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Adsense in Blogger posts (the basics!)

Like many bloggers, I see no harm in including AdSense (and affiliate ads) in my blog, as a way of making a little money to help me pay for my blogging costs. This short series of posts will explain methods you can use to feature AdSense in your Blogger blog, including how to feature ads in the body of your posts.

Google's AdSense seems to be the most popular system of advertising in blogs. This free service for web-publishers is easy to use, especially as ads are contextual (they change depending on the content of a particular page to display relevant ads for your readers). Most bloggers are eligible to sign up for AdSense, which you can do using this link.

Ensure you are aware of Google's policies for AdSense publishers, including sites which are prohibited from featuring AdSense, site and ad behaviour, and the number of ads allowed in a page.

How many ads can be displayed in a single page?

In any single web page, you can have:

Up to three ad units
Two AdSense for search boxes
Up to three link units
A maximum of three referral units

These regulations can be especially important for bloggers who choose to include ads in their posts, since the main page of your blog can feature a number of posts, and you cannot feature ad units in all of them. However, there are methods of displaying ads in posts only on post pages, as I will explain in a later installment.

How does Google decide which ads to display?

Keywords from your title and blog posts are used to determine the most relevant ads to display. It's best to try and keep each blog post on one particular subject and include relevant keywords in the title and at least a few times in the article itself. Problogger features some great advice on ensuring relevant ads are displayed on your site.

How do I place ads in my blog?

Blogger now has widgets you can use to include AdSense in your sidebar. You can configure the colour schemes and size of these ads to suit those of your blog.

Alternatively, log in to your AdSense control panel and click on the "AdSense setup" tab at the top of the page. You can then choose the type of ad you wish to use and get the relevant code, which you should then paste into your template where you would like the ad to be displayed.

Blogger: Beyond the Basics (A new book from Packt Publishing)

about their new book: Blogger: Beyond the Basics which is available in both print and PDF formats.

I was really happy to hear about this because (as far as I know!) this will be the first publication to cover use of the new Blogger Layouts system; it covers aspects of template customization, social networking and other advanced features of publishing with Blogger.

Blogger Beyond the Basics was written by Lee Jordan, a new media designer, writer and marketer, who also maintains an accompanying blog to the book.

Here's some more information about the book from the Packt Publishing site:

The book aims to be a "complete" guide to working with Blogger. The focus is on more advanced, professional uses. You will learn everything you need to know to extend your blog and grow beyond the basics of using Blogger. This book will cover the following:

* Customizing and creating templates to make your blog attractive
* Adding social bookmarks to your blog to promote your site
* Joining the blogosphere to drive traffic to your site
* Customizing your blog by using widgets effectively
* Customizing your blog's RSS and Atom feed, so that the Blogger feeds are available to the users
* Managing ads and adding e-commerce features
* Monitoring viewers and ads using Google Analytics
* Managing and optimizing your blog for search engines
* Integrating your website with your blog

The standard cover price of Blogger: Beyond the Basics is £24.99, but you can currently save 10% off this price by purchasing directly through Packt Publishing. There's also free shipping to the US. UK, Europe and selected Asian countries.

The Adobe PDF eBook version is listed at £16.99, though you can save 15% by purchasing directly through Packt Publishing website..

Packt have generously offered me a review copy of Blogger Beyond the Basics so I will be posting my own review in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, you may want to take a look at the free sample chapter which covers social bookmarking. It's a PDF download which can be downloaded directly from Packt Publishing.

At one point or another I'm sure we've all wondered the same thing: "What is the best time to publish our posts?".
Jake Luciani has done some pretty hefty research to find the answer to this question. By analyzing over 10,000 entries from Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Mixx, he has discovered the optimum times of day, and days of the week to post for best results in social media and maximum comments.

According to Luciani's results:

The best time to post is Tuesday to Friday between 10am and 2pm Pacific Standard Time (PST)
The worst time to post is on Saturday or Sunday between 3 and 5pm PST

These findings seem to correlate with the times US blog readers are most active online (around lunchtime and just after work on weekdays), so posting around these times should work well for bloggers whose readership is mostly based in this area of the world.
If your main readership is located in another part of the world, you may want to consider altering these times to suit your own audiences active times instead.
Here are charts displaying the full results of Luciani's research using GMT (Greenwich Mean Time):

Don't forget to account for the time-zone differences when working out the best "local" time for you to publish your blog posts!
For a detailed explanation of Luciani's findings, head over to ReadWriteWeb's articlewhich analyzes the data and method used in great detail.
I hope this will be useful to you in deciding what is the best time to publish your blog posts. Please let me know what you think about Jake Luciani's research by leaving your comments and opinions below.

