Action Sports Blog Resurection

That was a long long pause between my last post and this one. Lots of things have happened, like breaking up with my long time girlfriend and dealing with that shit. That was hard. It took my mind of internet things for quite a while. Then came the Google SERP and algorithm updates that kicked some of my sites into their shins and made me rethink things, made me lost my motivation and then get it back again. It's hard to go from alsom 100$ a day back to 20$. But on the other hand it's true a have been very passive and lazy in the last 1-2 years when it comes to my sites. Most of the time was spent checking earnings and stats. Which is fun but doesn't help build or rank sites.

Anyway... the recent changes are leading kind of away from sniper - one mini niche - one keyword sites. Fortunately I have expanded most of my sites to target many keywords. So even mini sites were not do or die dependent on one keyword.

For instance if you get 80% of your traffic from your main keyword and your site drops - you are screwed. If you get 30% from your main keyword and 70% from all other long tail versions of it and related keywords then a drop in the main keyword doesn't hit you that hard.

And what I have found out is that sites with lots of content, lots of different content have a better ratio between main keyword and all the other long tail keywords. More power to bigger number of keywords and less to the main one. This is good.

Also - I decided to return to sites that I enjoy making. And this are action sport sites or better that one surfing snowboarding and other alternative sports blog that was the first site that I ever put up. It has been 3 years since my last post on that blog and the traffic has been CONSTANT the whole time. During all the ups and downs and algo changes that site remained static. The CTR sucks, at least there are some affiliate sales...nothing to be really excited about but it's what a really enjoy to write about and I've been pumping out posts in the last few days. And I've moved this blog from Joomla to WP. Sorry Joomla but you suck. You are just too much of a pain in the ass to maintain. Otherwise a cool, simple and powerful CMS  but I don't want to take a vacation everytime a Joomla upgrade comes out, SEF URL's change and stuff like that.

So now I have only one Joomla site left. I'm really sorry that I didn't put all my sites on wordpress. Some ore running on other simpler scripts but at least they are light, simple and not updated. Unlike Joomla. Sound funny but this is a good thing :).

Anyway... blog has a semi new template that I like - Pagelines, and some new posts about mountainbiking and surfing. And about a stupid thing called wavejet and about Travis Rice new snowboard movie - The Art Of Flight. And I have included some links to in throughout this post so feel free to click them and check it out :).

New blogs on the block

LOL, are those New Kids On The Block still around? Yeah, I'm that old that I remember them. Right, enough about that. And more about a few new blogs. Why would you want to start a new blog? More blog is always better that less blogs. If you want to do some bussines online, why would you only have one? I mean, setting up a new blog takes like..well, it depends where and how you set it up..not that much time and definitely not that much money. If you do it on Blogger it's free.

If you get your own hosting and domain it costs a few bucks but it is a REALLY SMALL INVESTMENT if you consider that this very blog can also be an online bussiness. Well not this one, the hypothetical new blog.

If you want to earn something online than you need to get as much unique quality content online as possible. Build yourself a newtwork of blogs, sites, lenses, accounts, hubs, directories, forums... whatever. And next time you will want to promote something you will be miles ahead of the ordinary on blog guy.

Now to the two new blogs. The first one is about FOOD! Yeah, I love a good meal and I kind of like to cook, but I do not like to cook for very long time since this is time I would rather spend doing something else. So I created a blog about recipes that are simple, quick and easy to make - a Quick and Easy recipes blog. This means recipes that are not made out of some exotic plant or animal that only lives on Christmas island in the Pacific and only one store in New York sell. These are also recipes that do not require you to use all of your pots and pans and have a mountain of dishes to do later. These are just the kind of recipes that I like. Yeah, simple, quick,easy...

And the next one is a technology blog. I like gadgets, I own gadget, so why wouldnt I share some of my experinences with them. I used this blog a lot for blogging about my Nokia N85 and I think I will probably take this to my new blog that I have called The Stupid Technology Reviews Blog. Why Stupid? Because the name without stupind was already taken LOL, and because if I screew something up I can say - hey this is a stupid technology blog, what did you expect? LOL. Right, what I would like to point out is the beautifull template this blog has. At least to me :). I love it that is clean and simple without any crap and I love the color combination. It's just soooo much better than this white & blue over here.

