My navigation buttons

One thing I tend to look for on a site whether it be a blog or a standard website, is the navigation. Of course, a blogspot 'blog' does not have 'pages' in the sense that a standard website has, so there are no navigation buttons provided in the templates. So how and why have I included them on my blog. Let's start with the 'why'... You can quickly direct your visitors towards the answers to the questions that they may first have when they arrive at your blog. These are some of the things you should consider providing for your visitors:
'About' - an introduction to you and your blog.
'Contact' - a way for your visitor to send you a direct message.
Some sort of link to your 'best posts' - admittedly I have not done this yet...
'Home' - for easy navigation for those unfamiliar with blogs (regular bloggers know you can just click on the banner).
If you think of each post as a page with a unique URL, make posts to fulfill your requirements and publish them (I posted mine as 1st January 2007, so that they would not appear in the regular posts - there may be a way of posting them without dates, but I have not been diligent enough to research it...) - See 'post options' in the create post window for making posts appear on different dates.

And now the 'How....'
It's embarrassingly simple really, webmasters even at a low level will easily figure it out, but sometimes even the simplest solutions may help someone when clearly explained.
In short, we are going to use Dashboard/layout/elements/add a page element/HTML-javascript. And simply add HTML navigation exactly as you would in a standard website. The HTML for a navigation button requires a destination URL, a source for the graphic and may carry extra tags such as 'alt' and 'title':

Depending on the in which space you are placing the code, you may place all your navigation into one element, or separate them out. In order to save valuable space, mine are all placed in the same element.
Naturally you will need to be able to create the buttons in graphical software, I use 'Fireworks', but you could use 'Photoshop' or 'Gimp' or any other half-decent software to get nice results.
The graphic elements were designed to fit in with the colours and styles I was already using. Arguably, a better example of design to fit a theme can be seen here:


These designs can then be simply uploaded to a website somewhere and linked into the HTML as the source. If you don't have any spare web space, you could upload them into a post in blogger and then view the properties to see where blogger has stored them - however blogger has a nasty habit of compressing image files.... If you don't want the post with the images to be seen, you could then edit the post and 'save as draft'. (I have not tried this method of storing graphics, but I think it should work...)
For navigation within a website, there is no need to open in a new window, so a straight link will be fine.

Security features on Blogspot Comments

Coupled with the do-follow movement, comes the need for added security features on comments allowing you to easily deter spam commenting and to easily delete unwanted comments. I have observed in the past how pro-bloggers allow negative comments, and would point out that how you deal with negative comments may actually play in your favour. I would however delete spam comments as there is no point replying to them.
It has been observed by me and others, how John Chow and Problogger have not removed negative comments and even replied to them even though the comments were particularly crass. There is a common theme in these comments which actually does something to enhance the status of the blogger - they usually say something like 'you think you're so clever...', but of course the reality is that the commenter is acknowledging the popularity/celeverness of the blog by being there in the first place and bothering to comment. 'All publicity is good publicity' rules apply here...
Having 'do-follow' status is an invitation to bloggers with it's own reward (ie. a free backlink) that is why a level of security needs to be in place. There are two forms of security in 'Blogger', each with it's own pro's and con's.
First off then, let's go to Blogger Dashboard/Settings/Comments , our first option to consider is 'who can comment' (see above). Unless you are only running a blog for a limited exposure, then you will probably want to select 'anyone - including anonymous' allowing any visitors to at least attempt to engage with you. The security features that we can add to these comments are further down the page:

The higher-security option would be to select comment moderation (see above), the down-side is that your visitor does not have the satisfaction of seeing his/her comment immediately appear on the site. I choose verification which at least should make sure that your comments are from a real person, after that, I select to be notified of every comment. This means that I can check for new comments regularly without logging into Blogger, and then login to respond or 'bin' the comment. For either option, it is advisable to have email notification of comments to ensure that the delay between comment and either approval or response is as short as possible.
This is the last option on the comment section:


Place an email address that you regularly use in here and click 'save settings' and your new security settings will be up and running.

Competiton for $1...!!

I know it sounds crazy, but I had to have a go at this one. It's more a commenting competition than a blogging competition, in fact I'm not required to post about it to enter. Entry is far simpler than that...
One Dollar Jackpot give a way a dollar every day, here's what they say:

OneDollarJackpot.com is an online competition that's open to anyone with an email address.

A simple competition, all you need is a brain, some creativity and 25 words to win it with.

Each day the winner is drawn and written about on the blog. A tip for the daily competition is also given along with the greatest help - how many people entered yesterday.

You can see the winners and some of the entries by visiting the blog, and if you're wondering what you can do with your dollar, the site helpfully points you in the direction of 'Dollar Hot Dogs', a site offering to cook you a hot dog and mail it to you for a dollar paid via paypal...!!
This site carries a warning that actually eating the Hot Dog once it has been mailed to you may actually cause sickness or death so you mustn't actually eat it...

