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Posts Tagged ‘Blogger’

If you use Word to write your drafts, you’ve probably encountered formatting issues when copying them to your blog or other online posting outlets. Here’s a trick that will strip all of Word’s internal formatting and produce clean copy on your post.

Behind the text you see while creating a Word document is a set of code that contains all of the formatting information to correctly display that text. Many times when you copy and paste from Word to an online posting source, that formatting gets carried along with it. At that point, you have two choices. You can either manually remove all the Word formatting, or start the habit of saving all of your Word documents as plain .txt files.

There’s an easier way.

All blog platforms give you a text editor with two ways to enter the information.

• In Blogger, the two views are Edit HTML and Compose.
• In WordPress, they are Visual and HTML.

Pasting the contents from Word to the HTML view strips it of all formatting leaving you with a clean copy. You can simply return to the Compose or Visual mode to easily re-create any special formatting, such as words in bold or colored text or links.

One of the other tricks I’ve found helpful is to include the full URL of a link in the Word draft. That way, it will be easily available after pasting in my blog editor. It will usually look something like this:

Visit Just the FAQs (http://www.JustTheFAQs.net) for more helpful resources on blogs and websites. Be aware that on WordPress, entering a link in the HTML mode has less options than in Visual mode. Look for another blog post on that soon.

Using the HTML mode for copying lets you save your drafts as a Word document without having to create a second plain text version or manually having to remove extraneous formatting.

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One of the advantages of having a blog with Blogger is that the site can be easily monetized. Besides using Google Ads, you can now easily display affiliate items from your Amazon Associates account.

Google purchased Blogger a few years ago and shortly thereafter, Blogger added a Monetize tab to the interface, allowing you to easily include Google Ads. The new Monetize tab looks like the one below.

Notice the new Amazon Associates sub-link. Once you click it, you will be redirected to a page to either set up an Amazon Associates account, or enter your current affiliate ID. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to add a Product Finder to your blog. It allows you to search for products on Amazon and easily create links with images to post on your blog.

You can choose to have the product links appear in your post, your sidebar, or both. Blogger recommends that you choose the option to include the link in both. That way, whenever you write a new post, the product with its affiliate link will display inside the content of the post.

Adding an Amazon sidebar widget to your site has also been integrated, making it easy for you to display a product carousel or other specific categories, such as mp3 clips from music CDs carried on Amazon, an Amazon search box, and even contextual ads from Amazon that work much the same as Google Ads.

The commission rate for purchase made through your Amazon affiliate links is 15%. Depending on what you are advertising, you could make a nice side income from your blog with this new feature.

With so many bloggers switching to WordPress, both the .com and .org versions, it may seem that Blogger is a dying platform. After all, Blogger doesn’t offer a way to create static pages or upload text files. However, Blogger still has millions of users and new blogs are being created on that platform every day. They must have a reason. In fact, they have at least ten.

Reason 1: Blogger is simple. It’s quick to set up, customize, and maintain. Even novice bloggers find it easy to use.

Reason 2: It’s free. Bloggers on a budget can start an online marketing campaign without breaking the bank or hiring a site designer.

Reason 3: You can monetize the site with ads. You can’t do that on WordPress.com. That includes purchase links to your own products.

Reason 4: Search engine indexing is fast. Blogger is owned by Google. Blog posts are quickly indexed by the largest search engine in the world.

Reason 5: RSS Feed setup is simple. Blogger provides a handy widget to easily offer feeds through the number one feed provider, which is FeedBurner.

Reason 6: Use feeds to populate other sites. This is the true beauty of RSS feeds, which is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. Your blog posts can be fed to any other site on the Web. This is especially helpful if you already have an established site. With only minor coding changes, your blog posts can appear on your site. See an example.

Reason 7: Link to virtual pages. You can create virtual pages on Blogger and link to them in the sidebar. Simply create a post with the info you want to display as a virtual page. By using the text/HTML widget, you can easily create a text link to that post. Since posts are archived forever, it becomes a virtual page linked in your sidebar.

Reason 8: Widgets, widgets, widgets. Blogger comes standard with many useful widgets and there are literally thousands freely available on the Web with more being created every day.

Reason 9: Blogger is great for groups. It’s easy to set up group blogging on Blogger. This is especially helpful if you have multiple authors contributing information, such as a book review club.

Reason 10: Sharing your passion with others. Blogger is a great platform for those who want to connect with like-minded people around a particular topic. Book reviewers love Blogger because the focus is on constantly changing products centered on a certain genre, unlike authors whose focus is on one product and themselves. Reviewers don’t usually need additional pages for static content. They make great use of the sidebar to offer affiliate links for buying books, which is something they can’t do on WordPress.com.

Even though WordPress is gaining in popularity, there are still plenty of good reasons for choosing Blogger as a marketing platform. And, if you chose to switch to a WordPress site later, there are handy tools to help you export your entire Blogger site.

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