“Star Rating” Widget for Blogger

Outbrain is free ratings widget, simple to install and comes with no commitments or strings attached.

To add “Star Rating” Widget in Blogger simple go to Outbrain.com. Next click the Blogger icon(see image below).

blogger

Click Get Widget Now!, don’t forget to change your own languages(see image below).

get-widget

Notice a new browser window has opened with your blog dashboard. Click ADD WIDGET and Save. Enjoy your new Star Rating Widget.

start-rating

Bum Marketing is not only for Bums!

For some reason, I never stumbled upon Bum Marketing concept before. Actually, many people use it without identifying this approach as a standard Bum Marketing strategy.


What is Bum Marketing?



BUM Marketing is a technique where you can legitimately earn an online income from the commissions of affiliate products, sales of your own products, AdSense ads and so on. The major advantage is that you can do it without the need to own a website. It does require a fair amount of work though, just like any Internet Marketing endeavor.

Bum Marketing is the mastermind of Travis Sago with the name chosen by his wife. Why using bum?
My wife (Jeannie) named this the “Bum Marketing Method” because she thinks it is so easy that I could take a bum off the street…take him to the public library…and have him earning cash within a week.








How Bum Marketing Work?



In a flash, it works like this:
  • Find a niche that isn’t overly crowded but is marketable or find a hungry market that is looking to buy something.
  • Find an affiliate program that offers products within the niche/market, which pays a decent commission.
  • Brainstorm keywords for each product you are going to promote.
  • Research the themes/topics for each of the chosen keywords.
  • Create articles about the products you are trying to promote and use keywords or keyword phrases within those articles. The articles should contain at no more and no less than 350-500 words.
  • Then you submit your articles to popular article directors such as USFreeAds, EzineArticles.com, or Squidoo so they get picked up by Google and the other major search engines.
  • Begin to reap the results after some time.
Note that for significant returns, you will need to create a massive amount of articles for every keyword from the products that you want to promote. It is tiring and not too exciting work, so be prepared to that.
It is kind of ‘firing thousands of arrows to hit a single prey’ type of marketing strategy. 



Benefits of Bum Marketing



  • No cost (or extremely low costs) to execute the strategy and stay on the track.
  • No need to understand the topics of promotion or any special skills to succeed.
  • It’s extremely low risk – all you have to loose is time.
  • No need to have a Website, or Blog, or even an email list.
  • No need to create or develop your own product.
  • Since you submit your articles to the well ranked sites, you can start to get the positive returns as fast as after one week.
Negative Side of Bum Marketing



  • You will need to write a lot of articles a day.
  • It pushes writer to think in a non-creative ways to produce an article (combining other articles, modifying, etc without touching own idea).
  • Bum marketer doesn’t communicate as well as real blogger.
  • Bum Marketing is a solo play.
  • Write article with focus to earn money without caring the fact of the product because they need to write quick and earn quick.
  • Always rush content out without checking the quality.
Bum Marketing Recommendations



The whole point of Bum Marketing is not to get your articles clicked on from people searching the article directories. BUM Marketing is really about getting as many articles of decent quality ranking highly in the search engines in order to get traffic to your affiliate links, sales pages, AdSense pages, opt-in pages and so on. The main goal is to get your articles into the top 10 Google results – meaning on Google’s first page. The more people that read your articles, the more likely they will click on your affiliate links contained within your article and resource box.

