• Interested in blogging but don’t know where to start?
• Have already started blogging but don’t know how to move your blog to one level up?

If you fall in any of the situations above, read on…

BecomeABlogger.com is the brainchild of Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick who have made significant gains in the field of professional blogging. This is an online coaching program that proposes to put budding bloggers’ blogs on steroids – that is to drive crazy traffic to a blog, to the extent of getting ranked as one of the top blogs on the internet. This program was first launched in 2008 and saw a huge success. They are re-opening the doors to this program for a short period, now it going to be re-launched on 29th/June/2009. They will keep the registration site open only for 5 days after which it will again close for probably a year.

If you are serious to make a mark in the filed of pro-blogging, I would recommend you to check it out. To find out whether this program is really suitable for you or not, first go through this detailed free report. This report includes details on how to successfully market a blog and make a whole lot of money from it.

Here is my brief review of the report:

They have categorized the strategies to become a successful blogger into individual milestones and provide with easy methods to achieve them:

• The first milestone according to BecomeABlogger.com is to discover the true passion with yourself and work towards it. They suggest connecting with people over public platforms such as Facebook and making use of Skype towards achieving the same.
• This process is followed up with an attempt at reducing the time spent on information gathering mechanisms by making use of popular tools such as Google Reader which helps you to collect information from various sources at a single most comfortable location. Information related to your area of interest can also be obtained by making use of two very different kinds of search engines that are human driven such as Mahalo.com and Clusty.com. These search engines differ from Google and other popular search engines in that they do not make use of any complex algorithms and are mainly concentrating on providing results that most other users are looking for.
• The third milestone towards becoming a successful professional bloggers is to test out the niche that one is planning to work on. According to them, such a niche check can be done to by making use of search engines such as Seesmic.com.
• Once you establish that the niche indeed suits your blogging needs, you can make your blog more attractive by adding interactive content on your blog and promote it on platforms such as Twitter.com etc.
• Apart from these methods, there are more methods that BecomeABlogger.com intends to share. Those details are available to users at the Premium Member’s Area on the website which will open on 29th/June. The premium member’s area provides instructional videos at affordable prices which are indeed helpful to all budding bloggers.

If you want to see more details on the points discussed above, get this free report.

[Update:

BecomeABlogger has just released one of their premium content videos to the general public (no cost)...Check this link for video.

Inside the video, Yaro talks about what he calls "Impact Marketing Techniques" - the kind of tricks he's used himself to drive hoards of new traffic to his own 6-figure income blog.

Now, what makes this video so special?

Well, normally you'd have to pay for it.

But not today...

You can watch it at no cost right now, without one of those silly optin forms - nice for a change really. I just thought I'd let you know about this powerful video, because no matter what you do online, you can never know enough about how to drive crazy amounts of traffic to your blog. Here is the link again]

Want to get an update as soon as we publish new article? I recommend you to subscribe via RSS Feed. You can also subscribe by email and have new articles sent directly to your inbox. It's absolutely free!

As we all know blogger doesn’t provide an option for 301 redirect on a page by page basis. The only option left with us is meta refresh redirect.

Say you want to redirect http://xyz.blogspot.com/2008/11/about.html to http://www.xyz.com/about/

Here is the code that you will need:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == &quot;http://xyz.blogspot.com/2008/11/about.html&quot;'>

<meta content='0;url=http://www.xyz.com/about/' http-equiv='refresh'/>

</b:if>

Some points to note:

• You need to place this code just before the head section closure ie before </head>  tag.
• Take note of spacing before and after equals to sign and also there should be two (==) and not one (=) equals to sign.
• content = 0 means. The browser will wait for 0 seconds before redirecting to another page.

Adsense below the post title is known to give good CTR(Click-Through-Ratio). Here is how you can add adsense ads below every post title, only on inner pages and except the home page of your blog. [Yes, in a safe way!]

1. Go to Dashboard > Edit HTML.
2. Click on ‘Expand Widget Templates’.
   
3. Search for <div class=’post-body’> and place your adsense code below this line.
4. This is the most important step. Inside your adsense code’s <script type=’text/javascript’> and </script> , replace every occurrence of
   • < with &lt;
   • > with &gt;
   • “ with &quot;
5. You should NOT change the < and > around script type=’text/javascript’ and /script.
6. To show your adsense only on the inner pages and not on home page, add <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;’> before the adsense code and </b:if> after the adsense code. You can also add <center> tags to center align your ads.
7. The final code should look like this.
   

Regarding code changes that I have done, no need to worry about Adsense TOS violation. I have asked my Google adsense representative and according to her as long as any page’s source shows the same code as you copied from adsense account there is no problem. You can verify this by going to your page where you have put adsense. Right click and View Source (in IE) and View Page Source (In Firefox). Of course if you want to double verify this, you can always check with your adsense rep.

