompany it, but we’re waiting for feedback from our visitors so we can make it better. If you have any wishes for the next template/tutorial, please let us know.

What is the Best Length for a Blog Post?

2012-08-25T13:57:00.014-07:00

What is the best length for a blog post? Besides the necessity to write good content, the length of your posts is also an important factor.

There are several things to take into account when writing blog posts. Here is a list of some of the most important blog post length tips:

1. SEO

There are several ideas on the length of a blog post that is considered a good SEO practice. Most of the experts in the field agree that optimal lenght of a blog post is somewhere in between the two extremes: articles that are too short are not good SEO, and neither are articles that are too long. Even though it is impossible to really determine the best length, it is commonly perceived that it falls somewhere between 300 and 1200 words.

2. Quantity of Posts

An approach that some bloggers take is that if you write shorter posts, you can write more of them. More posts are better for getting new RSS readers and getting ranked in search engines. Even though no one can say for certain, some people believe that sites like Techcrunch.com or Gigaom.com have focused on short articles as their main type of content. How does that translate to your blog? Firstly, it's a proof that some successful sites have adopted this strategy. Secondly, it goes to show that maybe blogging on a regular basis is just what your blog needs.

3. Topic of Your Post

A lot of times, the topic of your post will in itself be a determinant of the post lenght. Let's say you're writing on a piece of breaking news. You will write a couple of paragraphs, and link to the source. But if you're writing a tutorial or a review, your post will be longer.

4. Reader Attention Span

It has been proven that people's attention span is shorter when they read content online. Some tests have shown that the average time on a blog is just one and a half minutes. How does that translate to your blog? Based on the blog's topic, it might be a good idea to keep your content in small bites. On the other hand, that probably wouldn't work on a review site.

5. In-depth Coverage of the Topic

This is probably the #1 criteria that bloggers consider when posting. Some people claim that a good post covers a topic in-depth and then stops. Writing extensively just for the sake of it is not a very good choice. Think of it like this: You are writing a story of sorts. Every story needs to have the three main parts: the beginning, the end, and all the stuff that happens in between. You can't place too much importance on irrelevant stuff, and you can't undermine the important bits. Balance is very important.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post has given you some ideas on how to choose the optimum post length on your blog. However, when it comes to your blog, you are the best expert. Use the tips here to try things out, mix it up a bit, but ultimately, you have to find something that works for you. Good luck!

If you’ve found this post useful, please help us make it even better! Post a question or a comment, and suggest ways on how we can improve. We appreciate your help.

Check Out Our First Free Template

2012-08-25T13:57:00.012-07:00

Tempera, our first free template for Google Blogger, is available for free download.

You can see the working example of the template at temperatemplate.blogspot.com.

The template is fully functional and it's a starting point for more complex designs. If you would like some more functionalities added to the template, please let us know in the comments section.

If you like the template, please bookmark it as we will soon publish a detailed tutorial on how this template was made, with detailed explanations on how you can make it your own, modify it, etc.

Update: Here you can view the tutorial on how this blogger template was made.

Note: Although the template is free, we have put a lot of work into it and we hope that you will keep the footer information intact. That is our only condition for use of this template.

Download Tempera, our first free blogger template.

Blogger Template Structure

2012-08-25T13:56:00.004-07:00

Do you find it difficult to customize your Blogger template? Most bloggers would like to make their blog unique, and that includes Blogger design. In this tutorial, you can find out more on Blogger template structure and how all different parts work together.

Before you delve into detailed and relatively complex Blogger template customization, you need to understand the basic make-up of your Blogger template.

To start off, we are going to divide the blogger web page code into following sections:
1. Body
2. Header
3. Outer Wrapper (which holds, in our example, Sidebar-left, Main Content, Sidebar-Right)
4. Footer

The above division looks like this:

1. Body
This is the whole of the page within your browser frame. In the diagram above it is the area colored in green. It contains every thing on the page including the Blogger Navbar at the top.