A key to being successful is looking at the priorities of a successful BUM Marketing campaign:
1. Articles and more articles. The more articles that you are able to write and get in the directories, the higher your ranking in the search engines will be.
2. Try to find a niche that is interesting to you. Writing articles is a whole lot easier if you are interested in your subject.
3. Submit articles to the major article directories every day. Don’t let up on this. This is one of the best Bum Marketing tips you will receive. Consistency is the key to get a high ranking in the search engines, which in turn means a high income.
4. Use Yahoo Answers for keyword research. Type in your keywords and see if people are asking questions that contain those keywords. If so, then start writing articles around those keywords.
5. Build a blog around your niche. This is one of the most critical Bum Marketing tips. Most article directories do not allow affiliate links, so you need a site to link to. A blog will give you a site link without the expense and time of building a website for each product you are promoting.
6. Jump on the social network by using Squidoo. The search engines are starting to love Squidoo, so build a lens around your niche.
7. Target phrases that have between 1,000 and 10,000 optimized results on Google. The lower the results, the better chance you have of getting on page one of Google quickly.
8. Forget all the complicated SEO tricks. Another very important tip in a long list of Bum Marketing tips is to make sure your keyword phrase is always included in your title. Then place it a few times throughout the article as I’ve done here. Keyword = “Bum Marketing Tips”
9. Write articles that contain tips and how to information. People love tips and lists so write articles that have a list of tips included in them.
10. Another great Bum Marketing tip is to write a FAQ article. Visit Yahoo Answers or forums and find the most frequently asked questions concerning your niche. Then write a FAQ article around these questions.
11. Here’s another great Bum Marketing tips that most people don’t think about. Use a pen name when submitting your articles. This does two things. First of all, unless you are a natural born writer, your first articles may not be that great. A pen name will keep you from being embarrassed about the quality of your articles. Secondly, once you get well known in the Internet marketing circles, using a pen name will keep your competition from searching out your niche markets.
12. One of the most important tips of all. Be persistent. If you really want to make a decent living online it is going to take some hard work and persistence.

Sources and Additional Information:

Blogger : Compress CSS For Fast Page Loading

1.Log in to your blogger dashboard and go to–> layout- -> Edit HTML

2.Now Cut CSS Code of your template.

NOTE : CSS Code is the code between the and tags.

3.Now go to cssdrive

4.Paste your CSS Code into the box.

5.Select ,
(a).Compression mode:- Normal

(b).Comments handling:- Select Don’t strip any comments.

6.Now click on “Compress-it!”.

7.After compressing your css code you can see like this message.

8.Now copy your Compressed CSS Code and paste it between and tags.

9.Now save your template and you are done.

Create 3 Column Footer Section In Blogger Template

  1. Back up your existing blog template
  2. Move all existing widgets from the existing footer section
  3. Add extra code to your footer section.
Go to Template>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard, and do not check the "expand widget templates" box (this simplifies the process).

Now you need to find this section in your template:


Replace the entire line highlighted in red with the code below:
































Its a good idea to save your template at this stage, before we add just one small section of code to style the new footer section and ensure that the widgets don't get pushed beneath each other when you add them later.
  1. Adding style for the new footer section
    Once again, open the Edit HTML section in your Blogger dashboard. This time, you need to find the closing "" tag, which is where the style section of your template ends.

    Immediately before this line, add the following lines of code:
#footer-column-container {
clear:both;
}

.footer-column {
padding: 10px;
}


And save your template again. The style in these lines of code ensure that the footer column don't get too bunched up, or slide beneath each other in the layout of your template.

Now you have finished adding these new sections to your footer, go to the Layout section of your Blogger dashboard (Template>Layout), and you will see the three new column, plus a lower section which spans the width of all three column, to which you can now add new widgets!



Bemplate: Professional 2-Column Blogger Template

New Professional 2 Column Blogger Template

Few days back, I found a new professional two column blogger theme called
Bemplate published by Simran. It's a neat and clean template with simple navigation and sidebar.

Features

  • 2 Columns
  • 2 navigation bars in the header to put as many links as you want
  • Search engine is already added
  • Subscribe buttons and subscribe via email form
  • More space for advertisements
  • Neat and clean design
  • and more..!

Demo | Download

Professional comment forms for Blogger

1. DISQUS :
Alternate comment form systems for Blogger

DISQUS is an alternate comment and discussion system for Wordpress , Blogger ,Typepad and other related services . Look at the following screenshot . It looks really professional than default Blogger comment system.


Join DISQUS here . After registration they will ask you to upload your Blogger template. upload and then download the DISQUSed Blogger template . After installation , your comments would appear as shown above .You can manage and moderate,backup your comments in DISQUS control panel .DISQUS also supports a universal avatar that can be set from control panel .

Intensedebate :


Intensedebate is another alternate Blogger comment system similar to DISQUS , but better than them in features . Intensedebate is an Automattic(Those guys behind Wordpress) joint venture . So this comment system includes many Wordpress features like Gravatar and Akismet spam protection . Intensedebate installation is almost similar to DISQUS. upload the template and then download the widgetized version .

