Advertising & Blogger: things to consider

This article discusses some things to keep in mind when you are putting advertising on your blog.

If you are considering putting advertising onto your blog, there are some basic things that you need to think about.  These include broader philosophical questions, right down to nuts-and-bolts technical concerns.

This article is not a definitive guide - see somewhere like ProBlogger for that.   Rather it's a collections of thoughts about the issues specifically related to Google's Blogger and its relationship with advertisers.   And it may include some thoughts about philosophical and policy issues, if I do any deep research or thinkng about these in the future.

Terms and Conditions

There are lots and lots of possible advertising and affiliate marketing programmes.

Staying within the programme of terms and conditions (often called T&C's) for every programme that you participate in is important.   Every advertising programme has terms and conditions.   You need to find the ones that apply to the programme(s) you are considering.  Read them.  Remember them.  Follow them.   Keep up-to-date.

Also, keep an eye on Blogger's T&C's and content policy too, in case they have any impact on what advertising you are allowed to carry.

Advert Co-location

Not every type of advertising can be shown on the same web-page as every other type of advertising.  See the point about about terms-and-conditions.   And besides - you need some space on your blog for content, which is what keeps advertisement-viewers coming to you in the first place!

Blogger doesn't have any automatic support for conditionally showing advertising.  If any programme you have has constraints like this, then you may need to do some programming in order to use that programme.

Placing ads

If you want to use advertising that isn't integrated with Blogger through the Monetize tab, then you're going to have to place blocks of HTML code into gadgets or into pages.

You don't have to write the code (the advertising network does that), or change it.  You just have to copy and paste it, and put the HTML into your blog, wherever you want the advertising to do.   (Note:  HTML and Javascript are the only types of code you can use.   No SQL.   No php.)

If you're not comfortable-enough doing this with the Blogger template that you have, then stick to the Blogger-endorsed programmes that can be added through the Monetize tab.

Experiment, and Track Progress

Marketing is an art and science.   So can use scientific techniques for data gathering.   Experiment with altrnative ad-placement.   Maybe even create a 2nd non-public blog where you can test how things look when you set up ads (and other gadgets, for that matter).  Only put them into your real blog when you're happy with how they work.   Once your ad is live, track your progress.

To effectively track progress, you need to keep a list of the date when you made changes to your site, and then do regular data-analysis to see what effect these changes have on your number of visitors, and their behaviour.    This is tedious - but if you really want to know what works and what doesn't, it needs to be done.

Watch your ad-contents

Make sure you know what types of things the programme you have chosen is advertising.  With Blogger, you (we!) are getting web-hosting for "free" (we have to watch their ads), and domain registration very cheaply.   Make sure that the advertising you use doesn't cause you to violate Blogger's terms and conditions.  I'm thinking especially about Adult/Pornographic content here, but I guess it could apply to other things too.

If you are using AdSense, it's pretty much essential to manage the categories of ads that AdSense displays.

How will you get paid

Some advertising programmes are very easy to be part of:  they give you ad, and pay you regularly.   Other's are more difficult.   Worst case, you may find that some options are totally unuseable for you, because they cannot make payments in your contry.   Or the cost of getting paid is extremely high - ProBlogger has written before about the transaction time and cost of every payment he receives from Amazon.com.

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Related Articles

Managing the categories of ads that AdSense displays.

Putting HTML from advertisers into your blog

A short list of advertising and affiliate marketing programmes

How to turn on a mobile theme / template for blogs in Blogger

This article explains why mobile mattes for some blogs (but not all), what tools Blogger has provided to help with this, and how to set up a mobile theme (aka template) for your blog.  It also links to Google's mobile testing tool, which shows you how your blog looks on a mobile device.

By default, when someone uses a smartphone, tablet or other mobile device to look at your blog, they see the "full site" just like they would if they were using a PC.   The pages aren't set up to work well on their small screen, but they have access to all the features and gadgets you've installed.

In some cases, this is fine.  For example, when I first wrote this article, I looked at the statistics for this site and hardly any of the visitors were mobile.   However now, a couple of years later things have changed and I've implemented a mobile theme for this blog.

But for other blogs, especially ones that have maps and other location-information or which people read on the go, having a mobile-friendly theme is very important:   for example, on my public-transport blog, over 25% of visitors are using mobile, and that figure is growing.  Making my site work well for these visitors is definitely important for its long-term future (and my short term advertising revenue!)

What's available

Blogger have made a set of mobile themes, to match the standard Designer Themes, and so far only one to match the Dynamic theme(s).

We cannot control the layout of gadgets on these - when the screen is only 300-ish pixels wide, there's not much room to move.

But we can add and remove gadgets, and also by choosing a custom template get colour settings that match our main blog.

How to enable a mobile theme / template for your blog

Log in to Blogger using an account with administrator rights to the blog.

Go to the Themes tab.

If your blog has a Designer or Dynamic theme, then there will be a Mobile option to the right of the "Live on Blog" area.

If the blog is not set up to use a mobile theme ,then the word Disabled will be in the middle of the picture area - although it may be hard to read if your base template (chosen in the Live on Blog area) has a picture behind it.

Click on the gear-wheel underneath the picture to see the mobile options.

Select "Yes.  Show mobile template on mobile devices."

Either leave the mobile template on Default, or select one of the other options.

• If you choose Default, your mobile template will use the standard template matching your desktop template.
• If you choose Custom, your mobile template will use the colour-scheme and various features from your desktop template, and you will be able to makes changes to these settings.

Use the Preview button if you want to see what your blog will look like with the selected template on a mobile device.

When you are happy with your selection, press Save.

What your readers see

Visitors to your blog who are using a desktop PC (or laptop or netbook or any other machine with a full-size screen) won't see anything different.

