Have You Found Your Niche?

Most professional Bloggers will tell you that you need to find your niche, there is no point just being another money making blog these days because although you can make beer money like this you probably won't hit it big unless you are extremely good.

The fact is that there is just too much competition, if you want to make a business out of your blog or website you need to carve yourself a niche where you don't have every man and his dog fighting for the same revenue.

For myself I have been trying to work out where to aim for my niche for a long time, and as I always like to share whats been going on here are some of things I have been thinking about whilst trying to find my little market segment.

Find something that you can be passionate about
This is very important, if you have a blog that you cannot put your all into then you are going to struggle long term to continue creating quality content for it. If you are passionate about something however it is not a chore - its enjoyable and rewarding.

Use what you have learned so far
Your existing sites and blogs have likely taught you a great deal, from SEO to marketing. I know for myself its been a crash course in Internet Marketing for me over the last year or two. When you are ready to get serious you need to draw on all this experience and bring it into play.

You MUST get your own domain and hosting
Even if you started making thousands of dollars out of your Blogspot blog, its important to realize that you don't own it. Blogger could simply shut you down and suddenly you would have nothing and have to start from scratch. This could conceivable be years of hard work down the drain and its to valuable to risk so you really need to get your own domain going on.

Be professional
Its easy to fill your site up with adverts and affiliate links, but when you find the niche that you want to make into a long term and stable business I think you need to start out concentrating on content and take it easy on the monetizing at least in the short term.

There are thousands of niches that are yet to be filled, whether its you or someone else that does it thousands and thousands of dollars will be made over the years to come. So many ways exist to monetize a popular site that given a certain level of decent traffic it is just a matter of trying different methods to earn the best income that you can from it - as well as providing the best quality of content to your site visitors.

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Is a Blog a Business?

For some a Blog is a diary online to record what they have been up to, for others it is their main job and income. Then there is the rest of us who sit somewhere between the two. We don't make enough money to survive solely on our Blogging income however you could hardly call us diary bloggers.

What are you actually selling?
Traffic is a blogs main product, its like a TV channel - you are not going to get any advertising unless the programmes are interesting and have people watching them. Once you get the traffic levels up to a few hundred visitors a day all kinds of doors start to open.

Cash flow
Running a Blog or any Internet business requires management of cash flow, there are expenses to take care of plus with any luck an influx of payments coming in. The kind of expenses that would be typical of a blog or website include...

• Domain Renewal Fees
  


• Hosting Fees
  


• Marketing/Advertising Costs
  


• Development Costs

Customer Service
As with any business the state of your customer service could well have an impact on your business. This can include the way that you deal with and process enquiries from advertisers, what kind of deals you can do for them and the build up of goodwill is important as well.

Startup Costs
A blogging business can be very economical to begin with, even with hosting and a domain name it is possible to get going for under $100 (or even for free for a hosted blog like blogspot) . A certain amount of knowledge is necessary to do this however as far as building a money making Internet business goes, this is certainly not expensive.

Word of Mouth
Like any business the best form of advertising is word of mouth, in the cyberage of course this type of viral advertising is seldom the spoken kind, however if you happen to get linked to by some of the A-List or popular Bloggers out there you can certainly get inundated with traffic.

Overall Blogging is very much a Business for many, however kudos to those that blog simply for the pleasure of sharing their lives or passions with the rest of world. I do think however it is possible to enjoy yourself and earn a few bucks at the same time. Only by doing sponsored posts and having LOTS of advertising have we managed to afford our new HO in Auckland City below.

Million Dollar Experiment Head Office in Auckland City

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Blog Mastermind - Free EBook

For weeks I have been waiting in eager anticipation for the launch of Yaro Staraks Blog Mastermind Program. He is going to show Bloggers how to make a full time living from Blogging part time and I will be joining his program as I believe it is an investment in my future. Yaro is giving away a free 55 page Ebook as part of promoting the launch of his site and I highly recommend that you download it. I have been following Yaro's Blog for months and have found incredible value in just about everything he has ever written about blogging.

The Free Ebook

Let me Take You 'Behind The Scenes' Of My Blogging Empire And I'll Show You How I make a Full Time Income Blogging Part Time...