All that remains is to say thanks guys for helping to make the internet a funnier place... and if I get a dollar, I'm gonna keep it!

Ashop the complete eCommerce solution

Since the opportunities for paid blogging appear to be diminishing, many will be looking for a new way to make money on the internet, and some will be considering an ecommerce site. However setting up your own ecommerce site is more or less impossible for the ‘casual’ website builder as your e-shopper will demand credit-card compatibility, high-security encryption and a flawless browsing and shopping experience.
To build your own ecommerce solution would involve complex front-end and back-end programming with product and customer databases which may well even require you to upgrade your web hosting package.
Once this realisation has become apparent, your budding entrepreneur is starting to think maybe a car-boot or garage sale is about as hi-tech as he can manage, unless he comes across off-the-shelf ecommerce software that will expand with his business.
One such solution is Ashop, one of the leading software solutions for start-up ecommerce sites. Not only does it have a low-cost entry-level solution to suit the tentative business-person (less than £25/US$50/AUS$70 per month), they host the ecommerce pages on their own dedicated servers, so there is no need to upgrade to an expensive web-hosting package, and you can fully customise the pages so that the shopper will have a seamless browsing experience between your main site and the ecommerce pages.
Couple this with safe encryption, compatibility with major banks and credit cards built in as standard and there’s no reason why you can’t start using this system tomorrow… especially since there is a free introductory period.
The features of this package, even at the entry-level stage add up to a staggering list, and there is a handy video presentation on the Ashop website which outlines how this software works to provide the complete ecommerce solution that you are looking for.

Editing the blogger HTML

Admittedly I was initially reluctant to do this, but found that unless I wanted a site that was identical to everyone else’s (or switched to Word-press) I was going to have to dive in there…

First off, you are offered the chance to download your template before you start messing around with it – this is a good idea.. click on the 'save template' button and then 'download full template' every time that you make a successful change, so that you can always take a step back and reverse a mistake by uploading a working template that you previously saved.
Try it and make sure it works…Once you have saved your template you can start experimenting to see what parameters can be changed, safe in the knowledge that you can always upload a default template.

Here goes then:
Log into Blogger dashboard/layout/edit HTML - Click on ‘download full template’ to save a copy of the HTML on your own hard-drive.
If you want to put your ‘description’ and keyword tags in, search for the 'head' tag and place them after this along with the other meta tags (NB the ‘title’ tag uses the variable: ‘data:blog.pageTitle’ – this is presumably linked to the entry that you make in the ‘title’ field in ‘Settings/Basic’) I suppose you could overwrite this, but I haven’t done(yet…)

I started by changing the pixel-width of my sidebar – I searched the term sidebar and changed width values until it looked how wanted it, then I decided that I didn’t like the dotted line… I noticed that the term ‘dotted’ in the code and simply took a guess that changing ‘dotted’ to ‘none’ would do the trick, and hey presto – line gone!

Your header can easily be changed in the dashboard, and I have used ‘layout/page elements/add a page element’ to include some HTML for navigation buttons which are very simple – I was pleased that some people have commented on the buttons so I may post about how I did them, but really they are very, very simple to do.

First steps in SEO

I have talked about simple SEO [Search Engine Optimisation] and practiced some SEO on other websites, even getting good levels of success doing just that in my day-job. I have not as yet, really got to grips with SEO on a blog. Today I took the first simple steps to rectify that and placed some meta-tags in my blogger template.
There is some debate over whether there is any value in 'keyword' since it has been over-used and abused in the past, yet the consensus is that when used properly, it may help and can certainly do no harm... If you don't believe me take a look at the HTML of the home page at eBay - they certainly know how to get a site noticed, and yes they use keyword along with 'description' and 'title'.
Now 'title' already exists in the blogger template and can be edited in blogger settings, but there is no 'keyword' or 'description', so why not put them in? I went to blogger dashboard, layout, edit HTML and just placed in the tags and saved the template. Simple huh?
If you want to know more about what the tags look like, there is an article on Livewyre.NET discussing tags and their format... feel free to click on 'view/page source' in your browser to see the tags in place on munny4hunny.