Readers who are using an internet-enabled cellphone (ie smartphone), tablet, iPad, etc will see a different view:

• They won't have a sidebar
• The gadgets will be limited (unless you add some extra ones) and in the header and footer only
• On the home-page there will just be the title, thumbnail and snippet for each post, and a button for read-more (this is irrespective of where you've put the jump-break) - notice that the usual methods of giving your blog a home-page don't always work.
• Custom styles that you have added to the template may not be applied (this has happened on one blog where I use styles, I'm still investigating whether it's a feature of all mobile templates, or just due to the way I added these particular styles).
• There will be buttons at the bottom of the page for Home, <   and > .    I think that the latter two refer to older and newer posts (though possible they are the opposite way around from what I expect).
• There will be a link to "view web version", which lets your visitor switch to to see the blog using the desktop template.

I have a  feeling that there may be some other differences too - very keen to hear about any others you've spotted.

Seeing what your mobile readers see

The absolute best way that I've found to accurately experience my blogs as mobile visitors see them is to use a mobile device myself:

• Just like preview mode in the Post-editor, the mobile preview mode shows a "look and feel" view, which is not entirely accurate.   For example in the picture above, it shows part of the most-recent article insteaod of just the post title and mini-snippet that I see when I look at the site on my phone.
• The screen-size testers that I've tried out (ie software tools that mimic showing your website in various different screen sizes) don't actually use the mobile template - I suspect that this is due to the way that Blogger detects mobile devices.

However you can see any blog as it would be on a mobile device by appending /?m=1 to the end of the URL.    For example, to see this blog in mobile, I would look at http://areyoublogger.blogspot.com/?m=1      If you're going to use this approach, it's best to re-size your browser window so that it's about 300px wide - from my netbook, that's about 1/3 of the screen size, but it would be less from machiens with bigger screens.


Another approach is to use Google's Mobile Friendly Testing tool, which will

... analyze a URL and report if the page has a mobile-friendly design.

As well as showing you how your blog looks, it also reports on any issues that have been found.

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Related Articles

Adding gadgets to your mobile template.

Removing the attribution from moblile blogs

Showing a Google custom map on your blog

Advertising programmes for websites

Types of Blogger template

Administrator rights to your blog

How to include the blog post description when you share on Facebook

This article shows how to make that the description is correctly shown when one of your blog-posts is shared on Facebook.

When you share one of your blog-posts using either the via the "what's on your mind" space on Facebook or the Facebook share button on your blog, you may find that the only information automatically shown is:

• A picture (hopefully, but not always from the post)
• The post title
• The blog URL or the post URL

But many people want the post-description to be included too.

There are two things which you need to do to make sure that this happens correctly.

Step 1: Add search descriptions to your blog-posts

If a post does not have a description, Facebook will sometimes try to estimate one based on the contents. But this is not reliable, and it depends on the blog template you have used, and possibly even on other factors, eg at one stage, Facebook just looked for the the first
(paragraph) tag with at least 120 characters in it - which gave very odd results for some Blogger users. Alternatively it may try to use your post.summary but this also depends on your template.

A more reliable approach is for you to provide the description-text for each post.

For Blogger, the way to do this is described here.

For Wordpress, you need to to use an SEO plugin like SEO Ultimate to do this.

Step 2: Add Open-Graph tags to your template

Some templates already contain code which causes Facebook to estimate the description correctly. But some don't - and some may use two-step methods, eg relying on schema.org tags to imply Open Graph tags.

So, as with descriptions, it's more reliable to ensure you are using the set of tags that Facebook officially supports. These are the Open Graph tags.

You can see how to apply them in Blogger  or there are various plug-ins you can use on Wordpress.

Job Done! Once you have made these two changes, when someone shares your blog on Facebook, your own post-description should be shown. Don't forget to test your changes - as described in the Adding Open Graph tags to Blogger article.

What your readers see

Nothing! People who get to your blog using a web-browser, or who subscribe to your RSS feed or who follow-by email don't see anything different after you have done the steps above.

The only different is when they share a post from your blog in Facebook:  the initial description will come from your Description tag for the the post, not from the overall blog.

What happens for posts that do not have search descriptions

This depends on your blog's template, and on how Facebook is interpreting the information that it provides. You can see what Facebook will do for specific posts using the tag-debugging tool which Facebook provide.

Adding descriptions to old posts is tedious. But if your posts are often shared on Facebook, it may be worthwhile for you to allocate some time each day to edit a few posts LINK and update them with a current description. Provided you don't spend too long working out what the description should say, it should be possible to update 200 posts in a three weeks if you spend ten minutes each day doing just this.

What's more, it is possible that adding descriptions to your posts will make them look more attractive in regular Google search results too, which is A Good Thing if search-traffic matters for your blog.

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Related Articles:

How to add a Description meta-tag to posts in Blogger

How to apply Facebook's OpenGraph labels in Blogger

Reasons why SEO and search-traffic don't matter for many blogs

Post.snippet and post.thumbnail - summaries for a post

Deciduous blog posts leave evergreens for dead

In a social-media world, deciduous blog posts have an enormous advantage of both ever-green and ephemeral content - find out what they are, and how to use them to best advantage.

Introducing deciduous blog posts

In botany and horticulture, deciduous plants

... are those that lose all of their leaves for part of the year. (Wikipedia)

In blogging, deciduous posts are ones that your readers lose all interest in at certain times - eg posts about Christmas carols during January, or winter gardening tips during spring.

Which sounds bad.

Until you realise that deciduous posts are also ones that your readers (both current and new ones) gain renewed interest in at certain times. That means it's quite reasonable for you - and everyone else  - to mention them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ each time that the new "season" starts.   If your posts are good, you might even get more new visits from social media in the subsequent seasons than in the first time around.