Click here to download the Blog Profits Blueprint

The Blog Mastermind Programme
The Blog Mastermind Programme includes special e-lessons, pod casts and other material that will help you turn your part time blogging ventures into a full time money making machine. Yaro has been there and done it, and will share his methods with you and assist you along the path. Member only forums are provided where you can ask Yaro questions specific to your situation and I intend to make full use of this medium.

The Blog Mastermind Programme launches next week, Yaro talks more about it in the video clip at the end of the E-Book if you are interested in learning more - or check out the Blog Mastermind Site.

About Yaro
Yaro is a young entrepreneur from
Australia and currently makes several thousand dollars a month from his Blog site. He has created managed and sold several Internet business's since 1998 so has a wealth of experience and knowledge which he shares both via his blog and in depth with the pupils of his Blog Mastermind program.

How to Increase your Opportunities in PayPerPost

Lately every time I have been into PayPerPost there has only been about one opportunity available to me - this is a bit of a concern as in about a week I am cutting down to full time work of only 3 days a week so I need to get my hands on every extra dollar that I can.

The reason I am cutting down on my full time work is primarily so that I can spend more time with my young family. They are only little kids for a very brief snapshot of time so I want to make the most of it.

Anyway I have another Blog which doesn't really do much and it has its own domain and is a wordpress blog. The blog is www.sirblogger.com so I thought that as that is now over 90 days and has a pagerank of 3 I would submit it to PayPerPost and see how things were looking. The main reason I thought that I was not getting many offers was the fact that this site is on a blogspot domain and a lot of advertisers don't seem that keen on that.

My Sir Blogger site was approved today and I eagerly logged into PPP and as suspected the amount of available opportunities had jumped from 1 to 34! This was great I quickly did a sponsored post on my Sir Blogger site and the checked some settings and noticed that this site did not have even one category selected - this was the primary reason that I only had one available opportunity. Anyway I selected a couple of relevant categories and now I suddenly have 48 available opportunities.

Things are looking up - so if you have a similar issue log in and check that you have suitable categories selected for your site. Also it can pay to install the PPP tools as some advertisers require that.

Or stop delaying and get that domain name and wordpress blog underway - it will start paying for itself in no time at all!

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Will you conquer the Mountain?

Blogging for money is as much about persistence as it is street smarts. You are never going to make it unless you are absolutely committed to achieving your goals and I am going to give you some examples of committed Bloggers so that you can see what I mean. These are the bloggers that you could be modelling yourself on if you want to be successful in the pursuit of making money online.

At the end of the day when it comes to being known about in the blogosphere and the search engines often the quantity and consistency is as important if not more than the actual quality of the writing itself.

Mikes Money Making Mission - Mike is Mr Consistent, he averages almost 30 quality posts a month and his site continues to grow. Mikes been around long enough to know how to stick to something and I can see him already well on his way up the mountain.

Make Money Online Kumiko's CashQuest - Kumiko is also a consistent Blogger and has written some great posts. She has now recently changed to her own domain name and is doing a great job of minimizing the hit that her rankings could of taken by doing this.

Dosh Dosh - Maki is a Star when it comes to pumping out quality articles one after the other and they never appear to be sponsored ones either. I just checked out Maki's alexa ranking and its in the top 12,000 sites in the world. Awesome.

Lets look at what it takes to be like them, then you can just replicate what they do and experience the same success.

Consistent Posts
All the above Bloggers are consistent posters, this means that several times a week new articles are appearing on their sites. (except for Mikes recent two week holiday - haven't you heard of guest bloggers Mike!)

Analysis
These Bloggers know about key words, how to get traffic and analyze whats going on with their sites. Without knowing where you have been so far and where you are going you might as well be blind folded.

Targets/Goals
You need to set yourself goals if you are going to have any chance of reaching them. I myself have daily goals, weekly and of course monthly goals. Its a great feeling of accomplishment to achieve your goals. Do you think these bloggers have goals - I am sure they do, they might not always broadcast it but they will be there.

Planning
You need to plan out your week, I have some sites I post weekly on, some almost daily and other tasks that need doing like backing up, writing sponsored posts etc. Each day I have a plan of what I need to do and try to get that out of the way before I start surfing and seeing what everyone else is up to. I know that if I work to my plan I will reach my goals - if I slack off I probably won't. My guess is that the blogs I mentioned previously also have a plan that they work to. When Kumiko decided to get a new domain name she didn't just go and get one and start a new blog she worked out how best to get everyone to change their links, worked out the best way to create buzz about it and made the transition a very smooth one.

