Make Money from Blogs » Blogger

How to plan for a trip when you are used to writing a blog post every day

ashish — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:30:39 +0000

Most people recognize that to increase the number of users coming to your system, and being sticky in the sense of keeping your subscribes as regular readers, you need to ensure that you are providing regular content that is rich and somewhat unique (that you are a presenting your own opinion, not simply copying something from somewhere). One approach that seems to work is that you provide content on a daily basis. This approach ensures that you readers get something to read every day, and works well for many publishers. Doing a daily update also ensures that search engine bots come to your site on a daily basis, and also increases your rank in Search Engines.
However, not all of us can spend 365 days in a year near your computer, sending out updates and post. You do need to plan for days when you will not have access to a computer, or are otherwise indisposed (you could be enjoying some travel with all the money you make blogging, as an example), but you need to ensure that you still churn out those regular daily posts that your readers have got used to. Well, you can do all this by scheduling your posts for the future (and you can do this whether your blog is on WordPress or on Google’s Blogger).
What you need to do is to plan for the number of days that you are going to be gone, and have that much extra posts written up, make sure that they are all in draft status, and then you should setup them for future publishing. Refer to these 2 articles (for WordPress and for 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)

Posting to your Blogger account from iGoogle as well as from Gmail

ashish — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:54:55 +0000

How to post to your Blogger account from the convenience of your iGoogle account or from your Gmail account. For those people who use their iGoogle account to a large degree, or are dependent on their Gmail accounts, this ability to post directly to their Blogger account can seem fairly useful.
Consider the following workflow – you are reading something in your Gmail account (with the same login as your Blogger account), and find a subject that you want to blog about. It does not take long to open your open Blogger account, but it can be incredibly easy to just have a plugin available in your Gmail account. From this Blogger Posting gadget, all you need to do is to select your blog (if you have multiple blogs), and then add your content, and you even get the ability to add labels for the post.
Read about the steps to add your Blogger account gadget to your iGoogle or Gmail account (link to post)

- The gadget supports editing the HTML of title and body.
- If you start writing a post and decide you want to upload images or use other rich text features, just click “Save Draft”. The gadget will save your post, then give you a link to directly edit the post in Blogger.
- The gadget works in Firefox, Chrome, Safari 3, Internet Explorer and on the iPhone.