Accessing Pinterest Analytics, and verifying your website with Pinterest

This Quick-tip is about how you can verify the website (or blog) associated with your Pinterest account - and solving a small problem with the meta-tag that Pinterest give you.

Pinterest have recently announced Pinterest Web Analytics, which will show you "how many people have pinned content from your site, what content is most popular with pinners, and more."   (From their announcement email.

To register to Pinterest Web Analytics, you need to

1. Get early access to Pinterest’s new look.
2. Verify your website, using the tools listed here.

After your website is verified, there will be an Analytics option on the top-right menu whenever you are using Pinterest.

Verifying your blog with Pinterest:

There is one slight twitch to the verification process:  As I've explained previously, Bloggers don't have access to load files to their site's root directory.   Instead we need to use the meta-tag option, currently on the bottom left of the box which opens when you choose "Verify your website" from Pinterest's settings.

The meta-tag that Pinterest gives you looks like this

<meta name="p:domain_verify" content="a-weird-collection-of-letters-and-numbers" >

Add it to your blog's template the same way you would add any other meta-tag.

If you see a message like this when you try to Preview or Save the change:

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure that all XML elements are closed properly. <br/> XML error message: The element type "meta" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</meta>".
Error 500

then it means is that the meta tag that Pinterest gave you has not been closed properly.   To fix it, you just need to add a "close tag" command  ( </meta> ), so that the code looks like:

<meta name="p:domain_verify" content="a-weird-collection-of-letters-and-numbers" >
</meta>

After the tag is added and you have saved your template, click the Complete Verification button in the Pinterest window, to tell Pinterest to look at your website and make the connection.

New resources and help-options for Google AdSense publishers

This Quick-tip is about some new help resources and options that Google has recently introduced for AdSense publishers - including ones who use AdSense through Blogger.

If you put AdSense ads into your blog or website, you are known as a "publisher", because you "publish" materials where advertisements, placed by people known as advertisers, can be placed.

Recently Google announced a simplified, personalized contact options page for AdSense publishers, backed by an an email-based "help" service.

This is a single source for many commonly used AdSense troubleshooting tools and articles, which often help you to resolve problems very quickly.

Some troubleshooters lead to "issue-specific contact forms that generate emails to our team". These are backed by automated tools, that help to fix problems very quickly.

Google say that "The new contact options page, troubleshooters, and specialized contact forms are available to all publishers with an approved AdSense account".

Also, publishers who usually earn $US25 or more a week are now eligible for consultations via email, to help with

• Managing your AdSense account
• Discussing strategies to grow more business.

Account-holders who qualify see an alert about this on the contact options page. Google target a 2-day response time, although they note it may be slower during peak times.

It's not clear whether publishers who were signed up quickly via a publishing partner (like Blogger) will qualify or not.  I cannot test this, because I signed up using the older full-sign-up process - but I'd suspect that they won't.

Easy professional translations for YouTube video captioning

This quick-tip is about an extension to YouTube's captioning service. It's relevant to bloggers who focus strongly on videos as a complement to their blog content.

In Septemeber 2012, YouTube introduced a feature that let you or your friend translate the captions of videos (that you own) into additional languages.

Now they've partnered with some professional translation firms so you can get a quote, order, receive and pay for professional translation - all within YouTube / Google.    So you don't have to worry about whether your friend's high-school Spanish is really good enough for your international audience!

The first step to doing this is uploading a transcript file for your video. Something to bear in mind if you do this:  If SEO matters for your blog, then you probably don't want to put the transcript into both YouTube and the blog, because that would create duplicate content.

A simple time-management tool for bloggers

This QuickTip shares a template that I used to help me be productive when I was working as a free-lance blogger (and a other things besides).

Blogging can seem overwhelming: there just is so much to learn, to do, to read

And if you don't have a boss, official work-hours or school-pickup-times to structure the day, it can be easy to get to the end of the week and discover that you've done lots of research, but nothing has actually been finished and published..