Versatility
Although planning and staying on task is important you also need to be able to react or act quickly to any opportunities that come up. Don't plan your day so much that you don't have a bit of breathing space to take on new things.

Continued Learning
Ongoing learning is also what I would consider to be an important ingredient for the successful climbing of the virtual mountain. You need to stay on top of blogging trends, technology and whats going on out there. New ways of making money are always appearing and unfortunately if you snooze you can lose.

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Make Faster Money with Auction Ads

To improve the fresh look of the Auction Ads that you are running on your site it is a good idea to include multiple keywords in the code. This means that each page view will cycle through a different keyword and display a different set of Auction Ads each time.

I keep trying different things with my Auction Ads because although I get a number of click throughs the money earned is very small to date. Maybe this is just not the right place for them what are your thoughts? Have you tried Auction Ads and had any success?

I have a couple of niche sites selling used products that I am hoping to see some results on however its early days yet so hard to tell whats going to happen.

How to add multiple Keywords in your Auction Ad code
To actually implement what we are talking about all you need to do is chose your list of keywords and insert it into your keyword tag line within your AuctionAds javascript.

For example:
auctionads_ad_kw = “cars; motorbikes; Americas Cup; Make Money Fast Books; cowboy hats”;

Its not hard to do as you can probably see and definetly worth a shot. Visitors that return to your site on a regular basis will be pleased to see a different array of adverts and less inclined to become blind to them.

As an additional promotion that Auction Ads are running at the moment is a ten challenge where they would like you to give the Auction Ads a trial run for the next ten days. As an added incentive they will pay you 5 dollars as an incentive to give it a go. (new signups only). So if you want to earn an easy 5 dollars I suggest you head along to Auction Ads and give it a shot.

Good Luck!

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Degrees of Monetization – Its not a Crime

A lot of Bloggers monetize their sites one way or another – and there seems to be a lot of discussion that goes around about what is an acceptable level of monetization and what is to much.

Well I guess it is really up to the individual – as remember no matter what anyone says it’s a free world out there (well most of it anyway). So if you want to fill your Blog up with Sponsored Posts go right ahead, and give yourself a pat on the back for your entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe you are going about it the wrong way however who really knows unless they are some kind of fortune teller.

If you get bagged for it check out the baggers site – do they have any form of advertising? Maybe a swapped link or two? Well its all about degrees and I don’t think that anyone is really qualified to draw the line – do you?

Is there like a Blogger panel of Judges that you can get to visit your site and give you the big thumbs up? And if there was do you think that by giving them a free link on your page rank 6 site they could be perhaps swayed a bit?

Maybe 5 sponsored posts is ok a month but 6 isn’t? or 4 are if they are related to your blog in some bizarre way? I don’t think there is a rule book out there so you might as well make up your own – or simply do whatever you want.

Come on – I think most of us like to make a few bucks and as long as we are not hurting anyone lets do it. If of course you don’t want to make money that’s fine to.

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Google Pagerank Competition - Winners are Grinners

Last month I entered a competition to predict the Page Rank of Kumiko's website. As you have probably heard by now Kumiko ended up getting a pagerank of 5 which happened to be exactly what I predicted. I was fortunate enough to be chosen by her to be the winner of the grand prize which was $30 US dollars as well as the chance to write a post on her site about whatever I choose.

How did you know it would be a 5
I was fairly certain that it would be a 5 because of the amount of sites that were linking to Kumiko and the popularity of her site. This site got a rank of 4 after only a couple of months and with the extra links that Kumiko has got I suspected she would be going one better.

What are you going to do with the Money
To be honest I don't really feel that comfortable accepting the money from Kumiko, she has already paid me via paypal and its very much appreciated. It just doesn't sit right to keep the money especially when she is the top referrer of traffic to my site! What I have decided to do is to donate the entire amount of 30 US dollars to charity and I will post proof of that on this site once I have done so. So don't worry Kumiko its going to a good cause and will not end up in my beer fridge! On that subject if anyone knows of a worthy International Charity that accepts paypal please let me know via a comment. Only reputable Charities please its not going to the donation box of another blogger!

What are you going to write about on her site
I have never really guest blogged on another site before so want this to be something special. Kumiko has kindly given me as much time as I like so I am going to take my time and try and write something really worthwhile.

What a fantastic start to May - Its going to be a great month I can tell!