When you think about it, it's easy to see that in a social-media world ...

Deciduous blog posts leave evergreens for dead.

What does this mean for bloggers

If getting more visitors through either search or referrals is important for your blog, then you should :

• Be systematic about  how you remember to promote seasonal posts you've already published.   

• Find ways to write posts that will be become popular on a cyclical basis.

• Make strategic decisions about whether to change an existing post vs when to make a new post about a seasonal topic.

• Set up Labels or custom-redirects to send people who end up on a previous-year post to the most recent one.

Remember to promote your seasonal posts

Make a calendar of significant factors that should cause extra traffic for your blog, and send yourself a reminder message in time to review and re-share the relevant posts, according to your blog's social media strategy.

Working out exactly when do these promotions can be tricky. Ideally this is based on studying your visitor statistics (Analytics or whatever tool you use) to see when the posts got popular last time around.

You might think that you know anyway, because the seasons are obvious, but it's easy to miss earlier-than-expected surges in interest. For example, posts about Christmas music might actually be popular with music directors who're choosing their Christmas programs in September. But you do need to be careful about and where how you promote posts like this - because no one else wants to be reminded about Christmas so soon!

Finding seasonal posting reasons in non-seasonal blogs

Some blogs clearly have cyclic patterns: gardens follow the natural world, folk songs follow holidays (eg workers-rights songs for labor day, patriotic songs for national days), gift suggestions follow established human seasons (Christmas, Valentines), homeschoolers generally follow the school year.

But if you look harder, you can find seasonal patterns that apply to lots of other blogs, too. For example, one well-known blogger-helper often does a post towards the end of the American college year reminding people to transfer ownership of their blogs to a non-college Google account.

Ways to do this include:

• Blogging about the similarities (or differences) between your niche and some unrelated by widely-known seasonal event  (eg "Writing poetry is not like Christmas because ...".
• Writing about famous people in your topic who have died - close to their anniversary or birthday.   
• Making up your own seasonal patter  eg   "In March, Crotchet-Blogger celebrates cable-stitch". 

Promotion existing posts vs publishing new ones

A big question for bloggers with deciduous blog topics is whether they should publish a new post each season, or just polish and promote the existing post(s).

The answer depends on the nature of the information each season:

Situation	What do do
Are there changes to the information each season?	Make a new post, link to it from the last season's posts, promote it like you do any other post.
Does exactly the same information apply each year	Review the existing post, and then promote it on social media - and perhaps in the blog itself or in other new posts.

For example, one of my blogs is about public transport news in my city.  This has clear seasonal patterns around public holidays, the tourist season, a major sporting event, and the academic year.   The sporting event causes the biggest peak, with web-traffic up by 600%, week-on-week.  Each year's  information for it is very similar: buses leave at (roughly the same time) from (exactly the same place) for (close to the same fare) as last year. But each year there are changes: slightly different times, different effects on other bus services, one year there was a park-and-ride. So for this blog, I do a new post each year.   And I go back into last year's post and add a line like

"This information is for 2013.   Click here for this year's bus services."

and I make the "here" link to a label search for the topic, so that the most recent post will always come up first in the list.

By comparison, in another blog, I've published a printable sheet of non-religious Christmas carol words for which copyright has expired.  Over time, it will be possible to add extra carols to this.  But this won't happen each year - and all the existing content will continue to be relevant forever. So I don't republish this in a new post each year.   Instead, I promote it with a gadget on the sidebar, and I share the post on my social media accounts for the blog.

Be aware that if you do decided to make a slight change to an existing seasonal post, rather than write a new one:

• RSS subscribers probably won't see the enhanced post in their feed.
• Follow-by-email subscribers will see it.

Other things to think about

When you thinking about how you can get the more traffic using the deciduous posts in your blog, there are a few other factors to keep in mind:

Look for multi-year cycles

Some events happen once every 2, 3 or more years. For example:

• Some sports events (the Olympics, the Volvo Ocean race, the Commonwealth games) happen every-so-many years. 
•  Leap years happen once every four years.
• In some countries, elections happen every five years.

These multi-year patterns can be even more powerful than the every-year ones, because less people are aware of them, and readers in general are not-so-likely to remember what you wrote four years ago.

Don't forget the Southern Hemisphere

Spring starts in September, not February, if you live in the bottom half of the world. And cars need to be prepared for winter in April, not November.

This may mean that you can re-promote posts based on natural seasons twice a year - or that you should target some seasonal posts by hemisphere.

Some readers have different holidays

It's easy to think that all your readers are just like you, and live with the same seasonal patterns that you do.   But that's not always true:

• People who don't live in America might not even know when Thanksgiving or Black Friday is, much less what it means.

• In many Western countries, Christmas is a holiday even for people who aren't religious. But there are countries where Christmas isn't a holiday at all and most people don't even know it exists.

How have you used seasonal / deciduous topics to get new interest in your blog?

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Related Articles:

Mapping out your blog's social media strategy: how your blog works with your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc accounts

5 reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

Using labels to categorise blog posts

Transferring a blog to a new owner

Follow-by-email, an easy way to offer email subscription to your blog

Letting other people send email from your Google account - and checking who can do this already

This article explains how you can control who can send mail on your behalf if you have a gmail account, why you might want to do that, and how to stop people from sending email messages on your behalf.

If you have given other people rights to publish to your blog , then you may also want to let them send emails on your blog's behalf - particularly if you are using an "organisational" email account.   I do this for several blogs - eg the one for the choir that I'm currently doing public relations for.