I had a few months between jobs, and found that it really helped to plan my week, by:

• setting very small, achievable goals for each of my blogs, 
• allocating my time in two hour blocks.
• writing this all down on old-fashioned pen-and-paper on a one-page-at-a-glance sheet that I could hang on the wall, tick of my achievements and keep track of the progress.

A week-planner template

Here's the template that I used to do my planning every Sunday night.  

 It's licensed under Creative Commons, so you are free to copy, adapt and share it.

My tips for being productive:

• Choose a set time to review your plan each week.   Mine was Sunday night - but any time is fine, so long as it's consistent.

• If your blog is not your Number One priority, then allocate time, before you set goals. There's no point getting six goals for your blog if you can only spend two hours working on it this week!

• Make sure that there are some small, totally-achievable-in-one-hour goals, and some that are simply steps toward doing a bigger project.

• If you need to be flexible, fill it in using a pencil and adapt as the week goes on:  this is a tool to make life better, not a way to overburden yourself.

• Make sure you allow time for meals, housework, exercise, socialising and relaxation - and even sleeping in sometimes (but not every day).

• Give yourself some weekends and "annual leave" days: ones when you choose not to schedule all your time, or any of it.

What has worked for you?

Custom-search-engine adds an "overlay" results layout

This quick-tip is about a new overlay results format which Google Custom Search Engines have just introduced - and which looks like it will be their new standard. 

Custom Search Engines have announced a new layout - which appears to have become their new standard option.

Search-engine creation is much the same as it was, but at the end you only get one piece of code to install, and it can just go in the place where you want it (no more messing with editing the <header> in your template).

The search results page is shown as an overlay on top of your regular page.  As always with custom-search-engines, there are ads-by-Google at the top of the page, and if you have already become an AdSense publisher you can use your custom-search-engine to share the revenue.

The big question is - will this new layout approach work in Blogger?    If I was writing an article, I'd test it out somewhere else first, and have some advice about the options, likely problems etc.   But since this is only a quick-tip, this post is my research!   Below, you should see a search-engine, which is set up to search inside Blogger-HAT.   Search for something in it, and you will hopefully see how the overlay search results work.    (If not, I'll come back and change this post as soon as I know more about the problem and how to solve it.)

See an example of custom-search-engine overlay results format

Try it out here:

Is this layout better?

If the layout works, my next decision is whether I should switch the overall Blogger-Helper-Search tool over to use it.

 What do you think?   Like the overlay search results approach, or hate it?

A quick way to keep an eye on what is posted to interesting YouTube channels

This quick-tip is about subscribing to a YouTube channel using an RSS feed-reader, like Google Reader

Most bloggers know about other blogs and websites in their niche that they want to keep an eye on, to either know what's going on, or as inspiration for their own posts.

Previously I've explained that RSS was invented to make this simpler: you can get a summary of changes on all interesting websites in the one place (called a feed-reader), rather than having to regularly visit each site individually.

Video is increasingly popular: many bloggers are putting videos in their posts or their posts into videos, and some have even abandoned their blogs and are only publishing new content to a YouTube channel.

I've just found that it's very easy to subscribe to a YouTube user or channel in RSS / Google reader, meaning you can see a list of new videos from you reader, without having to go to the channel in YouTube.

Follow these steps:

• Find the channel or person you want to subscribe to in YouTube

• Right-click on their name or icon, and copy the URL / web-address / link location (the precise name depends on the browser you are using - you want the place that clicking the link takes you to, not the location of the image-file used to make the link)

• Go into your feed-reader, and subscribe to that link (in Google Reader, this is done using a red button near top left corner of the screen labelled "subscribe" - just click it, paste in the link and click the Add button).

The link will be something like  

http://www.youtube.com/user/MariahIsTheQueen  or http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX9_dIohJBxlizx14AozTng

If it has something else after the name (eg   ?feature=watch), then delete that part before you subscribe  you just need a link saying whether it points to a user or channel, and the name of that user channel.

Example of subscribing to a channel about rocket-science in YouTube