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Making Money Fast - How this Blog is Doing it

Firstly some background, 7 or so months ago I started an exponential growth experiment with the end goal of earning 1 Million NZ dollars online. In the first month I earned $36 US dollars and by using an exponential formula realised that by increasing by 20 percent a month after 30 months of doing this I would be pulling in a whopping 7000 US dollars a month and be well on my to achieving my goal.

I work full time and are studying a Degree at University part time, also to top if off I have a young demanding family. Having no time is not an excuse - it is a cop out. This has to date been as much about time management as it has been about making money however I am pleased to say that after 7 months we are not only on track but literally blowing the targets out of the water.

For April the Million Dollar Experiment Down under has really ramped up - we have pulled out all stops in an effort to start proving exactly how much money can be made online. We are trying to Make Money Fast - no more dreaming about how much might be made - the readers of this site want to know whether they can do it to - and there's now enough content on this site to give you a plan to follow. Within the next couple of weeks I am putting together a chain of articles from previous posts that will help you get to where I am - faster as you can learn from my mistakes.

My tally so far this month is already over $250 US and we still have a couple of days to go. last month as a comparison we made $129 US Dollars - its pretty goddamn exciting as the dream starts to materialize.

Here's a glimpse of this months graph, more details will be in the month end summary in a couple of days with a breakdown of active vs passive as well as key realizations that have been made in recent weeks that have really started to help especially in regards to search engine optimization.

Good luck with your own endeavours, if you have any questions about how I am doing it feel free to ask by leaving a comment. You may want to subscribe so that you don't miss some great updates over the next couple of weeks.

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What is a Blog ?

We all can easily find out the dictionary meaning of a Blog by heading to a site like Wikipedia and typing in "What is a Blog" but does that really describe it. I think if you asked 10 different people they would all probably answer it differently.

Source: wikipedia

A blog (short for web log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

That's how they describe a Blog and I guess in its simplest form its correct however here is what a Blog is to me.

1. Something to do when I am bored
I don't know how people survived before the Internet, and I am not sure how I used to spend my time before I started Blogging.

2. A way to communicate
I've got a lot of stuff to say, I have recently discovered, what better way than to launch it into cyberspace and tell the world.

3. Another method of making some money
Its starting to become possible to make a few bucks and sometimes more out of a Blog. This month this Blog alone will have earned me around $200 dollars and that's pretty good money for doing something that you enjoy. Most hobbies you have to pay for - this one pays me!

4. An experimental Platform
I use this blog as an experimental platform and have picked up many valuable skills that I can use on my other Websites. There is nothing like having a blog and trying to increase its popularity for giving you a good grounding in SEO and Internet Marketing Skills.

5. A place to Advertise
I shamelessly use this Blog to Advertise my other websites - sorry!

6. A place to store all your digital photos
Obviously not this site, however I do have a blog where I just post photos of the kids, its an online photo album that I can share with everyone or anyone.

7. Somewhere I can improve my writing skills
I am really starting to enjoy writing articles and something must be working because when I do a spell check these days there is rarely a mistake - my writing and spelling must be improving all the time.

Well that's all for now - what is a Blog to you? It would be great to hear your perspective.

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How to add a Favicon to your Website or Blog

Have you ever seen the little icons that some sites have in the address bar and wished that you could have one for your website or Blog? Well now you can. This article will explain how to create a Favicon easily online and how to add it to your website or Blog. We also have a special set of instructions for Blogspot (Blogger) blogs.

How to create a Favicon
Firstly you need to create the little .ico file that will be used on your site. I have a favourite online site that I use for simple text favicons and that is what we will use today. Of course you can also create your own graphic and use that instead.

Head to the site Favicon Generator and enter the text or initials that you would like to use. Of course space is an issue however for our favicon we are going to use One at the top and Mill at the bottom. For the border and the background we will use the colours from this blog. (to get the colours from your website or blog it is very simple if you use the colorzilla plugin for Firefox. )

Have entered the words, just need to add the colors

Now with the colorzilla firefox plugin it is just a matter of hovering the mouse over a color on your page and it will tell you the html code for it - very cool tool. Once I have added the colors it is now time to download the favicon.ico file and I will just save it on my desktop for now. It is important to rename the file before or after you save it otherwise it will not work on some sites that already have a favicon.ico file. I am going to call mine onemill.ico

Applying the color combinations to the favicon.