For those interested in testing and knowing which ad unit would perform best for them, can refer this excellent post on A/B testing from official adsense blog.

We had released Recent Comments Widget sometime back that turned out to be an instant hit. We were overwhelmed with the responses we received. There were a lot of requests for a similar Recent Posts widget. So, today, we are releasing Recent Posts widget for BlogSpot users.

How is it different from the other Recent Posts widget?

1. The problem with other widgets is that the source code for them lies with the widget author and the authors often integrate it in within their own site. If because of some problem their site is down, the recent posts widget will not work.Here, I am releasing the source code so that the logic would reside within your blog itself and hence you can do away with dependency on 3rd party site not under your control.
2. You have a number of control and customizations options available. With this widget you have the option to show:
   1. Posts Title only.
   2. Posts Title with Date.
   3. Posts Title with excerpt.
   4. Posts Title with Date and excerpt.

Why should we use this widget when we can use you the feed option provided by blogger itself?

Well, for a number of reasons.

1. Blogger limits the recent posts to 5.
2. There are a number of customization options I have provided which you might not find with the internal blogger system.
3. [Trivia] The URL that appears in your Firefox bar (below) when you hover the mouse over the link, contains your feed URL and not the actual URL.

How to install Recent Posts widget for blogger?

1. Login to the blogger dashboard.
2. Go to ‘Page Elements’ tab
3. Click on Add a Gadget. Select HTML/JavaScript widget type.
4. Now this is the most important step. Download the corresponding code given below and paste it in the widget box you have just opened above.
   1. Right click on the button below to download code for Posts Title only.
      
   2. Right click on the button below to download code for Posts Title with Date.
      
   3. Right click on the button below to download code for Posts Title with excerpt.
      
   4. Right click on the button below to download code for Posts Title with Date and excerpt.
      
5. Scroll down to src=http://xyz.blogspot.com and replace xyz with your blog’s name. For example if your blog’s URL is http://abc.blogspot.com then the code should become src=http://abc.blogspot.com DO NOT TOUCH any other part of the code or else it might create problems.
6. You have the option to increase/decrease the number of posts displayed in your widget. Go to var numposts = 5; (3rd line from the top, in the code you have downloaded). Increase/Decrease the number of posts. By default 5 posts would be displayed.
7. If you choose to show excerpt for your posts, you have the option to increase/decrease length of the excerpt. Go to var numchars = 100; (6th line from the top, in the code you have downloaded). Increase/Decrease the number of characters. By default length is set to show 100 characters.
8. You are done! Lastly please do not remove the footer credits*.

Please let me know if you face any problem implementing the code above.

If you like the above widget. Consider donating and encourage us to come up with more such widgets.

*The code is released under the condition that footer credits should remain intact.

After a lot of dilly-dallying, finally I made up my mind to move from blogger to wordpress. With the introduction of “Import” feature in wordpress, the process has become quite simple but there are some points to take care of. Here is a step by step process how I made a shift, hope it would be useful for you too. In my case I had to move from blogger custom domain to wordpress. ie from xyz.com on blogger to xyz.com on wordpress. [This tutorial will be useful even for those who are moving from blogspot domain to your own domain on wordpress]

[We assume that you have wordpress installed on the domain you want to move to]

Change your Name Servers to point to the new webhost.

Go to your DNS settings page and point name server to your new host.
 
While registering, your webhost should have provided you with the name server info. If you are moving from custom domain name to wordpress with the same domain name, give ~ 24hrs of time for name server settings to propagate.   

Switch to blogspot.com

If you are moving from blogger custom domain (and same domain) to wordpress, read on. Otherwise skip this step.
You need to switch to blogspot.com otherwise you would not be able to complete next step.

Import all your blogger posts and comments with a click of a button.

Go to wordpress dashboard > Manage > Import. Click on blogger.

On the next page you need to key-in your blogger account details to let wordpress access your blogs. Click on Import button. Your blog posts and comments will now get imported to wordpress.

Redirection through .htaccess file.

This is one of the most important part. Proper redirection ensures that you don’t lose the old traffic and Google juice. We assume that permalinks custom structure that you would be using is /%postname%/ [btw this is one of the most SEO friendly structures] Create a .htaccess file on the new domain. 

1. If you are NOT in the habit of fiddling blogger post slug after publishing: The world would be nicer to you.
   Here is what you can do to ensure proper redirection.
   RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9A-Z_-]+) http://xyz.com/$1 
   $1 in the end takes anything that comes out of ([a-z0-9A-Z_-]+) and append to your new blog URL.
2. If you are in the habit of fiddling post slug after publishing (like me): Get ready to do some techie stuff.
   If you tend to change the post slug in blogger after publishing, the above method would simply not work for you, as it didn’t work for me. Here is what I did that ensured 100% redirection. I used one to one mapping for the URL’s. I have tried to automate this process so that it would consume minimal time of yours.

