important tips

If you use AdSense to make money on your blog, and have a mobile template enabled (which should, unless the blog is about something that makes no sense on a mobile device),  then it's an extremely good idea to have at least one AdSense ad-unit that was made with Blogger's official AdSense widget rather than by getting the code from AdSense and installing it manually. This is because the a majority of gadgets don't show up on the screen when a visitor using a mobile device (cellphone or tablet) looks at a blog which has a mobile template set up for it - and by default this includes AdSense gadgets.   When a mobile visitor looks at a blog, Blogger does check to see if AdSense is used on it, and if so it shows one or two ad-units to them.  But unfortunately these checks only detect AdSense gadgets, not AdSense code in HTML/Javascript gadgets or added directly to the template.   So the net effect is that unless you have one of the official AdSense gadgets, mobile visit...

An interesting addition to Amazon's terms and conditions for their Associates (announced here ): “If you are a Non-US person participating in the Program, you agree that you will perform all services under the Operating Agreement outside the United States. If, for any reason, you cannot comply with this requirement, you must notify us using this link for an exception.” My guess is that this is something to do with tax-regulations, and is worth a few moments thought (at least) for Bloggers who use Amazon Associates links  to earn money from their blogs.     But it also made me wonder about bloggers who travel a lot:   we possibly shouldn't be doing any work inside a country where we don't have a visa that allows us to work.   I wonder if that includes writing blog posts, or perhaps even drafting but not publishing them or taking pictures for them? 

If you sometimes delete posts from your blog, then it's a good idea to provide some help to people who who arrive at your blog via links to those posts. (Even if you don't have any links to those posts, it's likely that a search-engine somewhere will have some - and other people may have bookmarked or shared them, too.) There are two options for doing this: Post-specific redirects Use these if you want to re-direct visitors who come to a particular previous post: Go into Settings > Search Preferences , click Edit beside Custom Redirects . Click  New Redirect , to create instructions for what to do if a visitor tries to navigate to a specific post. Put the address of the post that you want to make a re-direct for into the From field. Put the address of the post that you want to visitors to be taken to into the To field. For both addresses, the part you need to enter is the URL of the post from the first backslash on.   Do not put in your blog-address Do include the date...

This post from the Weekly Blogging Tips series is about a cost-effective way to make pictures for blog postings. The best blogging advice is that every post should have at least one picture:  is a stunning professional-looking shot which perfectly illustrates the point you are making perfectly. This is a great idea if you're a professional photographer and have all time in the world, or if you can afford to purchase images which are custom made for your blog. But most of us just aren't in that league. Sometimes, you can use a search tool to find a re-usable photograph that you can put into your posts. (Remember to download your own copy and put it into a Google picture host, to make sure that it's accepted as the thumbnail picture for the post.) But another option is to use a diagram - like this . The picture above is a diagram that I used in a blog-post to emphasise that budgeting for an event is on-going through the planning phase, not a one-time job   I spent ...

Some visitors arrive at your blog from a search engine. Others will have subscribed to an RSS feed, or followed a link from some other blog or website. A few might even go directly to your home page because someone told them about it. But no matter how they got there, If you want people to read more than one post then you need to make it easy for them to find other posts. [tweet this quote] Kindness vs Confusion Some people say "don't confuse your visitors, only give them one way to look at your blog". But I disagree. Some people are naturally  searchers : if they want something they google it.  Others are navigator s: they start from a place they know, and follow the directions to get pretty much anywhere else.  You need to cater for both types of people - and to remember that there are lots of options in between.  And remember that not everyone understands Blogger jargon like "older posts" or "archive". In general, I think you should Give...

Blogger-hints-and-tips was originally where I kept my own notes about how my solutions to problems with Blogger But then I found other people were visiting - because they were looking for solutions to the same problems!    And looking back, I was embarrassed about how low-quality the original posts  were.  So I made a commitment to only publish properly researched articles, and I started keeping a private blog with post-ideas that I haven't researched fully (which now has 200+ posts in it). Then in Sept 2012, I started posting "Quick Tips" - very quick posts about changes in other products that are people tend to use with their blogs, which I didn't have the time or ability research fully, but which I really wanted to share with my readers quickly. Recently, however, the number of  Quick-tips has decreased: as Blogger and the other tools have become more mature, there just haven't been the same number of changes. And at the same time, other projects have been ...