Ok if you have followed the process so far you now have a little ico file saved on your computer. Now there are two sets of instructions, first set is for those with a regular hosted website where they can upload this file via ftp to their site.

Regular Website or Blog - Hosted on your own Domain
Using your ftp or file transfer program transfer the favicon.ico file to the root directory. Now on every page that you wish the favicon to show (normally included in the header file for your pages) add the following code. This should be directly after the head tag. (favicon.ico should be replaced with whatever you called your ico file. If it is your own domain the name favicon.ico may also work ok.

Blogger/Blogspot Hosted Blog
If you have a blogspot blog like I do we need to first find a home to host our favicon icon. I use the http://pages.google.com option because its free fast and easy. Head to the site manager and upload your favicon. My address for my favicon is http://robstgeorge.googlepages.com/onemill.ico . Now we need to dig into our Blog template and add the code that will point to this file that we have uploaded.

If you prefer to cut and paste here it is, however you will need to remove the spaces around the <> signs.

< href="'http://robstgeorge.googlepages.com/onemill.ico'" rel="'shortcut">
< href="'http://robstgeorge.googlepages.com/onemill.ico'" rel="'icon'/">

Now after you saved that you can refresh your browser and chances are you may not yet see it! Favicons are funny things and if a new visitor arrives at your site, they will see it, however you may need to remove any bookmarks you have to the site and clear any caching of temporary internet files before you can see it. You may want to try it on another computer or another browser just to check your work.

The finished sample...

I hope you found this tutorial of value, please feel free to link to it if you would like to share it with the readers of your blog. You can subscribe with the link below if you would like regular articles like this sent direct to your email account.

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Make Money Fast by writing "How To" Articles

In the last month or so I have written a few How To articles including...

• Blogspot Title Tags how to Remove Blog Name from the Beginning


• Setting Up an Advertising Page for your Site


• Blog Makeover - Adding another Column how hard can it be?


• The Secret of making Paid Posts less intrusive on your site

These are great for picking up search engine traffic. There are a number of Bloggers out there who are looking at improving their blogs and they will type their question into Google. If you have written an article about it chances are that your blog will show up.

Also this is a good way of working away on improving your sites, and by documenting it you can create great content at the same time.

Content = Traffic

Traffic = Money

One way to find great search engine ideas for a "How To" article is to use the Digital Point Keyword suggestion Tool and Type in "How To"

Now are you as surprised as me that 830 people a day are searching for the phrase "How to tie a tie" , I am embarrassed to admit to you how close to writing that very article I was! However even I had to admit that it would be a struggle to even distantly relate that to this website.

There are also 164 people a day asking "How to Kiss" and believe it or not 22 people a day asking "how to lose a guy in ten days" is that some kind of aspiration?

Of course with the Digital Point Keyword suggestion tool, you can also choose which country you want to search on.

When I tried the same search on Netherlands it became apparent that they have some kind of Pet Problem... why else would 21 people every day be typing in "How to clean pet urine".

When you are a Kiwi like me, we love to make fun of Australians. (also we like beating them in sport) so last but not least I wondered what Australians were looking for in the "How To" section.

Surprisingly Australians don't even seem to be asking this question except for one or 2 a day. However one question did pop up more than once a day and this was "How to last longer in Bed" !!

If you don't believe me go and check it out yourself. Keyword Suggestion Tool

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Make Money Fast - An experiment in Choosing Words

Previously we have looked at tools that show the popularity of certain keywords. What you can do is ideally try and find a set of key words that are popular yet don't have every man and his dog trying to optimize their sites for it - then start to build them into the content of your site, plus hopefully get people to link to your site with the keywords as the anchor text.

I have decided to try a little experiment that will hopefully make money fast for me at the same time - firstly lets go and check out our new phrase on the Overture Keyword selector tool to determine how popular it is - have you guessed what three words I am using yet?

And remember these keyword results are just from yahoo, so we can probably multiply it by 3 to get a more relevant picture of how many people are searching for these words.

Now we need to do a search on Google and see how many results one gets for carrying out a search such as this. Quite a few 47,200,000 actually.

However what I liked about this is that the first page of sites didn't really look that intimidating, and by that I mean there is for example an ezine article, a wikipedia article and a couple of lame looking sites. Not really a site dedicated to the art of Making Money Fast which is probably all it would take to get up there.

