Finish reading each numbered instruction to know what's gonna happen and my notes then apply or go to the links I point you to.
1. Get your blog indexed by Google. (a) Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ . Select learn more and then sign up. (b) Then follow the guide here: http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/2007/02/submit-blogger-sitemap-to-google.html . Note: For blogspot users, only the meta tag way is applicable.
Sorry that I am telling you to make changes to your template the first thing. But that'll be water to you later anyway. Don't worry. Create a new txt file and first copy your template into your txt file for back up. In case you mess up, copy the contents back and you get your old template. Which is important to do before all the following changes too. Well, at this point, you don't have anything on your blog anyway so you can really just change a template or re-apply your template. But I'm just teaching you what is right to do :).
One more thing to note: there's an option to upgrade your blogspot template or not. I think it doesn't matter to the above procedure but I've had most fun with the upgraded (and why not ...). So do it before you set any of the complicated things up.
I was very eager to do this because I thought to myself "what kind of blog do I have if you can't even find it on google". It takes a little bit of time for google to index your site. I heard people saying something like a month. But it took less than 24 hours in my case. But when your site grow, it'll be indexed for sure. Google's more than happy to index everyone :) .
You could also submit your blog to MSN, Yahoo like indicated here:
http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/2007/09/submit-blogger-sitemap-to-msn-and.html
and here:
http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/2007/02/submit-blogger-url-sitemap-to-yahoo.html
The meta tag didn't work for me and I had to parse it. Which I will talk about later. But see if the instruction works for you.
2. add "Digg this" button. I really like digg and it is overall a decent place to attract some traffic too. I am not that good at this traffic thing and maybe you'll even be able to teach me a thing or two a few days after you've graduated from this tutorial ( :) ) but this works for most other buttons too when you find the right codes. Copying and looking at this code here http://woork.blogspot.com/2007/10/add-digg-vote-button-on-blogger.html should teach you a thing or two. There are more flexibilities. to that. The line data:post.body is the computer's compact notation of what you've written. So if you put your code after that ,the button appears at the end of each post like in my pages.
Note: Expand widget is a little box you can check above your blog template editing window. You'll need to check this extensively in the sequel. I don't know what he's talking about about "small" button. He's button is as large as mine.
3. Add "add this bookmark". This is something I recently added. I don't know how much it helps but I think it is good to have a button where people can add your blog to their favorite bookmark. Go here http://www.addthis.com/web-button-select.html . Choose whatever makes sense to you and copy the code the way you copied "digg this" code and put it whever you like as you did with digg. See, now this should look very similar to what you've done before and you're right on track.
Note: The website is temporarily unavailable. I don't know what's going on there.
4.Two sidebars. Finally, something you can play a while with and a major change of structure to your blog. I basically followed the instructions here. http://beautifulbeta.blogspot.com/2006/10/adding-second-sidebar-to-your-blog-part.html
But there's a note I want to make. Look up all the width in your blog template. You can have much bigger flexibility with that. You can change them way the way you want (and you probably need to draw a little sketch or use a calculator). But one thing I found really useful is that you don't really need to use absolute numbers in the width, you can give percentages so when you change your whole page to be 1024px wide which is my case, the parts grow proportionally.
5. The whole Shabang of Google Adsense.
There are many things to this. At this point, you should post a few posts and go to check other things out like blog catalog, blog rush, technorati, stumble upon and other stuff out. I haven't found them particularly useful but it differs and a lot of people reported sucess with these. That should entertain you for a while while I can get the stuff for Google Adsense ready. There are so much about it. So if you're interested, bookmark and come back in a week when the post will be polished about twice and you'll get a perfect tutorial to this (in this style though. If you really like to read documentation, there are tons in google adsense site and I'm sure they simply cover everything but it just takes you some time to find and figure them out.).
The reason I include this as part of the starting your blog scheme is that I don't think ads is purely beneficial to bloggers and harmful to readers as some may put it. I have my attitude here together with some other things I experienced building this blog.
One thing bad about this code is that it's too dependent. You use someone else's javascript as you can read from the code (There's an link.). When you have your own site, you can find or write the javascript and upload it to your own permanent address and you'll be self sufficient.
7. After 2 days of trying, I am finally able to add the "related posts of mine" section to the end of each post.
Here's how to do it:
http://paulsdigitalworld.blogspot.com/2007/11/blogger-adding-related-posts-to-post.html
No comments:
Post a Comment