I might change all my other blogs to that template...I'll see.

Anyway, guy (no guys, guy as in singular) get of your ass and start a blog yourself. Reading about it won't make it happen.

How to insert/show HTML and other code in Blogger post?

Normaly if you copy-paste some code into the edit HTML or Compose window in your Creat post form in Blogger the code will render and show what it is supposed to show. But what if I want to show you the code, not the result of the code. 

How do I insert HTML or PHP or Javascript code into a Blogger post?

I want something like the code in this poste where I wrote about the ugly and simple Blogger templates. The solution is simple.

1. Copy the code into your NOTEPAD!
2. Use Edit->Replace (or Ctrl+H) and in find all the < and replace them with & l t ; (delete the spaces between the characters, without spaces you would just see another < here) 
3. Use Edit->Replace (or Ctrl+H) and in find all the > and replace them with & g t ; (delete the spaces between the characters, without spaces you would just see another > here)
   
4. Copy the code from NOTEPAD into the Blogger post
5. And you are done

What have you done? The & l t ; is another way of telling the browser to shov a <.

Simple!

How to get a crappy ugly looking Blogger template like I have?

First let me explain why would you want to have an "ugly" looking template like this one :)? First of all, I don't really think this temaplte is fugly. It's simple, clean, without all the stupid bells and whistles that contribute NOTHING to the blog itself. All they do is distract. Booohooo, look at my shiny blog, at least it's beautiful if the content is not woth reading....

Minimal. Simple. Think Google. Why is Google so successful with their simple (ugly?) interface? Because it works!

Besides that - if you want your website to bring you some money using Adsense or whatever, there are two benefits of having an ugly clean template:

- people that are used to all the shiny blogs will come to your website and think that your content can not be very good and worth anything if the template is so spartan. So they will probably leave a bit faster that they otherwise would and they would preferably leave by clicking on one of your ads. And second...

- is distraciton. Every element of the screen is a possible distraction for the visitors eye. If you want your ads to stand out you want as little distractions as possible. No badges, no widgets, no link, no colors, no pictures, no twitter crap, no blog catalog, no who is online, no who is following who and who is whos friend and how am I feeling at the moment, no favourite songs, bands, movies and other lists, no favorite books, celebrities...none of that crap. You want good content, simple navigation through your site and that's it.

So how to get an ugly simple minimalistic template on Blogger?

The minimal template is a good start. Select minimal template. Then enter your dashboard -> layout and fonts and colors and play with your colors. All you want are the following colors: black for the text, blue for the links and white for everything else. Then enter page elements and throw away all the unnecessary Gadgets/Widgets/page elements...whatever. 

And you are done. Or you can just have the same template as me nad just copy this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>

  <head>

    <b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

    

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>

<title><data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/></title>

<b:else/>

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

</b:if>

    <b:skin><![CDATA[/*

-----------------------------------------------

Blogger Template Style

Name:     Minima

Designer: Douglas Bowman

URL:      www.stopdesign.com

Date:     26 Feb 2004

Updated by: Blogger Team

----------------------------------------------- */

/* Variable definitions

   ====================

   <Variable name="bgcolor" description="Page Background Color"

             type="color" default="#fff" value="#ffffff">

   <Variable name="textcolor" description="Text Color"

             type="color" default="#333" value="#333333">

   <Variable name="linkcolor" description="Link Color"

             type="color" default="#58a" value="#0066CC">

   <Variable name="pagetitlecolor" description="Blog Title Color"

             type="color" default="#666" value="#0066CC">

   <Variable name="descriptioncolor" description="Blog Description Color"

             type="color" default="#999" value="#333333">

   <Variable name="titlecolor" description="Post Title Color"

             type="color" default="#c60" value="#0066CC">

   <Variable name="bordercolor" description="Border Color"

