Make Money from Blogs » Blogger

How to schedule a blog post in Blogger for the future

ashish — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:47:23 +0000

Strange topic, right ? Your normal workflow would be that you get into your Blogger account, write the stuff / post the photo, and then publish the post. In some circumstances, when you cannot complete the post as of that time, you would save the post in draft mode, to be taken up later when the time is more convenient. But can you consider the option where you publish the post, not for the current time, but for a future time.
There are reasons why you would want to publish the post for a later time, such as :
1. You are going somewhere on holiday, and want to ensure that in the time period that you are away, your readers still get a regular supply of your posts. This is important for retaining your readership, important for ensuring that you remain high on Google search, and to ensure that you don’t have any holes in your publishing calendar (especially when you are publishing on a daily basis).
2. This is also applicable for the case when you are in the mood, and have written more than one post at the same time, and you really don’t want to push out 2 posts at the same time (you don’t want to send a precedent / you are afraid that one of the posts will be neglected / etc), so you can publish one post immediately, and the other one can be set to publish at a later time.
It is fairly easy to set up this option, all you need to do is to go to your New Post Window -> Post Options -> Post Date and Time (as in the below diagram).

Connecting your Google Blogger account and Amazon Affiliates

ashish — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:59:06 +0000

If you have a Blog hosted on Google’s Blogger network, and you blog about objects where it would be beneficial to sell products from Amazon, then you would know that it takes some to get the Amazon affiliate links into your blog. Consider a blog about Gadgets (called Ultra Cool Gadgets) that is hosted on Blogger. Since the blog is about Gadgets, it makes sense to also try to earn some money through posting products from Amazon, and letting readers follow those product links and buying needed products from Amazon. Once they do, you can earn some commission. Till now, it used to be that one would have to create a separate account on Amazon’s affiliate program and then create relevant links, and insert the code inside the post. Now, with the new integration, you can get this finding of the relevant products to be much more automated, available through Amazon’s Product Finder.
Learn more about this facility in these 2 posts (link 1, link 2). If you have a Blogger blog, but don’t have an Amazon affiliate account, you can now easily create this from within Blogger itself. Once you have an account and an Amazon tracking ID, you can get to the setting inside your Blogger account, and reach the screen below.

Once you have accepted this setting, you are now setup for the connection between your Blogger account, and your Amazon affiliate account.

Uisng Google Friend Connect to share to Twitter and Facebook

ashish — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:09:12 +0000

In today’s world, it has become pretty important to ensure that if you want your website to get promoted and get more readers, you cannot just depend on adding content to your site (even if the content is very rich and useful) to get more readers. You need to be proactive, and add tools and mechanisms to make your site reach more people; and in this perspective, the concept of viral marketing is very important. Viral marketing means that your readers are doing the promotion for you, and people will do that if:
- they find your content appealing and worthy of sharing
- they have the tools to share the content easily from your site
Now, how do you do this sharing ? You can share through various sharing mechanisms such as “Addit”, through links that provide the facility to send email to anybody else, and through sharing to various social Networking sites. Now, Google is also providing a set of tools called “Google Friend Connect”, and you can leverage these tools to engage the visitors to your site, allow more sharing, and eventually increase the number of readers to your site.

Read more about the “Share It” gadget on this page (link)
If your blog is on Google’s Blogger service, then read the instructions given at this page for installing this gadget (link)

However, if your site is not a Google Blogger hosted site, then you would need to do some further steps such as registering your site on the Friend Connect site as well as add a couple of files to your site (complete set of instructions here)

Don’t misuse Twitter when using it for promotion

ashish — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:55:54 +0000

Twitter makes a great platform for getting new users to your blog. You can get a number of people to join your blog through a mechanism of following people in a similar line, as well as through writing short succinct Twitter updates (for more ways to use Twitter effectively, be sure to read the following blog – TwiTip.com).
Imagine the theory – all you need to do is get to a number of followers, and they will automatically get an update when you post a new Twitter update. However, it becomes far less simple after this point. Just because you have a number of followers does not mean that you will automatically get people coming to your blog from those posts – in many cases, the followers are not genuine. Getting followers who are genuine is far more difficult. And in many cases, it is the person posting on Twitter who is to blame. If you are writing genuine content, and posting short witty succinct posts to Twitter, then you will slowly start building up more dedicated users.
You could get more followers by following a number of people, and in many cases, there are software that automatically follows people who follow you. However, just because you have 10,000 followers does not mean that they are good. The strategy you need to follow is to follow only those people whose content you are really interested in, and then, if your content is genuine, then they will also follow you. However, and it is really important, do not share only for volume, share only that which would be interesting to somebody else.

Protect your Blogger post – Use Tracer to add your own link back to the copied content

ashish — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:56:18 +0000

It remains difficult to protect your content. You can take measures such as adding a Javascript that will prevent people from being able to right-click, or which will prevent people from being able to select content from your blog, but there are ways around that. Such controls do prevent some people from being able to take your content, but there will be people who are more technologically competent, and they will be able to beat your controls.
The method to be used is to detect when somebody is stealing your content, and then confront that person. The main point in this approach is to find out when somebody is stealing your content through the use of tools such as Google Alert, through some smart searching through using Google, and through some other plugins. However, if you have a blog on Google’s Blogger interface, it will get more difficult to use such measures. One such tool however that you can use is called Tracer, and can be downloaded from this link.
The way that this tool works is that you can set it up on your Blogger blog through a HTML/Javascript gadget, and then the tool will add a back link to your site when somebody selects content from your site and copies it. There will be always some people who will notice the back link, but for those where a tool is used to copy, or when somebody is not careful enough, the back link will let you easily detect when somebody has copied content from your site.