Alternate comment form systems for Blogger intensedebate


Join Intensedebate here .You can enable Akismet and Gravatar from Intensedebate control panel . They also support export ,import and backup of Blogger comments . Comment moderation is possible and you can even replay to comments by email .

How to Make Drop-Down Labels Menu in Blogger?

If you host your blog on the Blogger (blogspot) platform, and you have significant number of labels on your sidebar, you might be looking for a suitable solution to show them, but also save the expensive space for other elements. These two tasks can be achieved by using the option of displaying your labels in a simple drop-down menu. Many bloggers already use drop-down option for long lists of labels (categories), which minimizes clutter and enables information to be displayed in the sidebar neatly.

While Blogger offers a dropdown menu option for the Archives widget, you will not be able to find an option to do the same for your labels. In this post, we will review two ways you can use to convert your regular Label list into a drop-down list.

Method 1

1. Template Backup. As usual, when you just think about making any changes to the template code, it is strongly recommended to make a complete back up of your existing template. This ensures you can easily roll back and restore your current, working template if you make any mistake.

To make a back up of your current template, go to Layout > Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard and click the “Download Full Template” link near the top of the page. This will offer the option to save your current Blogger template as an XML file to your local computer. Be sure to save this file in a location you can easily find later.

2. Ensure you have a “Labels” widget in your Blogger template. If you do not have a Labels widget activated in your template, go to Layout>Page Elements and add a Labels widget using the “Add a Gadget” link above your sidebar. Definitely, your posts should be labeled as well to transfer the related content to the activated widget.

3. Go to Layout > Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard. This time, DO NOT check the "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox!

4. Search for the following code (note that the name of the label in your template might be slightly different):

5. Replace the above code, with this:















6. Modifying the Widget. To alter the phrase “Choose a label to view” which is visible when the drop down menu is contracted, you will need to go to the Layout>Edit HTML page of your Blogger dashboard and check the “Expand widget templates” box. Then search for this phrase in your template code. Simply alter the wording of this phrase to something more suitable for your blog, being careful not to alter any of the surrounding code.

To clarify, here is the line of code where adjustments will be made. The text which can be altered is highlighted in red:



  



No matter, which method you choose, at the end of the performed modification save the template and back it up with a new name. Do not overwrite the backup file you created at the beginning, since you want to try the option for some time and decide you do not see any problems or performance drawbacks.


Sources and Additional Information:

Blog Monetization with Contextual Links at V7N


When you are trying to make money online with your blog or website – SEO (search engine optimization) is crucial. When your website is optimized, Google and Yahoo bots can crawl it easier. A lot of Internet marketers would pay top dollar for good, their topics related links. And according to Aaron Wall (SEO Expert) – “SEO is links and links are SEO”. So if you have a simple blog or website, you can earn money from the embedded links.

V7N Contextual is something between get paid to post and get paid to sell your links. V7N is looking for bloggers with high Google PR and SERP, who’d sell backlinks. So basically V7N.com is a global link marketplace, where you can find targeted advertisers, or you can offer your blog pages to those, who are interested.

It is not technically a get paid to blog network because most of the time you won’t have to write a blog post. All you’ll have to do is to transform any specific keyword (eg. golf clubs) in your blog posts into a link to the advertiser’s website. All bloggers will earn $10 per link, regardless of their blog size and reach. As link is placed, you are contractually obligated to make a good faith effort to keep the link active on the website for as long as the web site exists. You do not have to endorse somehow the advertiser, or even mention him in the blog post.
Note those adult sites are generally not accepted.

Money is sent by PalPal on monthly basis. It’s required to register on v7n.com forum, because that’s where you can find your advertisers at. You can add up to 5 blogs to one account, but if you have more websites, most likely, you can add more and more blogs to make even more cash.

An important point to note is that you’ll have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which means that you can’t disclose that you’ve sold a sponsored link.

And, finally, you can always combine this way to monetize your blog with all others.

