Make Money from Blogs » Template

New free Blogger templates

ashish — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:38:11 +0000

There are a whole host of people who prefer to write their blogs using Google’s Blogger service. It gives a free hosting capability, allows you to place your own content on the site, gives a number of different widgets, and has numerous other blog-friendly features. The one major problem with using Blogger as a platform for your blogs is that the default list of templates is (for want of a better word), downright boring. When you first create a new account and select a template, you get a very small list. Once you have created the blog and to to modify your template, you get a few more customizations possible on the available theme, but none of them are likely to make your very enthusiastic.
However, Blogger does allow you to add your own theme, and if you want to change your template, then there is nothing simpler than finding some great template resources on the web. There are plenty of such resources, and here is a listing of some of them. Given that preferences can vary, I will not try to pre-select any. One word of warning, there is always the temptation to look at more templates, however, if you find a template that you like and supports what you want to do, then you should go with that and stop looking.

http://bloggertemplates.itmag.org/,
http://www.eblogtemplates.com/,
http://mashable.com/2008/05/17/70-plus-new-and-beautiful-blogger-templates/,
http://freshbloggertemplates.blogspot.com/,
http://www.finalsense.com/services/blog_templates/,
http://www.blogspottemplate.com/,
http://www.blogcrowds.com/resources/blogger_template.php,
http://freetemplates.blogspot.com/,
http://blogspottemplates.blogspot.com/,
http://mashable.com/2007/09/13/blogger-templates/,
http://btemplates.com/,
http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/

14 free Adsense templates – widget-ready

ashish — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:17:44 +0000

People are always on the lookout for great free WordPress themes, and it is not easy to cut through the clutter and find some good themes. There are sites that offer hundreds of themes of all types (fluid, fixed, 3 column, 2 column, and so on), and from personal experience, I know how hard it can be to finalize a theme. What people (at least me and a few of my friends) look for is the ability to find distinctive themes that are not so common, seem to present the content to the viewer with great readability, and yet tries to meet the goals of the site creator in terms of good placement of Ads, Images, Surveys, Links, and so on.
So without much further discussion, let me give the link to this site that offers 14 new templates (NOTEPAD CMS THEME, PAPER THEME, CITY LIGHTS THEME, COUNTRYSIDE THEME, DOZEN ROSES THEME, FLOWER FIELDS THEME, MY WORLD THEME, PERFECT SUNSET THEME, SOCIAL THEME, SPORTS THEME, FINANCE THEME, FREEDOM THEME, HEALTHCARE THEME, PERSONAL THEME, POLITICAL BLUE THEME, and POLITICAL ORANGE THEME)
All these themes (including demos and screenshots) are available at this link
The site also offers to let you purchase some other premium themes.

Posting Adsense code below post title in Blogger

ashish — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:26:04 +0000

I had 2 previous posts where referenced articles showed how to place adsense code in different positions between blogger posts, such as below the title; to the right of a post; between posts, and so on. This was done by modifying the HTML characters of the adsense code (escaping them) and placing the code between specific positions of the template.
This was one way of doing this. Another way is to do what woork has done (link to article), and place the actual adsense code in a specific position in the template. The difference being that he has modified the code of the template to make this change (this seems to be a cleaner method). One benefit of this method appears to be that it seems possible to add a conditional statement that will allow showing the ad only in the single post view, and not in the main page. Here is an excerpt from the article:

So, I have changed AdSense code position above this line, adding an if statement (on bold) to show sponsored links only into the single post, not when an user visits my home page, or browse categories (over 96% of my actual clicks cames from internal pages).
In this way, AdSense is more visible and in just two day I have improved the number of clicks and my CTR for the most visited pages. If you use Blogger platform for your blog, I suggest to try it.

This seems like a very neat and useful way to optimize the placement of the Adsense code.

How to parse Adsense code to add within the Blogger template

ashish — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:09:01 +0000

You want to add Adsense code to your Blogger template at certain locations such as just below the title, after all, the research you have done shows that this is a good place where people are more likely to click your ads. However, the template in the new Blogger does not easily allow this. Fear not, many people have done the research on the structure of the new template and come up with a solution for this. You will find many articles on how to do this, with some of them working and others not easily understandable.
I was hunting for articles on how to do this, and came up with some articles where this is detailed. In the last post, I referred an article that detailed how to do this, and here is another article on the same issue; the difference being that this article tries to explain the changes in the adsense code in greater clarity, explaining the need of why this change needs to be done. Read this article (link) for more details:

If you try to insert any Google AdSense, AdBrite, AdEngage and any other JavaScript based ad code, or client-side components such as counter, tracker, form, snippet, effect, date and time, etc which is JavaScript based, an error message may be returned (an XML message).
The problem is caused by incorrect dynamic interpretation of Blogger XML template when it generates the HTML webpage for the blog page that is requested, probably due to the fact that the AdSense ad code or other code is not a valid XML, coupled with the fact that some ASCII characters have special meaning and reserved functions, confusing Blogger blogging engine. The resolution to the JavaScript based coding does not work in Blogger HTML template error can be solved by replacing special characters or symbols in the script to HTML code.

The article explains how to escape the characters so that the ads from different ad networks such as Adsense, Adbrite, Adengage, in fact, most ad networks that rely on JavaScript based code for serving ads will work. Once you go through the article, you can easily escape the special characters and make the code work.

Posting Ads at different places inside Blogger blogs

ashish — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:23:27 +0000

Blogger is a very good free host to create a blog on, since it allows you many creative liberties, and most important, allows you to place ads on your blog and keep the money you earn from such a process. Earlier, in the older version of Blogger, the entire template was text based and it was very easy to place ads anywhere (right after the title of a post, to the right of a post, between the post and the start of the comments, and so on). However, the newer version of Blogger, also called Blogger Beta earlier, has a more module based design, and it is far more difficult to put ads in the position that you desire.
The Blogger platform does allow insertion of Ads between posts (read about it in this link), but as most people who have spent time working with Ads (including Google’s own platform, Adsense) know, placement of the Ad is all important if serious money has to be made from the blog. For that purpose, it is very important to be able to position the ad block in different locations of the blog, including just after the title, or between some lines of the post, and so on. However, for this purpose, you will need to modify the HTML template of the blog.
This website (link) has a post that shows exactly how to do that:

One of the known tips for improving the performance of your Google AdSense ads is knowing where to place the ads. In this guide, we shall discuss the modification you can make to your Blog template to have your Google AdSense ads appear between your post title and post body, or between your post body and post footer. Also, we shall have the AdSense ads appear on every individual post.
We have to parse the AdSense code so that it can be included into your Blog template. This is not against AdSense rules because after the code is inserted into the template, when you view the source code of the template, you should see the exact same AdSense code that Google has generated for you. Indeed, if it is anything different, it means that you have not parsed it correctly and should review the code again. Parsing the code essentially involves replacing the following HTML characters

Read the remaining technique at the original location of the article. The article further talks about where in the template to place the adsense code (or any other ad block for that matter). It covers the following locations:
- appear between the post title and post body
- appear immediately after every individual post
- left of your text
- right of your text
Further the article also mentions placing margins around the adsense code.