Hacks n Tips for Bloggers

Where to host your files?

Written by Basis-Consultant on 7:40 PM

Bloggers do make tutorials and text documents for viral marketing or promotion of blogs. Some of them make blogger templates or wordpress templates. They find problem in storing files. Blogger do not provide a way to store files.

To share files like tutorials of books on your blog you need to upload your files to a server which provides bandwidth and disk space. There very large no of free file hosting websites that provide your free space and bandwidth to store and share files. But most of them are ad financed.



Mediafire is on of them and provides best service in the industry.
Here are some of the features they provide on their free account.

• Unlimited storage
• Up to 100MB per file
• Unlimited uploads
• Unlimited downloads
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Image galleries

Even though Sign up is not required, it is recommended as you will have more powerful interface to manage your files.
Here is a picture how your files look in mediafire account.


You can created folders, organize files by moving them in to relevant folders, email links of all files at a time, tag items/folders according to category, add description to each and every file.

Click on My Account Tab and you can see total space occupied by files and bandwidth they have used till now.

Downloading from mediafire is a nice experience for your visitors. Ofcourse it is ad financed, but they don't have to wait or enter any captcha to download files. I have been using mediafire for long time now and i recommend all bloggers to use it.

How to create additional Pages in Blogger

Written by Basis-Consultant on 1:30 AM

How to you create additional posts which are not indexed or not shown to your regular readers. These are useful in using for making a contact me page.


1)Click on create, enter the name of you blog post and click post options as shown in figure.
2)Change the year (last two numbers highlighted) in date a shown in the figure.



and publish it now. You can also use this pages to create about us,disclaimer or privacy policy pages.

How to make popular pages widget?

Written by Basis-Consultant on 11:24 PM

The popular widget will display the killer posts on your blog. How is this determined? There are some who just display their popular post just based on no of comments but the posts with large no of comments might not be the popular posts.

This widget is just a link list widget based on your traffic results. If you are using statcounter as your site analyzer goto stats and click on popular pages and pick up the first five or ten popular posts and make a link list widget. Visit this page to learn how to make a link list widget . You have to do it manually. Update the widget once in a month. By the way getclicky provides you with various widgets you can display popular posts and visitor map. Ofcourse you have to install its site counter.

How to backup your blog

Written by Basis-Consultant on 9:04 PM

There are some ways to back up your blog like

use blog collector
You can convert your blog pages into pdf files.

HTTRACK
Use this program to download all blog post from blogger. This program is used to download websites.

Blog Send Address
Send all of your post to email.
Go to settings and click on email in your blog's control panel and you will see a field named
BlogSend Address, enter the email to which your post to be sent when published.
This one good option but i recommend you to create a separate email account so that all of your blog posts will be in another email that is not personal.

Use Draft.blogger.com
The next option is to export your blog from draft.blogger.com
yup
they are providing the features. All of your blog including settings is imported in a xml file for you to store in a safe place and restore it when you lost any of your blog or any unforeseen incident.

Login at draft.blogger.com

Go to settings -> basic in your blogger settings and you will see blog tools
Just click on export and your blog will be exported in blog atom format.


even your comments are saved. You can also import the blog by clicking on import & importing from .xml file.
I recommend you to back up blog atleast once a week or month (if you are lazy).

How to Schedule Future Posts in blogger

Written by Basis-Consultant on 8:28 PM

Blogger allows you to schedule post to be published at a future date and time.
To set post to be published at a future date
click on post options as shown in figure and you will see options to set time when the posts are published. Just change the date and time as shown in the figure below.


You can disallow visitors to comment on the post. Now click on publish button and you will see your post scheduled to be published
.

How to display scrolling texts in blog.

Written by Basis-Consultant on 5:46 PM

If you need to display scrolling texts in your blog use <marquee> tag.
Here are some properties you can use for marquee tag

Simple Scrolling Text

<marquee> Simple scrolling Text</marquee>

Simple scrolling Text

You can limit the width in which the text can scroll like

<marquee width=200 > Simple scrolling Text</marquee>

Limit width = 200 pixel

you can even limit height also use height = 50 etc..

you can even fill the background color.