Get paid to blog with Smorty.com

Trying to keep a blog fresh every day is not the easiest of tasks, and it is all too easy to get side-tracked from your main themes.
For those who don’t know, this site started as ‘an investigation of paid to blog schemes’ and remains true to that aim, even though the remit has widened to include articles on software and blogging competitions etc..
Today I am right back on track reviewing Smorty.com a unique service connecting web advertisers with bloggers, providing an easy means of monetising a blog. Smorty.com is one of the prime movers in the blog advertising world, and there are a number of reasons why you should consider using them if you want to blog for money:

1. The process of signing up is quick and painless
2. There are regular varied opportunities to take and payments range from $6 to $10.80
3. They pay out within a week (via Paypal) and there is no minimum payout
4. You can register more than one blog

These are just a few of the reasons that you might choose to investigate smorty.com as a means to get paid for blogging. Smorty has rules like any other service, but I have found that their tasks are not difficult to complete, they don’t try to make you jump through hoops and they never insist that endorse a product against your wishes. You may be asking why I call Smorty unique? Well it’s all about point 3 above, they don’t make you wait 30 days before the money gets into your Paypal account…

EzMoneyOn.NET offers a $100 prize..

It's about time we featured another blog contest here, and this one comes courtesy of the ContestBlogger who continues to provide an excellent supply of information regarding internet contests and competitions.
I am particularly fond of competitions that guarantee at least something for taking part, and this contest is offering link love from his make money online blog to every participant. For the winners, the following prizes are up for grabs:

First prize: $100 cash (via PayPal or MoneyBookers)
Second prize: 1000 Entrecard credits
Third prize: Free 125×125 banner design

There are a few ways of taking part including writing a blog post and using the anchor text of 'make money online' along with the usual options of subscribing to the RSS feed in a reader or via email - click thru' to the contest post to get the full rules...

The contest will be ending on March 11th and the winner will be chosen using random.org, and announced on 12th March. To ratify your entry, please leave a comment against the original contest post.

myLot User Profile

PayPerPost opens up...

PPP is famous for having strict rules about your blog needing to be 90 days old with 20 posts etc.. etc.. Well the big news is that they are slackening off their rules and allowing blogs at only 30 days old with 10 posts to join the program.
They have had the 90 day rule for a long time and one can't help wondering if this is linked to the way that Google has treated paid bloggers by reducing their pagerank. Maybe PPP just needs new blogs on which to publish adverts to replace bloggers who have left the fold. Or maybe it is a way of adding more blogs to the IZEA pot so that there will be more bloggers appearing in the top half of the IZEA real-rank system...

The DOT COM experience

Having the Dot Com has concentrated my mind on trying to get the best I can out of this blog and consequently I have instigated some subtle design changes to reflect the new attitude I have towards the blog. If you choose to use your own domain within 'blogger' there is a warning that tells you that will need to be using a standard template. I must have made some changes to my header that did not conform to this standard template, and it took a lot of work to restore the header and it still isn't how I would want it - I have also noted that other 'edits' I have done to the template are now gone, so some 'fiddling' will be required. If I really want to take this any further and regain control over the blog, my next logical step would have to be to take the blog onto a wordpress platform.
To be honest I am not ready to move the whole platform, so I am going to tinker with the blogger site until I can get it as near to how I want it to be. If anyone else is thinking of going Dot Com, then I would urge you do do it now especially if you have dropped PR recently as I think this might be a good way of responding to the 'Google slap' and it's possible that the new domain might not attract the same negative response as the old one did.
With this in mind, it is pretty imperative that I spend some time 'weeding out' references to paid posts and sponsored posts and the like... so that this new domain has the best chance of being given a PageRank as possible. I am happy with the layout for now, so will concentrate on cleaning up the blog in an attempt to comply with new Google PR criteria as far as I can guess what it might be.
As far as the Go-Daddy hosting is concerned (thanks to the Hot Dog Man for the heads up on Go-Daddy), they offer a free holding page edit program and an advanced 'Website tonight' feature which is basically a free 5-page website hosting included with your domain - what a great way to start on the internet, a whole 5 page website for the cost of a domain - $7...
Having this feature has enabled me to make a page that redirects any visitors to 'http://munny4hunny.com' straight to 'http://WWW.munny4hunny.com' using a javascript redirect. NB. blogger doesn't allow you to point both versions of the URL at your blog and the received wisdom is that you should use the 'www' version on your blog and use a redirect on the version without the 'www'.
I now feel more inclined to post at least four or five times a week if not daily, and may even go as far as having regular features... all this fresh attitude inspired by having the dot com is the perfect antidote to losing the Pagerank - It's time to fight back....

Munny4Hunny goes DOT COM!

Finally I got around to buying a domain for this blog. We are now officially residing at www.munny4hunny.com. I have had the domain for a few days and I just got round to redirecting the DNS, and found it remarkably straightforward. What's more, I got the domain from Go Daddy for a little over $7 for a year - one step nearer pro-blogging for the price of a Starbucks...
The blogspot remains active for old visitors, but I hope to drive some new traffic and raise some new revenue with the 'dot com' status.
Thanks to Rachel for going ahead of me, blogger for the instructions and Glamumous for posting a great article to help those who are thinking about doing this.

