The All new Google+ Followers Widget

Just a couple of hours ago Blogger launched the Google+ Follower widget. Build on the lines of the older Friend Connect Follower widget , it has a Follow button accompanied with the faces of your Google+ Followers. It is now available in the Add a Gadget menu and can be added to your blog with just a single click. The widget currently has no configurable options but this will surely change as future enchantments are made. This can be seen as another step in the direction of integrating Google+ with Blogger. Now lets see some of the other facts related to this widget



Before adding this widget you will have to connect your blog to Google+ if you haven't already done it

To connect your Google+ profile with Blogger

 1. To do that just go the Google+ tab in your Blog's dashboard and click the Upgrade to Google+ button

2. You will be presented a screen where you will have to tick the check-box and click the Switch Now button

3. Now you have a choice whether you want to add the blogs you contribute to the About section of your Google+ profile. Whatever you choose , either skip or add the blogs to your profile

4. This completes the integration of your Blogger account with Google+


To add the Google+ Follower widget

1. Go to the Layout tab

2. Click the Add a Gadget button ( preferable in the Sidebar )

3. Now select the Google+ Followers Widget and click the Save Button

4. Check your blog and you will see the widget in your sidebar now .

Hope this tutorial helped and don't forget to follow us on Google+ via the Google+ Follower widget present in the sidebar

Check more about this story on Blogger's official blog - Grow your audience with the Google+ followers gadget

6 Ways To Keep Your Blog Interesting

As you have created a blog for yourself and considering blogging, you are needed to ensure that you keep your blog interesting which will help you get more and more visitors preferably on-going visitors. In this post, I am to list down the 6 different ways to keep your blog interesting. Continue reading and figure out if your blog is good enough or not.






1. Identify The Purpose Of Your Blog

First and foremost step towards keeping your blog interesting is your primary objective behind creating your blog. It does not matter if your aim is to share valuable content or to generate traffic, once you are clear about the purpose of your objective, you need to keep moving forward and work hard to achieve success.

2. Your Blog’s Content

A blog happens to be interesting, when it is sharing worthy and useful information to its readers. In short, you; being the author of your blog will take your readers along. You need to make sure that you have unique and original content on your blog by covering exclusive topics.

3. Choosing A Topic

Choosing a topic to write on is certainly a tough task as you need to ensure that the topic you choose is interesting and exclusive to your readers. Moreover, you can also try writing about the latest market and industry trends which are yet to be discovered by others. You can even allow guest posts on your blog, and bloggers will help you contribute to the content of your blog. Also, you can consider the older topics and trends and tailor them according to the recent times. This way your readers will get to read new and interesting information that has been made available on your blog.

4. Design

While you are spending time to create unique and exclusive content for your blog, you should also spend some time choosing an exceptional design for your blog. it is imperative to avoid adding poor and clumsy designs which eventually leave your visitors searching for what they came for. You must incorporate such a design that prompt the visitors to check your site every now and then for latest updates as they liked the way you already presented your content on the blog. If you are using the WordPress platform, you can select and add several different themes that are available on the WordPress dashboard itself. Also, you can add premium and even free themes which are compatible with the latest WordPress version you are currently using for your blog.

5. Be Consistent

Keep posting on your blog frequently; and let your blog stay alive for your readers. Try to have a target which you must achieve per week. This way you will be able to engage more visitors on your blog.

6. Communicate!

You need to ensure that the content you post on your blog is useful in keeping the interest of your regular readers. Utilize the comment section of your blog to effectively communicate with them, engage your audience and share your ideas. Respond to all the comments that have been posted and do answer their queries if any asked.

Author Bio

This guest post was written by Rahul Garewal, writer and researcher for Minerabatkoder.dk.

Polls in Blogger

Getting feedback from your readers is the best way to know their opinions and what better way of doing this than by using Polls. Polls make your blog look more interactive and  makes your reader feel as being part of a community. In Blogger there is a inbuilt Poll Gadget which comes with basic options. In this post we will also be discussing poll widgets from Polldaddy & Quipol and their features.