Write something useful
Write something unique
Write something newsworthy
Write something first
Write something that makes those who read it smarter
Write something controversial
Write something insightful
Write something that taps into a fear people have
Write something that helps people achieve
Write something that elicit a response
Write something that gives a sense of belonging
Write something passionately
Write something that interprets or translates news for people
Write something inspirational
Write something that tells a story
Write something that solves a problem
Write something that gets a laugh
Write something that saves people time or money
Write something opinionated
Write something that is a resource
Write something about something ‘cool‘

How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Blog

Your blog’s readers probably have Facebook profiles already, and making your own Facebook profile is easy enough. Aside from allowing you to create a profile and connect with your friends from elementary school, Facebook has several features that can connect your blog readers and help you find new ones.

Create a Facebook Group

Your readers have a common interest - your blog’s subject. My readers are preparing for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). Maybe yours are interested in knitting, running, or making money online. Just as they have subscribed to your blog, they will join your Facebook group.

At the beginning of December 2008, I created the 2009 LSAT Study / Discussion Facebook Group. Someone else had created a 2008 LSAT Group, and I wanted to be the person to create the 2009 group, so I started early. When someone is searching Facebook for an LSAT group to join this year, they’ll see my group has over 100 members, but someone else’s group on the same topic only has 3, guess which group they’ll join.

Note: I didn’t make the group about my blog directly - I made it broader. Why? So people searching on Facebook for LSAT-related groups would feel welcome to join. If they thought it was limited to my blog’s readers, the prospective member might not even visit the group page, which means he/she would never see the link to my blog.

So I created a group and placed a prominent link to my blog on the top, but it only had one member - me. Not very impressive, right? I didn’t want my readers to think my group and blog were unpopular, so I immediately invited all of my Facebook friends to join the group. Some of my Facebook friends were already planning to take the LSAT, so inviting them to join my new Facebook group had two additional benefits:

1. It informed them of my blog if they didn’t know about it already.

2. Facebook’s news feed told all their friends, making the group a viral marketing mechanism for the blog..

How Readers Use the Facebook Group

Of course, the Facebook group is more than a viral marketing mechanism too. It helps your readers to connect with each other in a way comments don’t. While comments are generally responses to your postings, Facebook’s discussion boards allow direct interaction between readers. My readers have used the Facebook group to find LSAT study partners and form study groups by posting messages on the discussion board and the Wall. How did I tell my readers about the Facebook Group? I posted a link to it on the side of my blog, and I made a brief blog post about it for those who hadn’t noticed the link.

Marketing Your Facebook Group, and Your Blog, in Other Facebook Groups

Search Facebook for groups on your topic and related ones. In each of these groups, you can post a message on the group Wall or discussion board, or you can use the Post a Link feature to notify the group’s members of your group and your blog. Warning: don’t do all three in the same group at the same time - it’s overkill and may get you banned from the group. By promoting your Facebook group at first, instead of promoting your blog, you decrease the likelihood that the group administrator will remove your message.

After doing all of this, Facebook became one of my biggest sources of traffic, and I don’t even have to do much to keep the Facebook traffic coming. In order to get more readers, you need to have a presence where they are. For me and for many bloggers these days, our present and future readers spend their time in social networking sites.

What about you? Have you used Facebook or other social networking sites to promote your blog? Have you found it to be effective?

How do bloggers make money from blogs?

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogging.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads.

Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs,Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick and Value Click (to name just some of the options) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (YPN is only available to US publishers).

Lastly there’s BlogAds - one of the first blog specific ad networks.

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare,Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

How to earn from twitter

Make Easy Money
With Twitter

Step 1) Get one or more

twitter

accounts. Twitter requires no
email activation, so get as many accounts as possible to
start with.
Step 2) Join
this
network. Twtad is a advertising network
specially for twitter. They pay by paypal, when you reach 20
$, within 48 hours! You choose which ads you want to post
on your twitter profile and you will get 0.01-0.10 $ per click.
After you joined
Twtad
, you can ad your twitter profiles. To
post an ad, simply press ´post ad´ and select the profile you
want to post from.
Step 3) Mass follow people. If you follow them they will
follow you back and then you can ‘promote your ad’. This
can be done with the free website
Twollo
. You can follow
people that twitterd about certain items with
Twollo
. To get
higher CTR, you should follow people that twitter about the
same subject as the PPC ad. You can set it up in less then a
minute and it will work for you till the limit has been reached.
To auto-follow users you can also use hummingbird.
You can use
Twollo
to auto-tweet and auto-message
followers with your ad. This will significantly improve the
amount of clicks.
Step 4) Wait for people to follow, or rinse and repeat.
Good Luck !