This is a way to let the the other people use their current email client, ie what looks to them like their "normal email", but still to send official-looking messages from your organisation or blog.

Note that this is not the same as spoofing, which is a way that people with malicious intentions create email messages which appear to come from your account, even though you didn't send them and did give anyone else permission to send them.

• Spoofing, ie sending "on behalf of" without permission is bad.
• Granting "Send as" rights is good - and is a very useful feature that Gmail offers.

How to allow another email account send emails on your behalf

Log into www.gmail.com, using the Google / Blogger account that you want to lets other people send from.

From the Options gear-wheel (top right corner), choose Settings.

Choose the Accounts and Imports tab.

Click the "Add another email address that you own" link in the "Send mail as" section.

Enter the email address you want to give rights to, and the name which you want to be displayed when people receive email sent by this address on your behalf.

Click Next

Enter the other account's password. (This is a first step to stop you from impersonating someone by sending emails on behalf of accounts which you don't own.)

Click Add Account

Wait for the verification email to arrive at the other email address (if you use a web-based system for it, you may need to open it in a different browser).

Open the message and either click the link provided or copy-and-paste the code into the gmail window.

Job done!   The email account that you named should now be able to send messages which look like they came from you.

How another email account can send emails on your behalf

Firstly, you must give the other account permission to send emails which look as though they come from you - as explained in the section above.

Once you have done that, anyone using the other account can enter you (ie your gmail account) as the message-sender, and they will be permitted to send the message like this.

How specifically they do it depends on the email system which they use: In Gmail there is simply a drop-down box beside the From address, while other tools have different approaches.

Controlling who can send emails on your behalf - how to stop people sending emails from you

If you manage an email account which regularly gives other people the right to send on your behalf, then it is a good idea to regularly review the list, and revoke the access of anyone who doesn't need to send any more. To do this:

Log into www.gmail.com

Choose Settings from the Options gear-wheel (top right corner).

Choose the Accounts and Imports tab.

The list of email addresses beside Send Mail As is all the people who have been authorized to write emails that are sent as though they come from the current account.

Beside every entry on this list, there are options to:

• Make it the sending default for your account
• Edit the sending information (mainly the display name)
• Delete its rights to send on your behalf.

If you see an email address which shoudn't be sending any more, then delete it, by clicking the Delete link.

It's a good idea to check this, also, if someone has just given you a Google account instead of using the full procedure to transfer ownership of a blog to you.

Questions / Troubleshooting

Does this only work for Gmail accounts?

No. These instructions show you how to set up your gmail account so that other email accounts can send email "from" your account. But the other acccount does not need to be a Gmail account or a Google account - provided it has a feature to let the user say what account to use as the sender.

Where is the Sent-Mail copy of the message kept?

When you send a message from Gmail with a different account selected as the sender, then the "send mail" copy of the message is put into the send-mail folder of the account that you are logged into.

If you would like the nominated account to also get a copy of the message, then the person who is writing it needs to put that nominated account is as a carbon copy (CC) or blind-carbon-copy (BCC) recipient, as well as selecting it as the From address.

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Related Articles:

Letting other people post on your blog

Understanding Google accounts

Transferring blog-ownership to a different account

Understanding Google Accounts

This article is about Google accounts:  what they are- and aren't, how to access them, and what the account-names look like.  

Blogger, Google and Google+ accounts

Once upon a time (pre 2006), there was a website on the internet called Blogger.   People created an account on Blogger, and then used it to make a blog - which was owned by their Blogger account.

Then Google (the company that made the search engine) purchased Blogger.   They wanted to integrate their products, so Blogger users had to change their original Blogger accounts to "Google accounts", which still had a Blogger profile.  Google were pretty nice about this:   they kept support old, unconverted Blogger accounts up til 2011, but eventually said that no more conversions were possible.

At the time, very few people understood the difference between Google-the-company and Google-the-search-engine, so most didn't have any idea of the power and importance of these "Google accounts".   However as the other applications available through Gaoogle accounts grew (Gmail, Picasa-web-albums, Google-custom-maps, AdSense, AdWords, etc), this became clearer.

In mid/late 2011, Google introduced Google+, which is a social-networking and identity service.  Originally, G+ accounts required people to use their real names, which some Bloggers didn't want to do.   But this policy was gradually weakened:

• Since early 2013 it has been possible to give a Google+ Page its own loginID and password - effectively making it a stand-alone G+ account,
• In mid 2014 Google announced that real-names were no longer required.

Blogger / Google profiles can be converted into Google+ accounts.

Or they can be left as normal Google accounts   (which are sometimes called "Google Minus" or "G-" accounts).

Getting a Google account

To make a new Google account, you just have to use the Create an Account link near the bottom of the account-selection list on the login-page of any product that Google offers (Gmail, Blogger, AdSense, etc).

You then have to provide a a few details - note though you have to give a first name and last name, these don't need to be your real names any more.

These days, by default, new accounts are Google+ accounts - but you can opt out of this during the sign-up process if you want.    If you do this, you won't have access to all Google's features (eg Google+ Photos) - but you will have everything you need to use Blogger.

Account names look like email address

Google account names always look like email addresses, ie they are of the form:

willy.worm@yourMail.com

If the product that you sign up with is Gmail (which is where Google accounts started, I think), then this makes sense.

However it is possible to have an account name that is simply a text-string that looks like an email address.

For a long time Google didn't even check if there was a valid email account with that address at the time you signed up   This has changed now:  Google warn you that they will send an email message to the account that you give, to verify that you own it, and that you won't have full use of the account until it is verified.

However, even today, if a Google account was created some time ago, you cannot guarantee that the person who owns a Google account still owns - or indeed ever owned - the email-address with the same name.