So just to recap we have found some reasonably popular words , and we have done a search on Google and theres millions of page results which makes the task a challenging one.

Now the next thing we need to do is track our progress. We need to know where our site currently ranks for this term. Then we are going to keep checking back and rate our progress.

For this head to Google Rankings (note you will need to get your Google API key first ) and lets see where currently the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under ranks for the key words "Make Money Fast" ....

As you can see currently we are not ranking for these terms at all, so this will be an interesting task to see how long it takes.

Of course if you would like to assist and link to this article it would certainly be appreciated.

Good luck, let me know how you get on and where you rank for your chosen terms, please think of your own terms however - we don't want to be fighting over the same words!

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The Blog Traffic Challenge - Lets get ready to Rumble!!!

On the 18th March I joined the Blog Traffic Challenge over at the Can I Make Big Money Online website. The plan is that you clearly state that you wish to double the traffic to your blog over the next 3 months and then set about achieving that goal.

Now George who instigated the challenge has managed to achieve it in 4 weeks, this is a fantastic result and should be an inspiration to the rest of the participants - who are listed on this Squidoo Page.

I decided for my own challenge that I would look at the total traffic for March, and then try and double this by June. Here is the graph of my visits in March. An average of 43.58 which isn't that great really considering the time this site has been going. (hence why I am doing this challenge!)

Below are the methods that I have been using...

Posting articles more regularly
The more articles that you post - theoretically this should convert to more numbers.

Visiting other sites more often, and leaving comments and participating in things going on.
I often say you have to give before you will receive, so following this formula I try to get around as many sites as I have time for, see whats going on and comment accordingly. Also its important to participate in challenges or memes, or whatever is going down at the time.

Doing more sponsored posts
Hah - you think I'm crazy, well not so, this blog is about making money remember, when you see this months results it will start to become apparent as to why doing more sponsored posts could help raise the traffic to this site. People want to know how much money can be made from a blog - and I plan to show them.

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Can I remove the NavBar or not?

I have often thought about removing the navbar from the top of this site, however the jury is still out as to whether that would violate any terms and conditions from blogger.com.

I thought I would try and settle the question once and for all - so lets check it out. First of all a search of Blogger Help has this to say...

Unless you publish your blog via FTP, the Navbar cannot be disabled.

Well you might think that is fairly cut and dry however the confusing thing is that it is not worded very well and is open to mis-interpretation because it says that the Navbar cannot be disabled whereas it can very easily be disabled. Check this post out by Kumiko for specifics on hiding it if you are that brave.

A search of Google whilst by no means definitive would normally show up anyone that had been banned for removing it and I can find noone although lots of people seem to talk about whether or not it is against the blogger.com terms of service.

So in summary if decide to remove it and you got banned it would likely be the first case, so it is unlikely. However it would be nice if Blogger.com could clarify the simple question... Can we remove our Navbars or not?

Another question you may want to ask yourself is that as Blogger.com are letting you host your blog on their servers for no cost at all , and don't really smother your site in any advertising whatsover, isn't only fair that you display a small Navigation bar at the top that lets people search your blog and others? Also it makes it easy to log into the admin panel of your site.

My suggestion is leave the Navbar, Blogspots been good to me - if someone doesnt want to view my site because of it thats to bad.

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Blog Makeover - Adding another Column how hard can it be?

Its time to beef up the screen real estate of this blog, one way of doing this would be to add another column to the left of the Blog and maximize it for larger screens.

As a help for other bloggers that want to do this, I will document the process as I go. So far this Blog site just uses the basic Rounders template along with a customized header - which I unfortunately did not document when I modified. (there are however plenty of tutorials on the net for changing the header on Blogspot templates, just do a simple search)

I'm going to use Kumikos tutorial Hacking Blogger Beta: Building a Three Column Template, Removing the Navbar and Adding a Picture to the Header as a basis for this change. Why? Because shes cool and her blogs still in one piece after adding a column to it!

Grab yourself a cold drink, block out any interruptions for the next 30 mins 60 mins and lets do it!

Step 1 - Backup your template.
The first thing to do is backup your template, at least then if you stuff it up with a bit of luck it will be possible to resurrect your site before you started messing with it!

To do this go into the settings of your blog, click on Edit HTML then Download Full Template

Step 2 - Find the current sidebar and create your new bar from it.
Following on Kumikos tutorial we now need to find text similar to this. Mine is slightly different to the text on her site, and depending on your template it may be different as well, but it should say something like...