Goolge Toolbar Pagerank trick

Here is a nice little trick if you want to see your page rank of a site from one of the specific datacenters from google. Place this in your hosts file which you can find here on Windows XP:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

# sj
# 216.239.35.100 toolbarqueries.google.com
# fi
# 216.239.41.100 toolbarqueries.google.com
# ex
216.239.33.100 toolbarqueries.google.com

What you do is simply uncomment the line for which you want to query the page rank from. So if you wanted to see the pagerank of your domain from the sj server you would simply uncomment the the line for the sj address and comment the rest so it would look something like:

# sj
216.239.35.100 toolbarqueries.google.com
# fi
# 216.239.41.100 toolbarqueries.google.com
# ex
#216.239.33.100 toolbarqueries.google.com

As today is my birthday, it seems the most appropriate time to introduce you all to my latest blogging venture.

We Love Blogger is a gallery and news portal for Blogger fanatics! Here you will find great Blogger designs to inspire you; links to the latest Blogger news and useful tutorials to help you build a better blog.

The home page should provide easy access to the areas of most interest, with the gallery on the left, news/tips in the center, and a regular sidebar on the right.

In the header, you will find links to submit a new design or news article for later submission to the site.

We Love Blogger is an idea I have had for some time. As you may have read in my previous showcase articles, I love to be inspired by great designs (especially those which prove the potential of Blogger as a blogging platform).

Learning from the experience of other bloggers is important and highly useful when discovering new and interesting functions for this platform. On Blogger Buster, I think tutorials and lengthy articles have become an expectation. Rather than add many short posts and links on this site, I feel it's more useful for readers (and better coverage for Blogger authors) to feature their articles on a dedicated site.

At present, the design (and some functions) of We Love Blogger is not quite complete. Once I am home from vacation, I'll be sure to enhance the overall look and some usability issues for the site to make it a better place to visit and find articles of interest.

In the meantime, please visit We Love Blogger, let me know what you think and also any suggestions for how the site can be improved. I hope you enjoy We Love Blogger and will find this a useful addition to the Blogger Buster family of sites.

Blogger wants to hear from us!

The Blogger Team have released Product Ideas for Blogger: a forum based on theProduct Ideas platform which enables us to suggest and vote on new Blogger features, gadgets and even Blogs of Note:

"One of the primary factors that drive innovation and improvements on Blogger is the voice of our users. We always take your feedback to heart, and we use it do help make Blogger the best service it can possibly be."

Take a look at this screenshot to get an idea of how this forum works:

We can log in to Product Ideas for Blogger using our Google account, then vote on existing suggestions by clicking the tick (vote up) or cross (vote down).

When you choose a category (features, gadgets or Blogs of Note) you will be presented with a question you have not yet voted on, followed by the most popular suggestions.

You can also get an idea of the ratio of "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" votes by looking at the vote bars to the right of the suggestions:

It's also possible to view the ideas suggested by a particular user by clicking on the name below each suggestion (take a look at mine here).

I'm really excited about this new feature, and think it is the perfect way for the Blogger team to see the features (and recommended blogs) which are most desired by the Blogger community. While we have previously been able to suggest a new feature and suggest blogs of note, these forms gave us no indication of how popular these suggestions were. This forum enables us to see what others have suggested, how popular these suggestions are, and also to vote these up or down depending on our own preferences.

Take a look at Product Ideas for Blogger to vote on your favourite suggestions and make a few of your own.

How to Increase my Technorati Authority?
This is one of the hot questions that's thrown around in the blogging world day after day.
For those who are new to blogging or if you don't know what technorati is.. Technorati is one of the leading Blog search engine which crawls and index millions of blogs in real time.
And Technorati Authority means the total number of blogs that are linking to a website in the past six months. If you have a good technorati Authority, you get massive traffic from them. Also, technorati authority is one of the parameters that advertisers often look into before buying advertising spots.We can say how good and popular a particular blog is with the authority number. So, Here is my list of top 12 ways to increase your Technorati authority quickly..

1. Quality Content : As always, Content is King! The more quality content you post , the more chances that other blogs link to your site.

2. Giveaways : Who hate freebies..? you can encourage people to link to your site by giving away free stuff like templates,fonts,icons or any other resources you expertise in.