This means there are Google accounts called Joe.blogs@yahoo.com, and similar.   And there are even Google accounts with a name that is not, and never has been, a real email address.

Some of the confusion and problems:

• If the email address isn't a gmail one, then changing the password of the email doesn't change the password of the Google account

• Some people don't understand that their Google account name is just a set of letters: they don't realise that they can change the email address attached to their account without changing the underlying account (Dashboard > Edit Profile, identity tab).

• Some people lost access to the email address (eg because they leave their job, or use a free service and didn't log on for 30 or 60 or however-many day).

• Some people never had access to the email address, because they used a text-string that wasn't actually an address, and previously Google never checked if non-Gmail addresses actually worked.

In these cases, problems happened when that email address was the only tool that the person used to identify their Google accounts.  If it's not real, or they can't access it any more, then Google can't help when they forget their passwords,etc.  So there are some blogs that can never be accessed ever again, because Google has no way of being sure who owns the Google-account that made them.

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Related Articles: 

Blogs, Blogger and Bloggers, Google Inc vs google - some basic terms

Giving a Google+ Page its own loginID and password

Understanding Google Apps accounts

Fixing conflicting Google and Google Apps accounts

AdSense and AdWords - understanding the difference.

Moving some posts from one blog to another

This article is about how to copy some of the posts from one Blogger blog to another.

Previously, I've written about

• moving individual posts, or pages, from one blog to another and 
• moving all posts from one blog to another.   

They are in separate articles because the techniques used are quite different in each case.

If you only want to transfer some posts between two blogs, then you need to choose between:

• Moving each post individually,or
• Moving all the posts then and deleting the ones you don't want from the "new" blog.

Before you start, decide what should happen to any posts that are already in the destination blog:  if you want to delete them, you need to do it from the Posting / Edit Posts tab (press the delete link beside each one).  Don't just delete the enter blog (from the Settings / Basics tab), because that will remove your access to the URL.

How to decide

Choosing whether to most post individually, or moving all of them is firstly about maths.

You need to estimate the time needed for each option, ie

• Time to move a post individually, multiplied by the number of posts to be moved

• Time to export and import, plus (time to delete a post times the number of posts that will need to be deleted).

And then choose the smallest one.

Except - you may like to figure in the chance of making a mistake, or of wanting to make small changes to come posts along the way.  Possibly you need to consider which approach you're most comfortable with - so it may not even be about maths at all!

Either way, remember that Pages (see The Difference between Posts and Pages) in the first blog, need to be moved individually because they aren't currently included in the export file.

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Related Articles

Moving all posts from one blog to another

Moving individual posts, or pages, from one blog to another

Converting Posts into Pages

The Difference between Posts and Pages

Did you know that your blog is in the cloud?

This article explains the relationship between your blog and "the cloud", and other ways that you might be using the cloud without even realising it.

A few days ago, I received an email from Sam who works for "SingleHop, a company that specializes in cloud computing."

He explained that

"Due to recent events like Heartbleed, the Target breach and the leaking of celebrity photos to the public, the world is abuzz about "the cloud." However, you may be wondering what exactly it is and what it does. We are hoping you would be interested in sharing a post with your readers about cloud computing in everyday life.

In a nutshell, the cloud is a way to store data remotely, rather than on your home computer. This gives you easy access to your photos, documents, and other files from anywhere at any time. We are hoping that by spreading awareness about how the cloud works, we can help others make smarter decisions about what they post/share online.

We have put together a graphic discussing some of the most common ways you use the cloud. We would love to share this with you so that you can use the information to help create a post about how you use cloud computing in your day-to-day life.

Being the suspicious sort, I wondered if this was come kind of spam / scam. But it didn't feel totally spammy: there was no link to SingleHop in the email, his message text didn't come up in any of the hoax or urban-legend sites, and the company looks legitimate - though I cannot see how they will benefit from being linked to from my blog.

I wrote back to Sam, and sure enough he sent me a graphic. It looks sensible-enough, doesn't appear to have any viruses in it, and a Google image search isn't showing it anywhere else on the web. So far, so good.

I had asked "what's the catch" and he replied "No catch, we're just trying to spark discussion and create awareness about how people use the cloud. We’d love for you to talk about how you use the cloud, whether it’s to be productive at work, share special moments with friends or relax at home."

So here goes - a blog post about blogs, bloggers, Blogger and the cloud, with an illustration compliments of SingleHop (who didn't ask for the backlink).

Your blog is already in "the cloud"

For all the hype, "the cloud" is nothing new - at least not for individuals.

 As Sam said the cloud is just "a way to store data remotely, rather than on your home computer". 

I've been doing this on in Blogger since 2006 and doing it seriously (ie writing for more than just myself) since 2009. I've been using internet-email since 1987 - eve though most of the world didn't start until ten years later.   More recently I switched to using email accounts that let me keep all my email on-line and access it via IMAP rather than downloading it to my PC using POP3.

Obviously - if you have a blog made with Blogger, then it is already in "the cloud".

And this is true whether your have a public blog, or a private blog with restricted readers:  even those select people will be seeing the version of your blog that it on the internet.

The same if you are using Picasa-web-albums or any other picture-hosting service to keep photos that you show in your blog.   Or Youtube to store your videos, Google-Contacts to manage your address book, Google Drive to store the PDF files that you distribute through it, or a Facebook page, Twitter account or Pinterest boards to promote your blog.

These are all "in the cloud" because people who see them on your blog see the version that you uploaded to the internet, not the one on your home computer. This means that the pictures, videos etc can still be seen, even when your computer is turned off.