<marquee bgcolor=yellow > Simple scrolling Text</marquee>

Scrolling text with yellow background

You can sytle the text inside the marque tags and insert images like

<marquee> Google Logo <img src="http://img373.imageshack.us/img373/2590/earthday08ww6.gif"> </marquee>

Google Logo

Any way don't rely on them too much as they might distract your visitors.

Swaping Blog's Name with Page's Title

Written by Basis-Consultant on 10:33 PM

You have observed that in many blogs the Blog Name appears before the Page's Title like

Hacks n Tips for Bloggers: Categories or Labels
| | | |
`------Blog Title--------- `-------Page Title/



This Format is not good for search engine optimization. If your blog's Title is especially large all of your blog pages appears to have the same title.
There is a hack to swap you page's title with blog's title.
Go to your blog's template ---> edit html & click on expand widget templates.
Now seach for

<title><data:blog.title/></title>

and replace above code with

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>

Here is the result after applying above hack

Now fill you post title with lot of keywords. This will help you pages to show up in relevant search results in high position.

How to insert google ads between posts

Written by Basis-Consultant on 8:23 PM

Blogger provides option to insert google adsense ads between posts.
They don't earn much anyway.
I am just adding this for information as they might be profitable for you.

Here are the steps you need to follow

1. Log into your Blogger at http://www.blogger.com .
   
2. Goto your blog's Template tab and click on the Page Elements link.
   
3. Click Edit in the Blog Posts section.

4.Click on the Show Ads Between Posts, you can choose the ad format and the frequency the ads appears like after every 1 or every 2 posts and customize the colors & save it.



Here is a video Tutorial

Online Videos by Veoh.com

How to show a message for visitors before they comment

Written by Basis-Consultant on 11:37 PM

Some of you might have observed in some blogs the authors write a message in the comment form not to spam or just post because of back link value. Most of the bloggers user this to prevent spam and give any instructions to the commentators on their blog (or warn not to spam) or just sya a thank you for commenting on their blog.
Here is how you display a message in the comment form.
go to settings ---> comments and scroll down for Comment Form Message
Now type your message here. When ever a visitor opens the comment form they view the message you have typed as shown in figure.
See the message encircled in red area

Ratings for blogger posts

Written by Basis-Consultant on 11:44 AM

Why do you need ratings?
Apart from comments ratings are also a type of feed back. They show the quality of your articles or blog posts. Blogger has provided they own rating system in draft.blogger.com . You can use the ratings of outbrain. They also provide step by step instructions how to install this ratings widget.
Here are the step by step instructions how to active ratings through blogger

1) Go to draft.blogger.com
2) Click on the particular blogs layout and click on edit option on posts page element



3) now you will see options to include in blog posting. Check the Show Star Ratings and save.




You will see the rations as shown in belowfigure



Its better to get feed back and let others know how popular your content is ...

How to create a blog at Blogger

Written by Basis-Consultant on 1:20 AM

When is saw this video at you tube i was surprised that such a video to be created? Of course there are people who even don't know how to create a email account. Any way this video is official video from Google. This simply explains how to create a blog. There are people who don't know how to create a blog (my sis). She uses internet but she doesn't know what a blog is and how to create on (because she has no reason to create one). So does this video exists to show people how to create a blog with blogger.

How to add a gadget or html/javascript element to your blog

Written by Basis-Consultant on 1:01 AM

Gadget/widget is a html or javascript that add additional functionality to your blog.
Google provides many attractive and useful gadgets that makes your life as a blogger easy. Page element or gadget are one and same. There is a name change in the newer version of blogger. Here is a video explaining how to add a gadget or page element to your blog


Just go to layout and click on add gadget button and you will see a large no of gadgets appearing.. Click on + symbol and you will be able to configure and add the gadget

Ucomment Ifollow is only for Beginners ?

Written by Basis-Consultant on 2:22 PM

As i have explained the ucomment ifollow movement which give back link value for comments. But is not fruitful. The way bloggers give back link value to comments it attracts a lot of spam. It just that the whole Ifollow movement is for beginners to attract attention or to receive feedback. Once your blog is large enough you have to enable nofollow tag to prevent spam and those who comment only to get back link value adding no value to discussion. Here is one of the popular blog Jackbook's comment form with warning not to comment only for back links....