2. Header
This section contains the Title and Description of your blog.

3. Outer Wrapper
The Outer Wrapper includes the Main Content area, as well as sidebar(s). The Outer Wrapper itself is only a boundary, here represented with the dotted pink line. Within the Outer Wrapper, you can see the two Sidebars and the Main Content area. The Main Content area holds the posts, the Sidebars usually contain various widgets, such as Adsense Ads, Blogroll, Recent Posts, etc.

4. Footer
The footer is the bottom most horizontal section on your blog.

Now let's see the above division applied to an actual blog:

Notice that in this example, there is only one sidebar, on the right side.

If you’ve found this post useful, please help us make it even better! Post a question or a comment, and suggest ways on how we can improve. We appreciate your help.

Archive Settings for Blogger

2012-08-25T13:55:00.008-07:00

Ever tried to play around with archive options in Blogger? There are a few important tweaks you can do there.

Archiving Options for Google Blogger

Go to Blogger Settings, click on Archiving tab.

This tab enables archiving configuration for your blog posts. Here are some options:

Archive Frequency: Set the frequency of your blog posts that should be archived. “Monthly” in better option.

Enable Post Pages: This will enable to have a more search engine friendly address for your blog posts rather than having dynamic URLs (it will add no keywords to post titles) which is bad.

If you need traffic, turn this to “Yes” which is recommended. If selected “No” then you may not get the desided traffic and the embedded inline comment form to blogspot template.

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10 Essential Sites for Google Bloggers

2012-08-25T13:55:00.007-07:00

Here is our list of the top 10 essential websites every blogger should know and use regularly.

1. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is definately the site to target to get your blog kick-started. Webmaster Tools has some gems such as web diagnostic tools, visitor statistics and you can set up a sitemap for the Google searchbots (you can even tell the searchbots to leave certain pages alone). Being registered on Webmaster Tools is invaluable to getting indexed on Google quicker and easier as you can see at a glance if Google has a problem with any of your pages. If the bots don’t like any of your pages, they leave all their error messages here and you can view them all.

2. Google Keyword Tool

Every blog post should be based on keyword research. Google Keyword Tool is a good place to start.

3. Google Apps

If you own a blog, even if it's hosted on Blogger (Blogspot), you should still have a top level domain name. If you already have it, and you bought it through google blogger, you also need to set up your custom email. For example, I bought hosting for this site through Google Blogger, and I used Google Apps to set up my custom email account. Test it out, drop me a line to: contact@tuts4blogs.com

4. Google Adsense

There's so much written on this subject that I guess even preschoolers know about this CPC advertising program. However, not all Blogspot bloggers use it, and that's a shame. Adsense is even integrated with Blogger through the Dashboard, so if you still aren't using it, you could give it a shot today.

5. Fonts: dafont.com

This is a very useful site with a bunch of free fonts (both for commercial and personal use).

6. Stock Photos: iStockphoto.com

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iStockphoto is probably one of the largest stock photo websites. Shop around, find something for yourself, or submit your own photos.

7. Get Help: stackoverflow.com

8. Bloggerschoiceawards.com

This site offers competitions for blogger sites, it’s a great way to advertise your site especially if your up against a very popular opponent. Even if you get slaughtered everybody who votes for the big site will see the link to your site.

9. Technorati.com

Technorati is another essential site for your blog. It tracks your back links and give you another ranking based on links, though it doesn’t track all of them it can also give you a good ranking on how you stand.

10. Pingomatic.com

Pingers are essential to let the search engines know of your new posts. Do it after each new post.

If you’ve found this post useful, please help us make it even better! Post a question or a comment, and suggest ways on how to improve. We appreciate your help.

Increase Traffic Series: Tutorial 1 - Get More Traffic With Scribd

2012-08-25T13:52:00.003-07:00

Article sharing sites like Squidoo or Hubpages are quite popular. Scribd is an article sharing site of sorts, but on Scribd, you upload and share full documents.

Building backlinks is always important and Scribd is a great place for this

Some of advantages of backlink promotion of your website are:
- free advertising
- free traffic
- higher search engine ranking

How to upload documents to Scribd

1. Write your great content article in a word processor. When you have a finished article, it won't hurt to convert it into pdf.