There are also new ways of interacting with your blog, which "the cloud" is making possible, eg I'm currently experimenting with an app called Pixlr, as a way to manage the size of photos loaded to my "quirky pictures from my city" photoblog directly from my phone.   But the basic idea - that your blog is "in the cloud" hasn't changed since well before the cloud became hip.

Are there other ways that you can, should and do use "the cloud"?

Probably. Some of these will just be about the way your blog develops - for example if you start makign vlogs (video-blog-posts), you can store them on YouTube.

Others could be more suable. Looking through Sam's picture (below), one issue that stands out for me is backup: as well as using Google Takeout to make periodic copies of the contents of all my blogs, I should probably start to save these somwhere extra-safe just in case anything bad happens.

And for some types of blog, using streaming-media might be important.  SingleHop says that this is for entertainment.  But I can easily see it being useful for choral singers who are learning new works, teachers who want to share their materials, and even sports players who want to train to specific regimes that are distributed by "video", and available to play when needed - as well as for bloggers who write about these topics.

More information

Sam's graphic is shown below: he didn't say whether it it was ok to include in my post or not, so I thought I'd risk it and share it with you - I'm sure he'll be in touch if he wants me to take it down!

Most probably, your blog itself will fit into his social media category: blogs are really just ultra-long Twitter posts, delivered inside a tool that gives lots of creative freedom about how material is displayed.

But in some cases, you may fit into the collaboration category, if you are writing a team blog and have set up other team-members to write in it. B ut what do you think - does it belong somewhere else?

What you can and cannot know

For most bloggers, their use of "the cloud" will be pretty invisible: they see themselves as using Blogger or Wordpress or whatever, rather than using "the cloud"

If you look harder at Sam's company website, you will see that they are offering virtual private cloud services. In very, very rough terms, this means they own a very large set of computers, and rent out space on them - set up so that only people from the organisation which has leased the space can see the space and use the computer-power behind it.  This is different to public cloud services, where the processing power is shared with other people using the same computer.

For almost all cloud systems that you will use as a blogger, you aren't going to be certain whether they are based on public-cloud or private-cloud services - but for all practical purposes, you don't need to know.

But is it safe?

This is the biggest question for most when people someone starts talking about "the cloud" - especially if they've heard about passwords being hacked etc

Certainly my first reaction was that the companies I work within my day job would never use the cloud, because they would have to put too much sensitive data onto computers outside their control. And for some, this is true.

But what I eventually realised is that generally the large "cloud services companies" provide better computer security than you do in your house - and far better than the single IT-staff person in a small company can manage.  So overall, I think it's now safe to say that "the cloud is as secure as any other computing tool you use", and that the biggest risk to the safety of your information comes from choosing bad passwords, or having viruses / malware attack your computer.

What do you think?

Are you happy that your blog is in "the cloud" - would you prefer a blogging solution that let you keep your private blogs, at least, in a non-cloud place?

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Related Articles:

Understanding Picasa: Picasa-web-albums are Picasa "in the cloud"

Planning a social-media strategy for your blog.

Letting other people post to your blog.

Blogs, bloggers, Blogger - understanding the basic defintions around blogging

How to find other blogs to read

This is a quick guide to searching for other blogs to read, now that Google's blog-search tool has been retired.

If you write a blog, then reading other blogs "in your niche" (ie about similar topics) is a really good idea. This lets you keep up with what's going on and what other people are saying, and helps you to think up new blog-post ideas.

An RSS-reader is a great tool for managing everything you need to read:  it's basically a folder with links to all the blogs and websites you want to follow, which shows when they have been updated.   To make best use of it. as soon as you see an interesting website, go to your RSS reader software and subscribe to the website's RSS-feed there-and-then: otherwise you will almost certainly forget.   Alternatively you can subscribe-by-email - provided the site offers that option - but many bloggers find that their email gets overwhelmed if they do this with more than a few sites.

Some RSS software suggests websites that you might like to follow - although generally I've found that the suggestions are pretty broad and not overly useful.

So -  how else can you find new blogs to read?

How to find other blogs to read

Google's BlogSearch tool, RIP

Google previously gave us a dedicated blog-search tool at www.google.com/blogsearch, which was available from various places, and still comes up in the search results if you google "how to find other blogs"

But apparently this is now re-directing to the Google home page.   And even though I'm seeing that the re-directed URL is https://www.google.com/blogsearch?gws_rd=ssl - the search results that it returns are most definitely not just blogs.)

You can still get to it without re-direction at the moment, by going to https://www.google.com/?tbm=blg, but the predictions are that this won't work for much longer.

Google News

This tool is available at https://news.google.com

It looks like there are a couple of versions available.

In the newer one, you can apparently click Search Tools, select the “All news” drop down, and choose “Blogs.

In the older one, which I still have, to prioritise blogs in your news-feed you need to:

• Click on the gear wheel (button with a picture of a cog on it) near the top right of the screeen, 
• Click on the Settings link that is to the right of Save, and 
• Under Sources set Blogs to More and Press Releases to None
• Click Save Changes.

At the moment, the News content from blogs isn't the best - but indications from Google are that it will get better as news-bloggers register their sites.

Search

Old-fashioned searching is probably one of the most powerful way of finding blogs.  To use Search to find other blogs:

• If you follow a topic, then you should regularly search in Google for interesting questions in your niche, but not choose the most-obvious results from the results page. Instead choose the ones you haven't heard of, but which look promising.

• Use a different search engine - either a mainstream one like www.bing.com or www.yahoo.com, or a more specialist custom search in your niche.

• Include the word "blog" when you are searching. (This returns websites that use the word "blog" as well as blogs, so isn't perfect. But it sometimes helps to turn up new sources.)

• Search for interesting key words together with the phrase "site:blogspot.com". Now, this will only give you sites that don't have custom domains - but some of them are great blogs.