Where to upload pics to post in blog

Written by Basis-Consultant on 11:51 PM

Google provides options to upload your images. They are stored in picasa web albums http://picasaweb.google.com/. Unfortunately they don't give you direct link to the image. The space provided by google is limited to 1GB. There are other websites that provide space for hosting pictures for free and give you limited bandwidth. There are some services i suggest like Photobucket and Imageshack. They give you direct link to you pictures which you can share on you blog. By the way how to post a pic
here is the code

<img src="http://url-to-the-picture" />

I suggest using pictures in format of JPG or JPEG. Because most of them are small size. PNG files are of high quality but are of very large size.

How to embed videos from Youtube or Megavideo into your blog

Written by Basis-Consultant on 9:34 PM

If you find any video on youtube or megavideo worth adding to your site just search for button or field called embed. Usually in all video sharing sites the embed button is present. I am showing the popular sites like

youtube
it will be present in the right side of the video where the description is present.

megavideo
it is present on right side of video like this


in veoh
The embed option will be below the video.

If you see that embed is disabled, the author or uplander of video doesnot want other to embed his content sot you will not be able to publish it in your blog.

Copy all the code in the embed field and go to your post
click on Edit html button and paste it.
----this is picture---------------------------------------------------------

------- x-----------------
You will see the video in compose mode.

Here is video tutorial

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Get a Contact Form for your blog

Written by Basis-Consultant on 9:10 PM

Normally one of the most commonly used way of contact in blogger is comments. Just make a post named Contact me & tell the users to post a comment in that post & enable sending comments to you email. But this irritates many users since blogger contact form is in another page. But if you like to setup a contact form that doesn't require your visitor to visit another page use KontactR

They have a large no of options like html code or ajax code. They have now launched a new type of comment forms. Popup form!!. I think the popup form is the best. You can embed the contact me button at the end of each post like addthis or sharethis button. When the visitor clicks on it a small contact form opens up without opening a new window like below shading the rest of the page. After sending the message you can close the window and return to your page without going clicking any buttons. Also there is the CAPTCHA feature which stops spam.



Related Posts:
How to embed javascript in blog post 

To add this go to layout ---> edit html then check Expand widget templates button and search for post.body
now add this javascript after parsing it below         <p><data:post.body/></p> line
Click below contact me button to see the example

How to add signature to your post

Written by Basis-Consultant on 8:15 PM

Signature is repeated information which appears at the end of every post or letter or email you write. In Blogger you can add it. Suppose you are maintaining a site which has a large no of download links then you can make two posts named contact me & report broken links. As you need to add this to every post so that you visitor can send you the list of broken links. There are other uses, like you like to add a image singature like at the end of every post. You need to type < img src="http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/2034/signatureaugustelantzqb5.png" > every time. To automate this routine task you can code you signature in blogger.

To do it go to settings ---> formatting . After loading scroll down and you will see a section post template. Now paste html code of your signature here as shown in figure.

and click on save setting button. Now every time you create a new post the signature automatically appears.

How to choose your Niche?

Written by Basis-Consultant on 5:01 PM

These are my thoughts about choosing a niche. Normally experts suggest that you choose a niche that interests you a lot or you know a lot about it or you are willing to learn a lot about it. I think their idea is if you know a lot about a niche or if you are interested in your niche then you can write good articles and make a great website which will get good targeted traffic. But is this approach profitable? I used to manga (Japanese comics). I haven’t earned much money from it. The CPC is usually less than five cents. Of course the traffic is targeted one and the advertisements are targeted. But they pay very low for each click. Even if the niche is of your interest is it worth to blog about or publish if the ads pay you low? I am trying a highly competitive niche now. I think where there is more competition there more money is. When a police asked a robber, why do you loot only banks? The answer is bcos it where the money is. Of course it is hard to get noticed in such a large crowd. I think one must choose a sub niche which is part of this popular niche and start writing about it. But one should analyze properly about the niche before jumping into it. Some clues would be like. Medicines are very costly in our daily life. So ads targeted in that niche would pay you more?