Blogger Poll Gadget Demo
To integrate the Blogger's own Polling widget you just have to go to the Layout tab and Click the Add a Gadget button . There select the Poll gadget and you will be presented with the following window

You are provided with the basic option like
- Ability to select the Closing date of your Poll
- Selecting whether users are allowed to mark multiple answers

PollDaddy  Demo
Polldaddy provides a lot of options and it allows you to create Surveys , Quizzes and Rating widgets as well.
For getting started with creating a Poll , just go to Polldaddy.com and register if you haven't already . Now in your Dashboard click the Create a new button and select Poll .

Here the options for customization are many as compared to Blogger gadget , Here are some

- Adding MP3 , pictures accompanying your question
- 6 Polling gadget designs to choose from
- Different options to display results
- Ability to dedicated comment threads
- Repeat voters options

After completing the setup just click the Create Poll button and you will be presented with a code that you can simple copy in a HTML/JavaScript gadget.



Quipol Demo
Just a year old but has taken Polling industry by storm . Its restrictive in a sense because it only allows positive or negative feedback for a question but its design is just mind-blowing and makes make for it.

To create a poll , Firstly signup for Quipol here and then create a new poll . You will be presented with the following screen

Once complete , click the Create this Quipol button and then you will be given a code to add to your blog . Or if you like you can direct your reader to the Quipol-hosted poll

Some of its features are
- A dedicated comment thread for each poll
- Adding images or videos ( Youtube and Vimeo ) with question
- A visually appealing result pie chart
- Facebook/Twitter authentication

A word to round-offs all the services
Feature-Rich - Polldaddy
Awesome Design - Quipol
Native - Blogger's own

These are the polling widgets that I found useful and have shared with you . Feel free to voice your opinion about which you like the most out of them

Twitter Vs Other Online Advertising Platforms

Twitter is one of the popular social networking websites with more than 140 million users and 340 million tweets every day. Being very popular in online world, it’s used by many companies as platform through Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts. The numbers of its users are growing and they keep increasing every minute of the day.


Twitter indeed as a part of social media has emerged as one of the most popular means of free ads advertising for people who establish contacts and use these social channels to promote their products with their lists of followers/friends. This channel also offers an opportunity to stay in touch with customers and build your clientele.

Promoted Tweets

It helps to advertise and communicate with users who are not currently following your account. They are generally shown in timelines rather than amongst contents. They are usually displayed in search on Hootsuite and Twitter which can help reach your target audience when they search for specific keywords.


Promoted Trends

Promoted Trends are displayed on top of trending topics list that contain keywords along with attached hash tags. They help in spotting other users that are interested in same topic. While user selects the hash tag to find out conversation associated with it, Promoted Trends will be displayed above the conversation.

Promoted Accounts

Businesses who want to generate leads through Twitter followers can make use of promoted accounts which will be displayed in “who to follow” section on the homepage of users. Twitter will analyze your account and choose followers based on similarity after which it placed the targeted ads for promoted accounts.

Twitter Vs. Facebook Advertising

In both Twitter and Facebook, target audience is end users, followers, fans and customers. Twitter has 140 million users while Facebook has around 800 million users. The age group of Twitter users falls under 26-44 while that of Facebook is 18-34. In terms of pricing, promoted Tweets in Twitter uses a Cost per Engagement model (CPE) where minimum CPE is 0.10 USD while suggested CPE is 0.50 USD. The Promoted Accounts follow a CPF (Cost per Follower) model and minimum cost is 0.50 USD for a follower and can go up to 2 USD for suggested CPF. Facebook Ads are mostly simple text-based and image ads following cost per click model. Facebook has its own tracking tools but they are not as sophisticated as that of Twitter and cost-per-click is usually around 0.85 USD.