Browse

One of the most important ways of finding sites is by - finding sites.    Be curious with everything you read:  ask who wrote it, who else they follow, and what they are telling you about where they got their information.

Visit their sites, instead of just reading their blog posts in your RSS subscription tool, and look at their blogrolls and lists of interesting sites, and see if there are any you don't know about.

Follow links in their posts, and assess if they are pointing to blogs that you should be reading.

Look at their Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites:   she who they follow or interact with - and then check if those people have blogs.

Ask

This may seem strange but simply asking your readers for suggestions can unearth some blogs that you won't find any other way.     Of course it won't work if you ask on your blog and don't have many regular readers yet - but you have nothing to lose.

But there's no reason why you cannot ask in other mediums - eg by leaving a question on your Facebook page or the page of anyone else who might know (and will let you write there0

Similarly you could post a question on Twitter, and a time when people with lots of knowledge about blogs in your niche are likely to be posting.

Use Blogger's Profile linking service

This approach was first described in 2007 - which seems like eons ago.   And today won't work for bloggers who have a Google+ profile.  But it might work still for new bloggers, in particular.

Look in a Blog Directory

These are also somewhat old-hat, but some blog directories like Alltop and Technorati are still useful if the topics they feature suit your niche.

How do you keep the list of blogs that you read fresh and up-to-date?

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Related Articles:

Understanding RSS

How to make a real website using Blogger

The Ten-Minute-Guide to starting a blog

This article is a fast-and-furious guide to starting a blog - with a focus on getting started rather than researching to the nth degree.

Months ago, I started a properly researched article about "how to started with blogging". It's still a work in progress, and when it eventually gets finished it will have some great advice about researching blog-concepts and choosing great names.

But today I needed a quick-and-dirty version, for someone who doesn't need SEO or a fancy name. Here's what I shared with them.

How to get started with making a blog

Know your objectives

Think about what you want to do, what you want to write about, and what you want to achieve from it. 

Write this down.

Be prepared to revisit these objectives every time you need to make a decision about something.  Imagine you need to choose between a girly-pink looking template or rugged-outdoors one.  Simple - just look at your objectives and see who you're writing for.

Choose a platform

There are lots of alternatives for tools that you can use. Mostly though, it boils down to Wordpress or Blogger.

Wordpress disciples will tell you that it is The Only Way, usually with a far-away look in their eyes.

Personally, I don't like zealots, and I think that Blogger is good-enough to get started with - and there are ways to change to Wordpress later on if you want to put the work into learning it.

Choose a name

Every blog needs a name. What that name is really doesn't matter that much. You just need one that you can live with: If you become wildly popular, then the rest of the world will love whatever you chose. If you don't, then it won't be due to the name you chose.

So go to the platform you chose, and start a blog with any old name that isn't taken already. Just make sure that you can remember what it is, and that you're not too embarrassed to tell your mother about it (this alone will stop you from choosing anything really stupid).

Do some basic setup

My guide to what this involves with Blogger is here.

Even if you don't use Blogger, you probably need to think about the issues covered there, especially about security vs public access.

Write

Start writing

• Write two posts of 300+ words each.  Link them to each other: for example If post one is about crossing Australia by camel, then post two might start "When we got to Adelaide after our camel ride, we decided to try ... - and you need to put a link from the words "our camel ride" back to post one: this is called cross- linking.

• Write another five posts. Put cross-links between them. Don't link every post to every post. But make sure that every post has 2-3 links, and that every post is linked to at least once.

• Write five more. Cross link them to each other and the first seven.

Then go back to your objectives, think about how hard it's been to get this far, and figure out if you want to spend any more time on this hobby.   If you do - keep writing.

How to get readers

If getting other people to read your stuff is one of your objectives, then in no particular order:

• Email a link to your mum or your dad. Ask them to visit every day, just in case you've said something new.

• Put a link in your email signature.

• Share your posts on Google+ (even if you just share to Public - it seems to make a difference)

• Contribute to some forums / bulletin boards where you can put links to specific posts as part of an answer.  But I really do mean contribute. Your other content should vastly outweigh your self-links, so you aren't seen as a spammer.

• Set up a Twitter account for the blog, and do the same thing.

• Set up a Facebook page. Invite all your friends to like it. Every time you post to the blog, post a link to it on the FB page too.

f you think that Google+, Twitter and Facebook are a waste of time - then that's fine as far as your personal life goes. But if you want to promote a blog or website, then you simply have to get over yourself and use social media for blog promotions anyway.

How to make your blog stand out from the rest

If you've got some big objectives about having lots of readers or being famous, then you'll need to make your blog really stand out. This is a never-ending process, but here are some good first steps:

• Stir up trouble: Be controversial or outrageous in what you write. But do be sure you have the stomach and the stamina needed: People will discover that it's your who's writing the posts, even if you try to hide it. You will get abuse, and maybe legal threats.
  
  Also, remember that writing 2 witty posts is easy, doing it every day / week or even month is a lot more difficult.)

• Choose a niche, ie specific topic to write about, that no one else has written about. Or one that others have covered, but go for a different angle - eg if everyone else has described how they partied through Australia on the Oz Experience Bus, you focus on how befriended pensioners as you crawled through Queensland on the local bus, travelling only one town a day. Or something.

• Spend some time googling possible niches before you start. But don't get caught in the trap of forever researching and never writing.

• Read some other similar blogs, see what is successful, and do your own variation on that. Not the same thing - that's just plagiarism and you'll get caught. But something similar.

• Prepare your posts in private, publish when they're pristine. No one wants to read your typos.

• Use good photos or illustrations. If you don't have a picture to go with something, don't bother blogging about it.