Add image bullets to Sidebar links in blogger

1. Select or create a bullet image of 9px X 9px size ( You can download free bullets from sites like http://www.websitebullets.com/

2. After having an image, upload it onto a free server.( eg: sites.google.com, photobucket etc.)

3.Go back to “Template” tab and click “Edit HTML”. Scroll to look for the following lines

.sidebar  ul {
list-style:none;
margin:0 0 0;
padding:0 0 0;
}
.sidebar li {
margin:0;
padding:0 0 .25em 15px;
text-indent:-15px;
line-height:1.5em;
}


4. Replace them with this

.sidebar  ul {
list-style:none;
margin:0 0 1.25em;
padding:0 0px;
}

.sidebar ul li {
background:url("URL OF IMAGE FILE") no-repeat 2px .25em;
margin:0;
padding:0 0 3px 16px;
margin-bottom:3px;
border-bottom:1px dotted #ccc;
line-height:1.4em;
}


Remember to insert the URL OF IMAGE FILE into the code.

Numbering your Comments in the Blogger Blog

I am trying to keep my blogs in the simple informational style. That means, I am looking for interesting information on the Web and I am sharing with you. In most cases, it is a one-directional process, and I do not get a lot of comments. However, if you blog in more communicational and controversial manner, amount of comments you receive could be huge. If that is the case, the comments numbering might be an excellent idea.

Possible Advantages:
* It is a nice way of differencing/identifying each comment (it’s a great feature for giveaway posts!).
* It allows you to get the permalink of each comment, and this may work for future references (e.g.: “You should read this comment [URL goes here], I found it very interesting.”)
* Indispensible for design purposes.

Possible disadvantages and limitations:
* If your comments are paginated, the counter will reset in each comment page. In Blogger, comments are paginated if they surpass the 200.
* The process requires code modification in several places, so that is not recommended for the beginner bloggers.

Results:

Image and video hosting by TinyPic


Steps involved in implementing this trick
1. Login to your Blogger Dashboard
2. Go to Template >Edit HTML
3. Choose to expand your Widget templates.
4. Find this line of Code
and replace it with
5. Now find this line of code
and replace it with
6. Now find this line of code
and replace it with

So you should have it working in just 3 replacement steps. If everything went well, you should now have a numbered commenting system on your blog.




Sources and Additional Information:

Free Online Templates Generator for Bloggers

Firdamatic is an online tableless layout generator that allows you to create and customise layouts easily only by completing forms, making creating skins for your Firdamatic-based layout a breeze. This tool is available for free for personal/non-commercial use only and comes with no technical support. The web generator is not actively supported by author since 2006.


This online template generator will support an old Blogger and Movable Type blogs. You can select from the two column or three column options. Simply enter the information on the relevant boxes on the online form and click generate template. You can add your site name, title image, and choose the font and font color as well.

While there are still some people, who advocate for the tableless layout generators, like Firdamatic, I would consider this approach a bit outdated and limited. However, you might find this free template generator useful anyway.

Screenshot:
Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Favicon in Blogger

Step 1. Visit HTML Kit - Online Favicon Maker to make your own favicon from your desired image.

Step 2. Download it and rename the custom favicon as you want.

Step 3. Open MS Paint in your computer and change format ICO. to PNG or GIF format and save.

Step 4. Then upload somewhere (i use http://imageshack.us/ for this ). Remember to save the link / url of your uploaded favicon.

Step 5. Go to your Blogger Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML.
Find the title tag which looks like this:-


Step 6. Copy and paste the following code (right after above script)

for ICO. format


for PNG. format


for GIF. format


Remember to type in the “URL of your icon file”, Then Save Template.

That's all there is to it, enjoy your favicon! Enjoy your new favicon look!

Other online favicon generator

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
http://www.favicongenerator.com/
http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/
http://www.favicon.co.uk/
http://www.favicon.com/

Add "Print Button" after every post in Blogger Post

Print button help readers to print articles with just a click. To install just follow in the instructions below.
<!-- Print code by http://djyano.blogspot.com/ -->
<span class='noprint'><data:post.body/></span>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<a href='javascript:window.print()'><img src='http://i475.photobucket.com/albums/rr115/djyano21/printButton.png'/></a></b:if><!-- Print code by http://djyano.blogspot.com/ -->

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