A survey on gossip

I find myself quite enjoying these paid surveys from dNeero - this latest one is about celebrity news issues and how you feel about them - even though the questions were basically around news in the USA, I found that I did have an opinion, and in some cases I actually cared!!

If you want to complete the survey yourself (and get paid..) click on the widget to take part - you don't have to put the results into a blog, you can just take the surveys and get paid anyway...

Nice Contest Arun!

ArunTheAce has launched a new contest which offers some cool prizes such as a Deluxe Hosting Package at Godaddy for one year! including domain name is also included, a Sticky for one month at a Make Money Online forum and also get a Header Ad Spot at Aruntheace.com, and a Youtube Niche Video site with domain name. See the original article to get the details including the prize that EVERY participant will receive regardless of whether they win one of the main prizes....

To be the winner you must write a review about his blog.
I have some rules for the contest and the rules are as follows.

1. The review should be at least 100 words.
2. You have to link to the main page of my blog with the anchor text ?Earn money online?.
3. The contest page should be linked with the anchor text ?Link Love Contest?.
4. Porn or Illegal blogs are not allowed.
5. Only one review per blog is allowed.
6. A link to main page and the contest page is must.

The contest is open until 29th Feb. The winners will be selected from a random draw. The winner will be announced on 1st March.

Here is my review:

AruntheACE.com, is an attractive blog packed with ideas for earning money via the internet and with your blog... Right now he is running a Link Love Contest which offers a free gift to every participant. My main reason for participating is because the gift is worth having even if I don't win the main prize... Since I am reviewing the site, I am going to recommend one of his recent posts regarding making money with a blog.
Why not browse over to ArunTheAce.com, read some interesting articles and then take part in the contest giving yourself a chance to win a major prize, with the certainty of getting a reward whether you win or not?

When you finish your blog entry, contact Arun with the URL to the post.

Monetising with 'Matched.co.uk'

Everyone is familiar with Adsense and how you can monetise a website with Google Adsense adverts. UK users will also be aware that Google is withdrawing their affiliate scheme for Adsense so that users can no longer earn from referrals. All is not lost however, I stumbled across a new scheme which is UK-based (and therefore pays in ££££) which provides simple non-contextual fixed ads for a fixed price.

Matched.co.uk provide HTML or PHP adverts of various sizes for insertion into a website or a blog and pay a fixed £3 ($6) for each advert. Currently I have five pages accepted giving earnings of £15 per month, you can submit up to 5 pages per website, and up to five websites giving total potential earnings of £75 per month ($150).
You will need to submit the URL's on which you wish to place adverts, and if the page is approved, you will be allocated an advert. This advert is available in various shapes and sizes although the colours are fixed. When you have chosen the shape that fits an available spot on your page, you get the advertising code to insert.
When the code is in place, your page will be spidered to check that the code is active and after the alloted time, you will be paid straight into your bank account.
I presume that this service is geared towards the UK, and I am not sure whether blogspot blogs are acceptable (be sure there will be an advert in my sidebar soon if they are), I don't know the criteria for accepting pages but I do know that I am happy to allocate 125 x 125px of any of my pages for £3 per month... and they pay £5 per sign up... to the new recruit as well as the referrer.

Take surveys to make money

Today I tried out a new service called 'dNeero' - you can earn money by taking short surveys and posting the results on your blog. This is my first introductory survey, I will be taking more when I get into the swing of it to supplement earnings on this blog. Hopefully earnings will figure in the end of February report...
Payments are made via Paypal, and I was pleased to find out that UK bloggers are welcome to use the service - they sent me a very nice personal email when I asked them of non-US membership was allowed.
If you're looking for extra earnings, this seems like a good place to start.

Looking back on January 2008

It's been an interesting month, not a lot of blogging going on since Google removed PR, but still some earnings to report...
I am considering some changes, but I need to be sure that they will enhance income opportunities and that I can justify the time and effort.
All in all, I made just $30 this month from various activities, but mainly from a couple of $10 creamaid opportunities. Creamaid continues to surprise by occasionally coming up with the goods, and in case you don't know...they pay almost straight away, there's no hanging around for 30 days with creamaid. In order to reach $1000 for my first year of paid blogging, I will need to find just over $200 in February - I honestly don't expect to reach that target, but watch this space... Incidentally, having only earned $30 this month, as you can tell from the spreadsheet, I actually collected just over $58 including previous earnings.

Other earnings (not from blogs) include fixed adverts from and from The Ad Network if you want to earn regular income from a website, try these two schemes. Adsense for me is going from strength to strength , I reached my second payout in December, paid in January and have already over half-way to another $100 payout... I stress that the majority of Adsense earnings are NOT from blogs...