Job Done!

That's it:   getting started with blogging in one 10-minute stream of consciousness (+ editing time :-) )

There are about 494,432,987 million similar articles on the internet, so if you need more suggestions, Google "how to make a blog", and take it from there.

Happy posting.

TL/DR

If the ten-minute guide is too much, try this 45 second one:

• Go to http://www.blogger.com. 
• Sign up if it makes you. 
• Accept the terms and conditions. 
• Click New Blog. 
• Follow the prompts. 
• Start writing.

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Related Articles:

Getting started with blogger

Linking two blog posts together

Using social networks to promote a blog

Preparing a blog post in private

Use diagrams to make pictures for blog posts

Finding a picture's location (URL) in Google+ Photos or Picasa-web-albums

This article is about how to find the URL (web-address) of a picture that is stored in Picasa web albums.  It is written for Blogger users, but the same technique can be used by anyone who uses Picasa-web-albums.

Google+ Photos, Picasa-web-albums and your PC

An introduction to Picasa. describes the relationship between Picasa and Picasa-web-albums.  A key difference between is that :

• Picasa is a program, written by Google, which runs on your PC even when it's not connected to the internet, and 
• Picasa-web-albums is a Google program that you use through your web-browser and some accompanying space on the internet where your pictures can be stored.
• Google+ Photos is another Google program that you use through a web-browser (Chrome, FireFox, Internnet Explorer, Safari, etc), and a space on the space on the internet where you can keep pictures.   

Both Picasa-web-albums and Google+ Photos use the same space on the internet to store photos for each person.    This means that if there are features (eg finding the URL of an individual photo) that are not  available in one program, then you can just use the other program instead.

This means that each and every picture in your Piscasa-web-albums has a unique URL, ie web-address, where it can be found.

How to find the URL of a picture in Google+ Photos or Picasa-web-albums

• Sign in to Picasa-web-albums, using the google account that owns the album that has the picture you want.   (If you are already signed in to Blogger you may not have to log in again.).

• If you are re-directed to Google+ Photos, either follow the Return link - or use the approach described here to return to Picasa-web-albums.

• Find the album which contains the picture you want to find the web-address for.
  
  
• Click on the album to open it. 
  Note:  each album has one picture, usually the first one loaded, set as the cover.   Be careful to actually open the album, and not just work with the album cover, because the URL for it is not the same as the URL for the picture.
  
  
• Click on the picture you want:  it will open in a large "photo" view
  
  EITHER:
  
  
• Click on "Full details page" in the right-hand bar.
  This opens the picture in a new browser window or tab.
  Copy the contents of the address bar in this new window - this is the URL of the photo..
  
  OR
  
  
• Right-click on the picture once you're in "photo" view, and choose the appropriate option for your browser.   In the current versions, this is:
  
  Chrome: Copy image URL
  Safari: Copy image address
  Internet Explorer: Properties > Copy the URL address shown
  Firefox: Copy image location
  

Job done!   
The web-address of the photo is now in your computer's clipboard, and can be pasted into other places where you might need to use the photo's URL, eg in adding a photo to a post, or as a gadget.

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Related Articles

Showing a picture as a gadget in Blogger

How to put a photo into a blog-post

Understanding Google accounts

An introduction to Picasa

How to find a gadget in the Add a Gadget list - quickly

This article explains a quick way to find the widget that you are looking for in the list that Blogger displays when you use the Add a Gadget tool.

When you start to add a gadget to your blog, Blogger opens a new window listing all the existing page-elements that are available (in two tabs) and allowing you to upload a widget of your own (in a third tab.)

Currently, the first tab (called Basics) has 28 gadgets listed, while the second one (called More gadgets) has 899, displayed in pages of 30.

There is a search-for-gadgets feature available on the second tab - but it doesn't return gadgets that are listed on the first tab.   And even when it did, I didn't recommend it, because sometimes 3rd party gadgets with similar names were listed before the official widgets developed by Blogger.

So, to find a gadget that's listed in the Basics tab, you have to scroll down the list until you see the gadget you want.   However there are some problems with this.

• Given that there are 28 gadgets listed, but only about 4 shown at each click (may be different if you have a larger screen), this can be a lot of clicks.
• It's very easy to miss the gadget you want, and keep clicking through to the bottom instead.

But there is a very simple way to go directly to the gadget you want, provided you know what it is called, or some words that are shown in the description of that gadget and no other.

How to navigate directly to your desired gadget

Choose Add a gadget

When the new window has opened, use your browser's "find" command.

• In Chrome and Firefox, this is ctrl /f ,   ie hold down the Control key while pressing the "f" key once.

Type in a  few letters of the name (or description) of the gadget you want.  

Note:  these can be any letter, they don't have to be at the start.  But they must appear together.

Usually, as soon as you start typing, your web-browser will start scrolling down to the first place in the screen where the letters you type appear.   So if you choose the gadget details you type carefully, you should end up scrolled down to the gadget you want very quickly indeed.

The scroll bar at the side shows how far down the window you have come, and also if there are more cases of those letters further down the page.

And once you are at the gadget you want, you can just click the name or the blue plus-sign on the right side to open the gadget configuration page.

To sum up:

Use your browser's Find tool to go straight to what your're looking for in the Add a Gadget list. 
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What to search for to find popular gadgets

The words that I search for most often when I'm adding gadgets are:

• HTM - for the HTML/Javsascript gadget
• Ads - for the Adsense gadget
• Link L - for the linked-list gadget.

What about you - what gadgets do you most frequently add to your blogs?

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Related Articles:

Backing up your gadget settings

How to add a gadget to your blog

Where to find the HTML code for popular Blogger widgets