3. Link to Us : Design a good small button and add the "Link to Us" html code to your blog sidebar just like I did it in this blog (check the right sidebar).. so, it's easy for your readers to just copy & paste your link on their blogs.

4. More Blogs - More Authority : Do you run lot of blogs ? You can increase your Technorati Authority easily by linking all the blogs to your main blog... So, the more blogs you have , the more authority you get..as simple as that.

5. Sponsor a Blog theme : There are millions of people using blogs like Blogger and Wordpress. So, sponsoring a blog theme is one of the best and fastest way to get tons of backlinks to your site. Everytime someone uses your template, your backlinks will increase along with technorati authority.

6. Link exchange : Try to contact blog owners related to your site niche and propose for link exchange. There are lot of blog directories out there.. Just go to them and select your blog category and browse other blogs related to your niche and contact them one by one for link exchanges or you can find some link exchange parters in forums like Digitalpoint.

7. Buy links : If you have some $$ to advertise your site, you can buy links and blog posts on other blogs that are relevant to your site and can increase your authority.

8. Top Commentators : Some people put 'Top Commentators' widget on their blogs and link to their top comment posters.Try to find them and comment on their blogs (no spammy ones) and get a backlink to your site.

9. Run a Contest : You can Run a blog contest giving away prizes like money, entrecard credits, rapidshare accounts, etc and ask your readers to link back to your site to participate in the contest. This is one of the proven ways to increase your technorati authority in a rapid pase.

10. Use Technorati Badges : Simply add a technorati 'Fav this blog' widget to your blog. This can make your readers to easily "Fav" your blog which gives you a point.

11. Blog commenting : This is well known and popular method to increase backlinks to your site aswell as technorati authority. Do a bit of research on dofollow blogs and your authority will increase everytime if the blog you commented on is claimed.

12. Ping Blogs : Check who is linking to your blog. If you are using visitor counters like histats, sitemeter,etc.. Check your referrals stats and find out the blogs that are linking to you and ping them.. so, technorati can crawl them fast and increase your authority fast. you can ping the technorati here.

Blogger Followers now Integrated with Google Friend Connect

When Google Friend Connect was introduced a few months ago, it seemed inevitable that eventually this service would be closely integrated with Blogger to enable more social interaction around our blogs and social communities.

Today the Blogger Buzz blog announced that Friend Connect has been integrated with the Followers feature, enabling readers to log in and become a follower of your blog using their preferred login details (rather than using only their Google account).

As explained in the introductory post:

"[...] Your readers come from across the web, from Yahoo, AOL, WordPress, Typepad... not just Blogger. That's why we're excited to announce that we've integrated Blogger Following with Google Friend Connect.

Friend Connect encourages readers to use one account (whether it's a Google account, a Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account) to follow any site - a Blogger blog, a WordPress blog, or any other site that has incorporated Friend Connect."

This integration promises more exposure for our blogs as those from other social networks can follow our posts, be updated of new articles and share their followings with friends from other social sites.

For those who have already set up "Following" on their Blogger blogs, the integration has already been set up for you. Your Followers widget will have already changed to reflect the new Friend Connect features and enable those using other login details to follow your site.

Here is what the Blogger Buster followers widget looks like now:

I did need to alter some of the colors to ensure it matched the overall design of my blog, but otherwise this was integrated with my overall design. If you need to edit some of the font colors for your own Followers widget, simply click the edit icon or go to Layout>Page Elements in your Blogger dashboard and choose the "Edit" link. On the pop-up screen you will be able to change the colors for the different text sections of your widget.

Here also is a video which the Blogger team created to explain "How to follow" a blog:

As hinted in the introductory post for Friend Connect integration, we're likely to see even more new features based on Google's social integration features over the next few months!

Feel free to let us know what you think of Friend Connect and the updated Followers widget by leaving your comments below.

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Blog Archive

Adsense in Blogger posts (the basics!)

Blogger: Beyond the Basics (A new book from Packt Publishing)

The Best and Worst Times to Publish your Posts

21 Ways to Write Posts that Are Guaranteed to Grow Your Blog

How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Blog

Create a Facebook Group

How Readers Use the Facebook Group

Marketing Your Facebook Group, and Your Blog, in Other Facebook Groups

How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs

How do bloggers make money from blogs?

Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging

How to earn from twitter

Goolge Toolbar Pagerank trick

Introducing "We Love Blogger"!

Blogger wants to hear from us!

How to Increase Technorati Authority ?

Blogger Followers now Integrated with Google Friend Connect

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