   Download and install Notepad++
   Go to blogger dashboard. Posting > Edit Posts. View Source.
   Select All and copy paste everything in notepad++ window. 
   Find http://xyz\.blogspot\.com.*" and click find all. You will see the results in a window below. Copy paste from this window into a new one.
   Find (.*)(http://xyz\.blogspot\.com.*")(.*) replace with \2
   Find " and replace with blank [ie leave the replace field blank]
   Find .*#comments and replace with blank [ie leave the replace field blank]
   Find http://xyz\.blogspot\.com  and replace with RedirectMatch permanent ^
   Now Log into phpmyadmin of your new domain. Go to SQL tab and execute this query.

SELECT post_name
FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_status = "publish"
AND post_type = "post"

 
You will get all your posts slug. Copy paste them in notepad++ window and:
Find (.*) and replace with to http://www.xyz.com\1

Hereafter you need to manually place the URL in-front of the corresponding matching URL. I know this is kind of a boring stuff but this is closest to which I could reach and have tried to automate the process as much as I was able to.

Rest of the part should be no brainer.

Change the “Let Search Engines find your blog” under blogger settings to No.

Change the original feed address in feedburner to your new blog’s feed address.

Done. Enjoy!
While I moved from blogger to wordpress I took help from this post of blogbloke.com. I found there were some points that could be improved upon hence wrote a full post on it.

Sitemap is a way to tell search engines about pages on your site that they might not otherwise discover. Google provides a way to submit sitemaps through Google Webmaster Tools. For self hosted sites submitting sitemaps is easy but for blogspot(blogger) hosted sites there is a tweak involved. If you don’t follow this tweak; either you will end up with a WARNING and/or the maximum number of URLs submitted will be shown as 26.

So, how can you submit sitemaps for a blogger hosted blog without any warnings or errors?

Suppose you have a site called abc.blogspot.com. The sitemap for this site would be: http://abc.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100 meaning simply append atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100 to your blog URL in Google Webmaster Tools > Sitemaps > Add Sitemap.

Food for the thinking mind: If you don’t include redirect=false, webmaster tools will throw warning. If you don’t include start-index=1&max-results=100, the maximum number of URLs submitted will be shown as 26, always. Remember if you have more than 100 pages on your blogspot site, you would need to include two sitemaps one having an index starting with 1 and ending with 100(start-index=1&max-results=100) and the other having an index starting with 100 and ending with 200(start-index=100&max-results=100)

Many people have contacted me asking for the blogger DMCA template I used in a recent case, so here I am disclosing the full template I used personally for one of my complaints (with my personal details removed).

***********************************************************************

Attn: Blogger Legal Support, DMCA Complaints

I own the site <yoursite.com> This is to report that the site owner of <scrapersite.com> – hereinafter referred as ‘offender’- has lifted verbatim almost the entire content of my post/website.
Please find below the DMCA notice against <scrapersite.com>.

Section 1) The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on:

<Mention all YOUR links>

Some examples to prove that the offender has copied content:

<Give some examples like Google’s cache, archive.org’s cache etc >

Below is a quick comparison of my site and offender’s site:

My Site: <yoursite.com>

1) Started in <Date>

2) Page Rank:

3) Alexa Rank:

4) RSS Subscribers:

Offender’s site <scrapersite.com>

1) Started in <Date>

2) Page Rank:

3) Alexa Rank:

4) RSS Subscribers:

Section 2) The blog posts where my copyrighted work is published on is

<Mention all SCRAPER’s links.>

Section 3)

Name:

Address:

Phone No:

Email:

Section 4) I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted material described above on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law

Section 5) I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Section 6)

<Put your signature here>

<Name>

<Date>

Fax To: (650) 618-2680, Attn: Blogger Legal Support, DMCA Complaints

***********************************************************************

Releasing the Recent Comments widget for blogspot/blogger users.

How is it different from the other Recent Comments widget?

The problem with other widgets is that the source code for them lies with the widget author and the authors often integrate it in within their own site. If because of some problem their site is down, the recent comments widget will not work.

Here, I am releasing the source code so that the logic would reside within your blog itself and hence you can do away with dependency on 3rd party site not under your control.

How to install Recent Comments widget for blogger?

1. Login to the blogger dashboard.
2. Go to ‘Page Elements’ tab
3. Click on Add a Gadget. Select HTML/Javascript widget type.
4. Now this is the most important step. Select the whole code given below and paste it in the widget box you have just opened above.