#sidebar-wrap

{
width:240px; float:right;
margin:15px 0 0;
font-size:97%;
line-height:1.5em;
word-wrap: break-word;
/* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow:
hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE
sidebar float */
}

We now need to copy this code, change it a little to reflect the new name and float position of our left hand sidebar. If you just want to copy and paste here is the new code.

#leftsidebar-wrap
{
width:240px;
float:left;
margin:15px 0 0;
Font-size:97%;
line-height:1.5em;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for
long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long
non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}

Step 3 - Widen the width of the site
Now currently the site is set to a width of 740px, we know that the other sidebar is 240 px, and the main wrap is set to 485px. What we do here is subtract 485 from 740 and we are left with 255px, this is what we want to widen the site by - below is the new code if you want to copy it and paste over the existing.

#outer-wrapper
{
width:955px;
margin:0 auto;
text-align:left;
font: $bodyFont;
}

Step 4 - Now add the Div settings into the code
You can simply paste this above the existing main-wrap code.... you will need to edit the widget id or remove it all together to add your own.

<div id="'leftsidebar-wrap'"><br /><div id="sidebartop-wrap"><div id="'sidebartop-wrap2'"><br /><!--xml:namespace prefix = b /--><b:section class="sidebar" id="leftsidebartop"><b:widget id="HTML8" title="Bloggers Toolkit" type="HTML" locked="false"></b:widget></b:section><br /></div></div><br /></div>

This was a bit more difficult than I expected and for a while there I had big gaps and a sidebar that was about 4 foot off the bottom of my screen! But this kind of stuff always happens when you mess with templates, so you just need to be patient and keep working away at it, and if all else fails restore from backup.

The End Result
Here is our 3 column rounders template! If you try this yourself and have any grief, I cannot promise to help you but will give it a shot so feel free to ask any questions.

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Don't Come Monday - Your a Blogger and YOUR FIRED

There have been a number of bloggers that have been fired for expressing their views on their Blogs! The most newsworthy ones are..

Michael Hanscom gets sacked for Posting an article along with a picture taken on the Microsoft Campus where he worked - Sacked. The original article is here Even Microsoft wants G5s and shows a bunch of Macs being unloaded at Microsoft!

Mark Jen was a blogger who being a new employee at Google started blogging about his experiences at the company, he ended up leaving the company however there seems to be some discussion over whether or not it was under duress. Why don't you read the official story, straight from the source

Ellen Simonetti was sacked from her job as a flight attendant after posting photos of her posing in her Flight Attendants uniform you can read her story here.. I was fired for blogging it looks like Ellen ended up filing a sexual discrimination case after finding plenty of pictures out there of Male Flight Attendants in their uniforms, shes concerned as you would be I guess that she was singled out.

Catherine Sanderson is a 33 year old British Secretary that lives in Paris, she had a personal anonymous Blog and over time became more relaxed about what she was posting on it.

"I didn't name my employers and I didn't name their profession ... I don't think I felt that they were identifiable,"

Catherine is now suing her former employers - you can read the full article virtually famous.

Well what can we learn from this lot - I think its got to the stage where you really need to be very careful to leave your employer out of your blog altogether, you never know what might be interpreted as unacceptable so its best to err on the side of caution!

From an employers point of view it would be wise to be very careful before sacking a blogger - both for the negative publicity that it could and can create. Also the fact that they may sue you!

I hope you enjoyed reading about these as much as I did.

Rob

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What does a John Chow review mean to your site stats?

Note 19-March-2007 this post has been updated with the latest stats from the harpzon.com blog, hence the "bump" on my site - we have taken another look to see how Mitch is going a couple of weeks after the John Chow review....

I was visiting one of the (many) sites that John Chow has recently done a review on and noticed a sitemeter link down the bottom of the page so thought I would have a look. The answer to the question is quite a lot!

It would be interesting to return back in a couple of weeks to see how many continue to visit the site. Reading the Harpzon.com blog was quite interesting, sounds like a switched on guy. His Blog is only new however is worth a visit.

Update 19- March-2007 Mitch does a guest blog post for John Chow, so I thought it was worth a revisit to his site meter stats, to see how the ongoing visits were looking.

The results are a credit to Mitch really, obviously he is supplying enough content to keep the readers coming back, and has in less than a month scored a great reader base for his blog - looking solid dude keep up the good work!

