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Blogger keeps adding new widgets (=gadgets) to its collection. We discovered a gadget that keeps one of your important posts on top. This feature was already there in Wordpress but was sorely missed on Blogger. This gadget allows you to put a title and show image if you like. You can put this gadget anywhere on the blog - top, bottom or sidebar. The Featured Post gadget is highly customizable. If you want to put the featured post on top of the blog, be sure that its image is not too small (it will pixellate as it'll try to fill the width of the blog) or too tall (it will push all your contend too much down). Or you can think not to include image in the widget. Also keep in mind that if you select the latest post as the featured post, it will show up near the post - you will have two versions of the same post near each other. Other useful but uncommon widgets on blogger If you have a blog on Blogger, we hope that you have had a look at major gadgets already. Howeve...

The terms 'omnichannel' is in vogue in marketing circles these days. But don't be unnerved by the jargon; it just refers to multi-channel retailing of products with emphasis on integration among the channels. The channels could be offline (e.g. store) as well as online (e.g. website). Omnichannel and blogging?? We'd try to answer two questions that might arise about omnichannel in the context of blogging:  Why and how does omnichannel matter to bloggers? How does a blog fit in retail omnichannel concept? Omnichannel matters immensely if you are using the blog to sell something - a product or service. That would also include a book blog, a review blog, a photography blog that also offers photos on payment. If you are not into marketing, it matters less but improves your understanding about growing the influence of your personal brand, and helps you grow your reputation and influence on the web. This in turn will surely result in better professional ne...

Updated: July 2020  Are you facing issues relating to Google AdSense sign up? Read on... AdSense pays. It pays rather well to bloggers if things are done right. Of course there are many factors that impact the amount of money that you can make from AdSense. We have talked about that in a separate post. Of late, AdSense requests seem to be getting rejected in higher numbers than before, mostly because of laziness on the part of the blogger or his greed to get rich overnight by earning from the blog. We have seen comments on the web that new bloggers cannot get AdSense accounts approved, Google does not approve blogs on free platforms, etc etc. By our experience with blogging and through discussions with bloggers, we are sure that for an ethical and hard-working blogger, there is nothing to worry and AdSense remains one of the easiest and sure-shot methods to earn from blogging.  However, it is always better to take precautions so that the chances of success increase. Let'...

Updated: October 2020 We keep surfing the web, sometimes more often than a common blogger because we are in the 'business' of bringing blogging tips and tricks to new bloggers and compiling blog directories. Features you look for in blogging platforms. When you search on Google for ' how to start a blog ', you get 1.39 billion webpages. Search for ' Wordpress vs Blogger ', and you still get 141 million results! Show, how much has been written already on starting a blog and comparing the two most popular free blogging platforms.  We checked dozens of pages that came at the top, when searching for ' Wordpress vs Blogger' . In most of these, we found Wordpress being recommended as compared to Blogger.  But in most cases, the comparisons are misplaced, as we'll discuss later in this article. While we are well conversant with Wordpress, we use Blogger for our blogs, becasue we know its advantages over the free Wordpress platform for a commo...

Best practices, adapted from Google rating guide In the previous post in this series, we talked about the importance of these two qualities of websites for getting high search ratings from Google : (i) helping the user, and (ii) quality of web content. In the present post, we'd talk further about the quality aspects and also other factors that impact a website's standing. [In this 2-part series, we present the gems of search engine optimi z ation (SEO) that we have collected from the recently released Google's Search Quality Rating Guidelines . In trying to emphasi z e certain important points or to make it simple for common users, we have added our own interpretations and expressions.] Content quality Google raters will give good quality rating to a webpage or a website if it has sufficient amount of relevant content which must also be of high quality. Please note that the matter must be of high relevance to the topic; it must be in good quantity and upd...

UPDATE: Google has issued new guidelines in December 2019. We have published an updated post on ' Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines '.  Google has brought out its ' Search Quality Rating Guidelines ', first time since 2013. These are essentially for Evaluators who help in manually checking websites and queries for their quality, relevance, reputation etc that help in improving search experience. However, these guidelines also are very useful for website owners, bloggers and SEO experts.  Nothing can not be a more credible adviser than Google about what to do to improve quality and searchability of your website; so, we bring a 2-part series on what we found in Google guidelines that could be of great use to our visitors. That will save you the bother of going through the longish (160 pages, no more!) and slightly technical document and taking notes. It makes us feel especially humble to say that all these years, we have been saying what Google has deta...

Blogs have a dynamic life-cycle unlike static websites. They need updation, and therefore the blogger has to be on his toes - getting ideas for the next post, writing posts, finding relevant pictures, publishing the post also on other social media platforms or at least giving a link, and so on. When the blogger leaves this processing of blogging, the blog hibernates and eventually dies. There are occasions when a blogger thinks what he  publishes need not be shared with others or shared only with a few chosen ones, and he decides to make the blog private.  For some, it is not a pleasant change but they need to do it for some specific reasons such as keeping the blog off limit from their employer, discussing a controversial subject, working on a research that is not yet public etc. However, for most such communication, we feel that there are better ways than having a private blog. Sometimes, making the blog private is a knee-jerk reaction to not being able to maintain it...