Twitter Vs. LinkedIn Advertising:

LinkedIn is the social network platform especially meant for professionals and business people and has more than ninety million members. They provide various advertising options with affordability and visibility which includes self-service ads known as direct ads with multiple display formats to match your needs. When compared to twitter which is meant for all categories of people, LinkedIn is a very good advertising platform if you are targeting business people and professionals. You can target users based on Company, Industry, Job function and role etc. You can also target business travelers, subject matter experts, Unemployed professionals etc. All these options make LinkedIn an effective platform for B2B advertising.

Twitter Vs. Blog Advertising:

Blogs are ways to express your views to public and it can also be a good platform for advertising. Blogs targeted on specific niche can be used to promote products associated with that category. There are blog advertising networks which help you display ads on blogs with topic related to product you are promoting online.

Final Verdict: Twitter is considered to be very effective platform for online advertising owing to robust tracking tools, easier access for all users and cheaper pricing compared to other platforms. But choosing the platform depends on target audience and niche which you are focusing.

Stylify Minimal Responsive Blogger Template

This is a fully responsive and highly optimized template for every kind of Blogger user. It is centered around the concept of Minimalism hence all the unnecessary stuff like Blogger's Default CSS as well as JavaScript have been shunned. It has lightening fast load times and completely complies with Search Engines heading and title standards. This template requires that you have a little bit of knowledge about HTML/CSS so as to do some customization , rest assured that I will be there to help you out in the comments if you face any unsolvable problem.


Download Demo
Features

- Responsive
- Search Engine Optimized
- Lightening fast Page Load Time (98% in Google Page Speed)
- Exclusive Threaded Comment Design
- CSS3 powered Tilted Header
- Supports All Major browsers
- Uses CSS Sprites for less HTML Requests
- Auto Read More Hack
- Pagination option
- Automatic Related Posts under each Post
- CSS3 powered ReadMore Button and Labels
- Electrolize Web Font
- Attractive Share Buttons and Subscribe options
- Author Bio Box
- Ribbon styled Labels on Post Pages
- Print Friendly
- Captivating Post Title design
- Near W3C Valid
- Four Column Footer
- Widget Ready Sidebar with Stacked effect
- Simple Menu and Social Media Buttons
- Automatic Meta Descriptions
- Stacked Paper feel to Post Body
- Appealing Custom 404 Design
- Simple Search Box


Installing the template

- UnZip the Download Pacakge
- Now Go to Blogger Dashboard > Template > Backup/Restore and click Choose File
- Select the XML file from the Unzipped directory
- Then Press Upload and the template is installed


Configuring the various features

- Firstly After Installing the Template Go to Layout and Edit the Blog Posts Widget. Now untick these options and save.

 

- In the Download package copy all the content of the Widgets.txt file.
  Now create a New HTML/JavaScript widget and place it under the Header widget (Don't forget to press the Save Arrangements button) See image below

In this widget , paste the contents of Widgets.txt file and Save. Now the Search Box , Menu and Social Media Buttons are installed. You will have to manually change the URLs in the Menu as well the Social Media Buttons. The most important URL to change is the action URL of Search box . Make it something like http://www.yourblogURL.blogspot.com/search

- To configure the CSS3 Labels , go to Layout and Edit the Label widget , there Tick Cloud as Display Option and Uncheck the Show number of posts per label


- Now go to the Template > Edit HTML option , Click Proceed and then Tick Expand Widget Templates
Here Search for "Short" . Now remove this whole line and write a small bio about yourself that will be visible under each post. Replace the URL of the Image as well if you like

- Now search for "Stay Connected With Us" , now here change all your Social media URLs accordingly

- Now Search for "home_page" , this will show all the settings related to the Pagination option (Check here for explanation  )

- Now Search for "Your Tag Line" and replace it with your blog's mission or description

- Now Search for "thumbnail_mode" , this will display all the settings related to the Auto Read More Hack

Happy Blogging !

One piece of warning , Other than the Popular Post and Label Widget all the widgets like Blog Archive ,etc don't work . This is because the Deafult JS and CSS files of Blogger have been removed. On the Brighter side Your blog will open like a express train (given that you don't overcrowd it with widgets)

Screenshot

Download Demo

If you liked the template consider donating to us :)