Guide To Blogging

Exploring The World Of Blogs

As per a comment posted here the other day I recently joined BloggrZ.com and from what I’ve seen of it so far it’s going to be a wonderful new service for both those that love to visit other people’s blogs as well as those want to build the readership of their own blogs.

By installing the BloggrZ Toolbar you can easily explore other blogs and get your own blog visited. You can set your preferences as to what type of blogs you’re interested in (these can be updated at any time) and a simple click of a button will let you explore the blogging world based on your preferences.

As taken from the about page:

BloggrZ.com allows you to submit blogs that will be reviewed by all through BloggrZ Toolbar and BloggrZ.com website and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page of BloggrZ.com. Anyone can submit a blog. The blog will then be shown through toolbar and will also be available on BloggrZ.com website for votes and comments. When a user submits a blog it will be placed in the “Recently Submitted” area until it gains sufficient votes to be promoted to the main page.

Through the use of BloggrZ Toolbar, bloggers get to explore other blogs, get their own blogs explored and increase readership. Blog-explorers, on the other hand, get to view the online world through bloggers’ eyes. The toolbar remembers the preferences set by a user and shows blogs based on those interests. Preferences can be updated any time.

When you love blogs so much, why stumble all over the web? There is a better way to easily discover great blogs and let your blog get discovered. All based on your preferences. Get your BloggrZ Toolbar today! BloggrZ.com always keeps you within the blogosphere.

It’s well worth a look in my opinion. BloggerZ.com 

Blog Tips And Other Interesting Bits and Pieces - 2

I’ve been cruising around the place and come up with some more interesting little bits and pieces so I thought it was probably time to share again.

You know that old saying - you learn something new every day? well it’s true (at least for me - it’s possible many of you already know this, but I figured I’d share anyway - just in case). This post -  Secret ‘Blogging Traffic Booster’ In WordPress - taught me a nifty little trick that could go a long way to helping the search engines rank your posts on your targeted keywords.

Don’t think you’re creative enough in your blogging? take a look at this post: Be Extraordinary: How To Tap Into Your Amazing Creative Power and while you’re on that blog  How To Write More, Worry Less, And Create Great Content in fact just take a look around there’s plenty of cool bits and pieces to read.

And finally from a little more technical side want to display posts on your homepage only from a particular category? then maybe this will help Retrieving Posts from a Particular Category 

That’s all for now

Promote Your Blog With Its Own Business Card

When it comes to building your online business/blog Web 2.0 is all the rage. These social sites (from blogs and forums to bookmark sites like digg and stumbleupon) are a great way to meet and interact with like-minded people or just make new acquaintances.

Before we turned to the internet to network with others people used to pass out their business cards by the handful, and now online the same premise can be applied with Entrecard. You too can have your own online business card that promotes your blog and allows you to network with other blog owners.

Other Entrecard blog members can in turn either drop me their business card or build up credits to advertise on my sites widget etc.

If you want to know more take a look at this video

Get Paid For Every Visitor To Your Site

I am always looking out for new ways for my readers to make more money online with less effort.

Recently I came across a new innovation that you need to hear about because it may affect the way you earn with your website in the very near future.

As you may know, major television networks are in trouble because their advertising revenue is dropping. They are losing market share at a dramatic pace.

For the first time in history, website owners are sharing in the ad revenue that was formerly spent with the giant TV networks.

Advertisers like Harley Davidson, HBO & Taco Bell are willing to pay you on 100% of your website traffic to make up for the loss of viewers that the big TV networks are experiencing.

Do your online business a huge favour. Stop what you are doing for just a moment and learn how you can earn revenue on 100% of your website traffic.

This is a FREE opportunity that is taking the advertising community by storm.

This is bigger than radio, television and all other forms of media combined!

Get full details here:: Pay Per Play ad

Or for a brief video guide: Pay Per Play Video 

Add A Video To Your Blog And Earn From It

I’ve previously posted about some quick and easy plugins for WordPress blogs that enable you to easily add videos to your bog posts. I’m now going to share another, though this one is a little different.

By joining Revver and then using the Revver Plugin for WordPress you can not only easily add a variety of videos to your posts you also have the chance to earn from them.

You can earn from Revver in a couple of different ways. Taken from the site:

 

How we share revenue

Yeah, you can earn money by making an awesome video and putting it on Revver. But did you know you can also earn just by sharing other people’s videos? Just find a few of your faves and you can send them to friends, embed them in your blog or website, or even make your very own podcast with them — and earn for sharing!