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Free Blog reviews going at the Our Blog Review website

Our Blog Review is a new site run by the Hockey Crazy Greg Stratz. If you are looking at promoting your blog it can be a good idea to submit it to a site like this where it will get reviewed for free (at worst you are going to get a link to your site).

Greg has been kind enough to answer the following questions for us about his new site.

In a nutshell Greg - whats the idea behind the Blog Review site and how did you come up with it?

The Site Our Blog Review is a site where you can submit your blog or site that you want to try to create some buzz for. You submit your blog, by doing that you will get at least one link-back to your site from ours, helping out your Technorati ratings. We would like it if you mention us in your blog and or give us a return link but if you choose not to we will still gladly review your blog or site. I was just searching for blogs one day and was not happy with the "other directories" "review sites" out there so I kinda took some general idea's from some and incorporated my own. of course I think if I was able to build good websites Our blog Review would look a lot different then it does now.

How many Blogs have you reviewed to date?

Right now we have about 20 full reviews up on the site. Also all the reviews in our directory have a mini review of them as well. Right now I am working on to make it easier to find the full reviews of all the blogs we have. It might mean the elimination of the mini reviews.

What kind of traffic are you getting on the site?

Sunday's have been our most popular day so far which we get between 100-200 visitors. Friday, Saturday and Monday's Are a little behind Sunday and have been averaging 50-100 with the rest of the week days averaging 30+ visitors. But remember this site has only been up for less than a month and the average visits have increased every week so who knows what the average will be next week.

Tell us a bit about the other reviewers, how did they end up being part of your team?

The review team we have is quite unique. We have Rachel, Sid, and John helping me review the blogs we receive. Basically they found Our Blog Review and and saw that I am looking for people to help review blogs. In return right now I can offer free publicity for there own sites and link-backs to them as well.

Future plans/ideas about the site?

Right now I am working on making it easier to find the full reviews of the blogs and most likely create a list of them in there category instead of having mini reviews. Thus making it easier for people to find a blog. I would also kinda like it to morph in to a hybrid review/personal blog type site with lots of visitor participation. Possibly create a Our Blog Review store.

Some things about you Greg, where do you live whats all the fuss about hockey and what team do you play for?

I live in Vancouver Canada right now. I have duel citizenship with Australia ( by decent) As for hockey I love playing it, right now I have been getting back into it playing beer league hockey out of 8 rinks in Burnaby. Will be playing spring hockey this spring/summer for the first time so that should also be fun. I played is as a youngster till juvenile ( which is equivalent to junior B teams in the east coast ) I was too small (size wise) for the old NHL but since they changed the rules last 2 years I could have had a shot at the big time since I am extremely fast.

Greg has a personal blog which gets updated sometimes. http://www.gregstratz.blogspot.com/ he is 26 years old and hates working like the rest of us. If you are looking for some free publicity for your blog why not stop by www.ourblogreview.com and submit your site.

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


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Motivation - Or Lack of it - Is there a cure for Laziness?

Often I find it very hard to motivate myself to work on my sites and write articles etc.. I tend to waste away precious time reading other articles about blogging and making money online instead of concentrating on getting my own backyard in order.

I am curious to know if this is a problem that other blogger/online money makers have or am I just lazy? Lately I have been writing task lists for myself that include backup this website, post an article on this blog today and things like that. It seems to help a bit and I feel so much better when I have made a decent contribution to one or more of my sites.

At the moment I have the added task of studying... I have this theory that ( I am studying extramurally) instead of spending hours going through the course materials like a normal person probably would - I spend what little time I have working hard out on the assignments as they tend to cover what is in the course material anyway - then I just have to do a last minute cram for the exam and can normally wing it!

Unfortunately I left school at a young age, so maybe if I had put in a bit more effort back then I would not be faced with studying now - but better late than never.

Anyway I guess its a bit of a weird post - but what I would really like to know is that if you are reading this article, please share how you motivate yourself (if you need to!) and do you have similar issues with getting sidetracked and wasting time.

Thanks and hopefully we can share some good tips for lazy bones people like myself!

Top Five Referrers For February - Great sites that are worth a visit!
1. Kumiko's Cash Quest
2. Mike's Money Making Mission
3. Stratz's Blog
4. If Ya Want to Make Money
5. How to earn money online?


Visit Curry Focus for Free Delicious Recipes