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How to Back Up Your Blogger Blog

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Backing up your blog is one of the most important things you can do. It’s kinda like insurance: you hope you never need it, but you’re crazy not to have it. The same goes for a backup of your site. Can you imagine waking up one day and your entire blog is gone? Not just missing some stuff, not just formatted weirdly, but gone. No posts, no header, no menu, no sidebar, nothing. Well, it happens. A number of things can cause this to happen. A violation of your domain provider’s terms of use, a hacker, an error in coding and other things can cause it. Although you do want to prevent it, you should also spend some time and effort preparing for it, in case it does happen. When you back up your blog properly, all of your posts, images, html customizations and all other content from your blog are downloaded to your computer. If the worst of the worst happens, you are still sitting on a file of your entire site. This is why backing up your site as much as possible (as new content is added) is the best idea. Some people don’t want to go through all of that. A way to avoid having to do this is to compose your posts in a Word document. Then that content is already saved on your computer. Simply copy and paste content, add pictures and you’re done!

So without further delay, here’s a step by step (with screenshots) guide to backing up your blog!

Click settings.
>settings
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Then click “other”
other
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Then click “export blog” at the top.
how to back up your blogger blog
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Then this will pop up. Click “Download Blog”
download blog
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Your blog will now download to your computer in the form of an XML file with all of your content! To recover your blog, simply create a new blog and follow steps one and two of this post. Then, instead of clicking “export blog” you’re going to click “import blog”. It’ll have you upload that XML file and you’ll be good to go!

Filed Under: Blog, General Blogging Tips

Turn off That Stupid Captcha!

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captcha
Turn off the captcha!

So you want more comments right?  And you wouldn’t want to do anything to discourage comments would you?  So turn off that stupid captcha!  Nobody wants to try and decipher what letters are in that stupid box, then type them into another box just to leave you a comment.  Truth is 18% of potential commenters decide that they don’t want to leave a comment that bad when they see a captcha.  Do you want to be losing out on almost 1/5th of your comments?  Then consider removing your captcha! (See picture at the end of the post to see how.)

What does this even say?!?
What does this even say?!?

But what about spam?

Deal with it yourself.  In all honesty, spam is your problem and you should not pass it on to your readers by making them decode a captcha just to leave a comment on your site!  Blogger has a very good built in spam detector that will keep out almost all spam.  If you’re on WordPress, get the Akismet plugin and you’ll be good to go.  Just get rid of that captcha!

Remember, comments are contagious and lead to more comments and more traffic. People want to feel like they are a part of something that other people like too. If someone stumbles onto a blog post of yours with dozens of comments, they are more likely to stick around and see what all the rage is about. Comments are immensely important to a successful blog, so don’t make it a hassle to leave them.

How to turn off captcha in Blogger:
turn off captcha

Filed Under: Blog, Grow Your Blog's Audience, Setting up Your Blog

Advanced Google Adsense Tips

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Let’s check out some advanced Google Adsense tips.

Digging deeper into Google’s Adsense, there are a few more things you can do to make sure you are getting the most out of Adsense.

Block URLs. 
You have the ability to block any URLs for any reason.  I would suggest blocking any URLs that you are promoting in other ways.  For example, if you have an affiliate relationship with Target, you may not want to have Target displayed in your Adsense ads.  Since you only get paid per click, you could be losing sales, and perhaps income.  You can also block URLs that are offensive, political, competing with your business, or, as I mentioned earlier, for any reason you want.  Just keep in mind that you don’t want to block a ton or URLs for no reason.  If Google can’t find an applicable ad to show, nothing shows up, thus eliminating your chance at revenue for that pageview.

Here, you can see that we have blocked some competing URLs for our coupon site.
Here, you can see that we have blocked some competing URLs for our coupon site.

Customization. 
You can also customize the appearance of your ads to better match your website’s color scheme.  You can customize different colors for the border, background, text, title and URL.  While we recommend that you try and blend the ad with your site’s color, you can choose to do the opposite and make your ad stand out as much as possible.
See the graphic below to learn how to change the color scheme of your ads.
Adsense customize
A well customized color scheme can be the difference between looking “spammy” and looking natural.

Keep track of your performance reports. Know which ads perform the best for your site and determine which, if any, need to be moved or removed. See more about Adsense reporting in this post: Google Adsense Reports 101.

Filed Under: Blog, Make Money Blogging

The Basics of Making Money with Google Adsense

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Making money with Google Adsense

Adsense is the go-to moneymaker for many bloggers and website owners. The main appeal of Google’s Adsense is the “set it and forget it” idea that comes with it. Once approved, you add a bit of code to your site and voila, you’ve got great, targeted ads for your readers to see! Targeted ads from Google’s Adsense are better than any other content advertiser that we’ve seen. Have you ever been shopping online at a certain store and gone to another site only to see ads for that store you were just shopping at? Those are targeted ads and Google does them best. Also their click-through-rate and cost-per-click are generally higher than competitors. This makes Adsense the leader of the pack. Would you expect a Google product to be anything but a leader?

There are many factors that should be considered when dealing with Google Adsense. First and foremost, do NOT click your own ads and do NOT tell others to click your ads. This will get your account banned very quickly and there is no turning back from that point. It’s easier to get the President of the USA on the phone than it is to get someone from Google.

You also want to consider how many ads you will be placing. Google shows 3 image ads and will show up to 3 more text ads if you choose to place them. It’s a good idea to make your ads noticeable, but not distracting and annoying. You don’t want your content to compliment your ads; you want your content to overshadow your ads. Ads are completely secondary and you don’t want people looking at your site as a bunch of ads.

Another factor to be considered is the size and placement of the ads. In a meeting with the folks from Google Adsense, we learned which sizes of ads offer the highest average payment per click. We also learned the “hot zones” of placement. See the hot zones according to Google below:

Photo credit: http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1354747
Photo credit: Google

Now, of course you might not want to place an ad smack in the middle of your site, but there are certain areas that perform better than others and you should know what those are before diving in. For instance, did you know that ads in a right sidebar perform better than a left sidebar? That might be a good thing to keep in mind when doing a site design/re-design. The thing about placing ads is that they change the appearance of your website. I don’t condone changing the appearance of your site very often, so do your research, pick a spot and stick with it. As far as the ad sizes, we were told that the highest number of advertisers bid on ads that are 300×250 (standard sidebar) and 728×90 (standard banner). A higher number of bidders means a higher cost-per-click, which means you get paid more.

So the really basic concepts of making money with Google Adsense are ad size, quantity of ads, placement of those ads and performance tracking. We’ll dig deeper into Adsense in other articles here. Take a look at our Advanced Google Adsense Tips post to learn a even more!

Filed Under: Blog, Make Money Blogging

Welcome!

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Hi!  Welcome to More from Your Blog!  I always think it’s weird when I’m snooping someone’s blog and find that their first post is just jumping right in.  No “hello world” or anything like that.  So here’s mine!

If you’re reading this, the site is either very new, or you are very curious!  In any event, thanks for being here and we hope you learn a lot!

Update: it’s January 8th, 2014 and one year into this site, a major redesign is being pushed out today! Woot!

Filed Under: Blog

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