   <script style="text/javascript">
   function showrecentcomments(json) {
     var numcomments = 5;
     var showcommentdate = true;
     var showposttitle = true;
     var numchars = 100;
   for (var i = 0; i < numcomments; i++) {
       var entry = json.feed.entry[i];
       var alturl;
       if (i == json.feed.entry.length) break;
   for (var k = 0; k < entry.link.length; k++) {
         if (entry.link[k].rel == 'alternate') {
           alturl = entry.link[k].href;
           break;
         }
       }
      alturl = alturl.replace("#", "#comment-");
      var postlink = alturl.split("#");
      postlink = postlink[0];
      var linktext = postlink.split("/");
      linktext = linktext[5];
      linktext = linktext.split(".html");
      linktext = linktext[0];
      var posttitle = linktext.replace(/-/g," ");
      posttitle = posttitle.link(postlink);
      var commentdate = entry.published.$t;
      var cdyear = commentdate.substring(0,4);
      var cdmonth = commentdate.substring(5,7);
      var cdday = commentdate.substring(8,10);
      var monthnames = new Array();
      monthnames[1] = "Jan";
      monthnames[2] = "Feb";
      monthnames[3] = "Mar";
      monthnames[4] = "Apr";
      monthnames[5] = "May";
      monthnames[6] = "Jun";
      monthnames[7] = "Jul";
      monthnames[8] = "Aug";
      monthnames[9] = "Sep";
      monthnames[10] = "Oct";
      monthnames[11] = "Nov";
      monthnames[12] = "Dec";
      if ("content" in entry) {
        var comment = entry.content.$t;}
      else
      if ("summary" in entry) {
        var comment = entry.summary.$t;}
      else var comment = "";
   var re = /<\S[^>]*>/g;
      comment = comment.replace(re, "");
   document.write('<br/>');
      if (showcommentdate == true) document.write('On ' + monthnames[parseInt(cdmonth,10)] + ' ' + cdday + ' ');
   document.write('<a href="' + alturl + '">' + entry.author[0].name.$t + '</a> commented');
      if (showposttitle == true) document.write(' on ' + posttitle);
   document.write('<br/>');
   if (comment.length < numchars) {
   document.write('<i>');
            document.write(comment);
   document.write('</i>');}
      else
           {
   document.write('<i>');
            comment = comment.substring(0, numchars);
            var quoteEnd = comment.lastIndexOf(" ");
            comment = comment.substring(0, quoteEnd);
   document.write(comment + '...<a href="' + alturl + '">(more)</a>');
   document.write('</i>');}
   document.write('<br/>');
     }
   document.write('<br/>');
   }
   </script>
   <script src="http://xyz.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=json-in-script&callback=showrecentcomments">
   </script><a href="http://reviewofweb.com/blogging/recent-comments-blogspot-widget/">Widget </a>by <a href="http://reviewofweb.com/">ReviewOfWeb</a>
   

5. Scroll down to src=http://xyz.blogspot.com and replace xyz with your blog’s name. For example if your blog’s URL is http://abc.blogspot.com then the code should become src=http://abc.blogspot.com DO NOT TOUCH any other part of the code or else it might create problems.
6. You are done! Lastly please do not remove the footer credits*.

Please let me know if you face any problem implementing the code above.

If you like the above widget. Consider donating and encourage us to come up with more such widgets.

*The code is released under the condition that footer credits should remain intact.

I followed blogger’s instruction while setting up a custom domain name on blogger and was not able to set up my domain name. Luckily, while searching on the net, I hit a comment on one of the sites, followed the instruction there and it worked like charm. Here are the modified blogger instructions (in bold):

1. Log in to your account at www.godaddy.com.
2. Open the Domains tab and select My Domain Names. You’ll be directed to the Domain Manager page.
3. Click the domain that you’d like to use with your blog.
4. Click the Total DNS Control And MX Records link at the bottom of the section entitled Total DNS.
5. Select the A Name entry and delete it using X button on the right.
6. Come to CNAMES. By default Godaddy create a CNAME with host NAME as www pointing to @. Click the pencil icon on the right to edit it. Change the “Points To Host Name” to ghs.google.com. Leave other options as it is.
7. Now, Click Add New CNAME Record in the box labelled CNAMES (aliases). For the NAME enter “domain.com“[Your domain name] and for “Points To Host Name” again enter ghs.google.com. Leave the default TTL option
8. Click OK, and then click OK again.
9. Relax and give a couple of hours for DNS entry to propagate.

Note: These instructions are for those who have domain(s) registered with GoDaddy, for other Domain Name Registrars follow blogger’s instruction here.

Also, the instructions above would not work if your domain is hosted somewhere else and you wish to host a sub-domain with blogger. I mean it wouldn’t work if your domain www.domain.com is hosted at XYZ host and you want to host blog.domain.com at blogger.

Well, for the uninitiated, with the help of custom domain, blogger gives you the facility to change to a domain name of your choice. For ex: If you have www.domain.blogspot.com you can change it to www.domain.com.  With some minimal settings blogger would automatically redirect all your traffic older domain to new one.