2. Upload your document to Scribd. Remember to include hyperlinks to your website in the document. This is a pretty easy thing to do so I won't get into the technical details on this one. If you own a site, chances are you should be able to do this easy.

3. Keywords: Remember to link your keywords or your url. This is a whole lot better than simply linking with "click here", "homepage", "read more", etc.

The advantages of Scribd for link building

All social sites are useful for boosting your rankings(and article submission sites are considered to be social sites).

However, Scribd has some advantages over other article submission sites. The content on article submission sites usually has to be approved. Not on Scribd. You can pretty much upload whatever you want. But be careful! Upload high quality content, and you'll get high quality traffic. Upload junk content, and you know what you'll get.

You can even place your own ads in your documents when you upload on Scribd. Other article submission sites have a very strict policy on advertising and they won't allow this.

Overall, Scribd is an excellent, easy and fast way to increase your SERP and to get more visitors/traffic.

See an example: You can have a look at our own article on Scribd, dealing with How to Blog on a Regular Basis.

If you’ve found this post useful, please help us make it even better! Post a question or a comment. We appreciate your help.

How to Blog on a Regular Basis

2012-08-25T13:49:00.005-07:00

Should a blog be updated on a regular basis? Should I blog daily? What will I do if I’m too busy with other things? These were all questions that came to my mind before I started out blogging.

Image source

Then, after I started blogging, I realized that for a blog to be successful, it must be updated on a regular basis. It must become a part of your routine, if you are serious about it.

Writing a blog is like washing dishes. If you don’t get it done regularly, very soon having the dishes becomes pointless.

So, how often should you blog? Well, how often do you wash dishes?

Find something that works for you, be it daily, twice a day, twice or three times a week, twice a month… Just don’t make the breaks too long. Search engine bots don’t like that. And neither do your visitors.

How often do I blog and what helps me do it

I blog every day. Sometimes it’s difficult, but I use a few tricks to make it easier on myself:

Make a plan of posting on a calendar. Do it for at least the next week. This shouldn’t be something you will follow to a letter, but it is a gameplan that should make things easier and more automatic for you.
Make blogging a habit. See what part of the day you usually have some spare time, and choose to spend this time blogging.
Write about what makes you tick. Topics you’re emotional about make writing easier.
Before you go to bed, jot down a few ideas on what you’ll be writing about tomorrow. This will give your brain some food for thought, some stuff to process and you should get inspired easier when the time comes to write.
If you are not inspired, a list post of relevant information is a great idea. View example post: 10 essential sites for a google blogger.
Get help from guest bloggers. Or, if you are just starting out, make it a habit to do a guest post, say, one guest post for three posts you publish on your site. Once your blog gets some higher status, you can turn the tables and ease the writing load by having guest bloggers on your blog.

If you’ve found this post useful, please help us make it even better! Post a question or a comment and we’ll be glad to answer. Thanks!

Image used in this post courtesy of flickr creative commons

Why Use Blogger?

2012-08-25T13:48:00.009-07:00

There are a few well-known weblog systems such as Blog writer, Typepad, and WordPress. So why use Google Blogger?

The number-one response is because it is no cost. Moreover, it is easy to understand and user-friendly.

With Typepad, you must buy an endless program (US $14.95 a month) to be able to have complete customization control.

WordPress.com costs US $15 a season for a CSS (Cascade Design Sheet) update.

But Blogger allows you to personalize your banner, navigation, posts, and footers (just about any element of your blog) for no cost.

You have the management of your site, its components, and performance at your fingertips. You also have integration with Google Apps, Google Webmaster Tools, Adsense and a whole truckload of other Google products, most of which are free.

To sum it up in a sentence, Google Blogger is a user-friendly blog platform running a free weblog service with all the features. What more could you ask for?

How to Add "Read More" to Blogger posts?

2012-08-25T13:48:00.008-07:00

A while back, if you wanted to have a "read more" function in your blog, you had to hand code it in your template. However, as Google Blogger is being constantly improved by Google, hacking your template to get the "read more" function is no longer needed.