But wait, there’s more! Because it’s so easy to earn money by sharing videos, other Revver members will be knocking down your door trying to share your videos with the world. Every time they earn money for sharing your video, you earn money for creating it!

The video above gives a brief explanation of using the plugin. This plugin and video site might prove very useful to those that set up primarly vlogs (video blogs) or use videos to portray their content rather than text etc.

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Click here to post a video response.

Creating Your Own 404 Page Not Found For WordPress

Quite awhile ago I wrote a post about editing the WordPress 404 Page to make it more user friendly for your readers, within that post I explained a quick and easy way to do it if your chosen blog template already has a 404 page created.

If, however, you don’t have a 404 page as part of your blog theme then you can quickly remedy that by adding or making your own. Some themes will allow you to simply add/upload the 404 page that comes with the default WordPress theme into your new blog theme’s directory. Unfortunately though, some won’t and you need to take the extra step of creating your own.

This blog for example; earlier today when I mentioned editing 404 pages in a forum I suddenly realised that when I changed themes I no longer had an edited 404 page (it was just the standard page not found message) I wanted to quickly change that to make it more useful (and so I didn’t look quite so silly if someone tried it on the blog after reading my message ).

Here’s the steps I took to quickly create a 404 page:

Download your index.php file of your chosen theme and rename it 404.php you then need to open it with notepad and make your changes (right click - open)

You’ll see a lot of gooblygook (well at least it is to me as I don’t know a great deal about all the php stuff) the most important part though will be the top of the page which is what calls your footer and sidebars etc when the page is opened. eg.

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<div class=”middle”>

This line below is the start of what is known as The Loop (this is for your posts etc) and is not need for your 404 page

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

This continues until here:

<p class=”center”>Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.</p>
<?php endif; ?>

Everything within The Loop can be deleted and replaced with your chosen information for your 404 page. eg.

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<div class=”middle”>

<h2 class=”center”><b><center>OOPS! Something went wrong</center></h2><center>It seems the gremlins have been hard at work again</center>In the mean time, while I work to try and catch them and stop them from creating havoc around here, you might like to try finding the page you were after in one of the ways I’ll list below:

Below that you’ll probably have the get header get footer etc similar to the top of the page

</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

The above bold section is an example of what your 404 page could look like once completed

Once you have the page created to your satisfaction you then need upload it your your blog’s theme - wp-content/themes/chosenblogthemename

Then you can check that it all works by testing it with an incorrect url. If it looks how you want you don’t need to do anything else (always a good thing) you can edit if need be by opening your theme editor in your dashboard and clicking on 404.php, or if need be you can delete it entirely via your chosen ftp etc.

I hope all that made sense - as always I suggest you copy any files as backup in case something goes wrong

Turn Your Blog RSS Feeds Into Podcasts

You can quickly turn your readers into listeners with this free service that automatically converts your blog posts, text articles or rss feeds into podcasts.

With Odiogo you can give your readers the chance to listen to your posts wherever and whenever they want. If your blog publishes an rss feed (WordPress, Blogger, Typepad etc) you can use Odiogo convert your written word into audio that your readers can listen to on their ipod, mp3, pc or phone etc.

I’m still waiting to use this service myself but for those that have high content blogs it might come in very handy for you.  If you want a demonstration and more detailed information take a look at the demo page

If anyone has used this service I’d be very interested to hear what you think about it: good or bad

Blog Tips And Other Interesting Bits and Pieces - 1

I’ve been keeping pretty busy with real life lately so I haven’t had much of a chance to do any playing around with my blog, but that hasn’t stopped me from my regular reading and searching on the internet.

I always come across some great informative posts in my travels and as such I’ve decided to start sharing them ( 1) because they are good and 2) because they usually explain things a whole lot better than I ever could)

So with that in mind I bring you the first in what I hope will be a regular series of cool blog tips and other interesting odds and sods.

Blog Oh! Blog offers an easy to follow guide on how to add an extra sidebar to your WordPress theme. Should prove useful to those that love a particular theme but need that extra space.

While on the subject of codes for your blogs - WordPressGarage has a section that covers a variety of useful code snippets so you can make your own changes to your theme
Snoskred - from Life In the Country  - has a great html guide - I really liked the information on scroll bars and now use it a lot (thanks) you can find that and more here: Basic Html For Bloggers

Looking for some ideas on what to post about in your blog? you can try these 101 blog posting ideas

I’m a Bloglines fan when it comes to subscribing to my favourite blogs, so for those that might be interested in switching from Google Reader then this guide might be just what you need: Move From Google Reader To Bloglines