While writing/editing your post, just click on the "read more" icon. This should do the trick.

How to Write Spectacular Money-Making Blog Posts

2012-08-25T13:46:00.005-07:00

Would you like to write an inspiring, provoking, emotionally charging, and engaging blog post? One that will drive traffic, and keep visitors coming back? One that will make you money?

It’s not as easy, but the good news is, it isn’t too hard either.

So let’s jump straight in:

Step 1: Do your research, structure your headings

What’s your post about? For example, initially, I wanted to use this blog post title: “How to Write an Awesome Blog Post”. However, after doing some research, I tweaked it a bit, because of…

…Keyword Research in Google Keyword Tool

Two important points to remember here:

1. Match your post title to a keyword people look for

This is so simple, yet overlooked by so many people. Very often bloggers simply ignore this very important step.

2. Look for highly-searched, low-competition keywords, it should give your post better results in search engines

There are a couple of keyword search tools I like to use, but we’ll stick with Google Keyword Tool to keep it simple.

Ok, so let’s type in some keyword ideas. I thought of these…

- How to Write Awesome Blog Posts
- How to Blog Successfully
- How to Blog
- How to be a Better Blogger

…and picked this keyword as my “closest match”.

Test-drive Your Keyword in Search Engines

Why is this important? First, you can check the competition (other websites’ articles on the same subject). Second, it gives you a chance to check your competitors’ metadata, and the way they structured and organized their articles.

And finally, by doing this step, you virtually rocket-lauch your blog-post writing process, as you already know what the top-performing posts on the subject have done. In other words, you don’t have to start writing from scratch.

Pick your meta-data keywords

This is what I chose to use:

"Write Spectacular Blog Posts, Writing Blog Posts, Blog Post Writing Tutorial, How to Write an Awesome Blog Post".

Use your keywords for your heading1,2,3... tags

Are you using your h tags? Just styling them with css is bad for SEO.

Anyway, after you put your keywords in the title (h1), and other subheading tags (h2 and on), hopefully in a logical order, you are ready to write your content.

Step 2: Write Your Content

Here, it’s important to remember that your need to write a mind-blowing intro to your blog post. I have used a “yes” rhetorical question technique in this article.

What follows immediately after this brief intro, is what I call a “bridge”. It’s a deal-maker or a deal-breaker. It’s what keeps the readers hooked to your post. In this article, my bridge is simply “it’s not hard” followed with “let’s jump straight in”.

In the main body of the post, it’s important to remember what I refer to as the 3 circles of attention:

1. First you try your best to keep the readers on your post (and hopefully get so much out of the article to want to read it to the very end, then comment on it and share it with their friends)

2. If you lose the readers on your post (for e.g. not having enough time, or simply not being too interested in the content after all), put a link or two here and there in your article to keep them on your site. This is what I call the 2nd circle of attention.

3. Call your readers to action. Make them bookmark the page (so they come back to it later), ask them what are their thoughts, invite them to share it, make them do something. Make them want/feel that they need to do something. Inspire.

It’s also important to make the post readable. This has to do with your writing style, your use of images, bullets, quotes, and with your choice of css (there is no excuse for using white 8pt letters on a black background).

Step 3: Reading Through, Spelling and Grammar

Read your whole article, to see if it feels right. Are there things to expand, or to replace? Finally, check it once again for (not-so-)obvious errors.

Step 4: Wrapping Up

You’ve done your research, you’ve picked your meta-data keywords and you’ve used them in headings. You’ve written a content-rich article that is engaging and that inspires readers. You’ve linked your articles with other parts of your site. Now it’s time to upload everything, add photos, and you’re done.

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Privacy Policy

2012-08-25T13:45:00.004-07:00

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About

2012-08-25T13:44:00.012-07:00

Here at www.tuts4blogs.com, we are dedicated to providing you the simple solutions for your blogging needs. You will find blogger tutorials, blogger templates, tips and tricks, as well as general blogging topics and areas of interest.