             type="color" default="#ccc" value="#ffffff">

   <Variable name="sidebarcolor" description="Sidebar Title Color"

             type="color" default="#999" value="#0066CC">

   <Variable name="sidebartextcolor" description="Sidebar Text Color"

             type="color" default="#666" value="#333333">

   <Variable name="visitedlinkcolor" description="Visited Link Color"

             type="color" default="#999" value="#0066CC">

   <Variable name="bodyfont" description="Text Font"

             type="font" default="normal normal 100% Georgia, Serif" value="normal normal 120% Verdana, sans-serif">

   <Variable name="headerfont" description="Sidebar Title Font"

             type="font"

             default="normal normal 78% 'Trebuchet MS',Trebuchet,Arial,Verdana,Sans-serif" value="normal normal 70% Verdana, sans-serif">

   <Variable name="pagetitlefont" description="Blog Title Font"

             type="font"

             default="normal normal 200% Georgia, Serif" value="normal bold 266% Verdana, sans-serif">

   <Variable name="descriptionfont" description="Blog Description Font"

             type="font"

             default="normal normal 78% 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif" value="normal bold 78% Georgia, Times, serif">

   <Variable name="postfooterfont" description="Post Footer Font"

             type="font"

             default="normal normal 78% 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif" value="normal normal 69% 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif">

   <Variable name="startSide" description="Side where text starts in blog language"

             type="automatic" default="left" value="left">

   <Variable name="endSide" description="Side where text ends in blog language"

             type="automatic" default="right" value="right">

*/

/* Use this with templates/template-twocol.html */

body {

  background:$bgcolor;

  margin:0;

  color:$textcolor;

  font:x-small Georgia Serif;

  font-size/* */:/**/small;

  font-size: /**/small;

  text-align: center;

  }

a:link {

  color:$linkcolor;

  text-decoration:none;

  }

a:visited {

  color:$visitedlinkcolor;

  text-decoration:none;

  }

a:hover {

  color:$titlecolor;

  text-decoration:underline;

}

a img {

  border-width:0;

  }

/* Header

-----------------------------------------------

 */

#header-wrapper {

  width:800px;

  margin:0 auto 10px;

  border:1px solid $bordercolor;

  }

#header-inner {

  background-position: center;

  margin-left: auto;

  margin-right: auto;

}

#header { 

  margin: 5px;

  border: 1px solid $bordercolor;

  text-align: center;

  color:$pagetitlecolor;

}

#header h1 {

  margin:5px 5px 0;

  padding:15px 20px .25em;

  line-height:1.2em;

  text-transform:uppercase;

  letter-spacing:.2em;

  font: $pagetitlefont;

}

#header a {

  color:$pagetitlecolor;

  text-decoration:none;

  }

#header a:hover {

  color:$pagetitlecolor;

  }

#header .description {

  margin:0 5px 5px;

  padding:0 20px 15px;

  max-width:700px;

  text-transform:uppercase;

  letter-spacing:.2em;

  line-height: 1.4em;

  font: $descriptionfont;

  color: $descriptioncolor;

 }

#header img {

  margin-$startSide: auto;

  margin-$endSide: auto;

}

/* Outer-Wrapper

----------------------------------------------- */

#outer-wrapper {

  width: 800px;

  margin:0 auto;

  padding:10px;

  text-align:$startSide;

  font: $bodyfont;

  }

#main-wrapper {

  width: 550px;

  float: $startSide;

  word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */

  overflow: hidden;     /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */

  }

#sidebar-wrapper {

  width: 220px;

  float: $endSide;

  word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */

  overflow: hidden;      /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */

}

/* Headings

----------------------------------------------- */

h2 {

  margin:1.5em 0 .75em;

  font:$headerfont;

  line-height: 1.4em;

  text-transform:uppercase;

  letter-spacing:.2em;

  color:$sidebarcolor;

}

/* Posts

-----------------------------------------------

 */

h2.date-header {

  margin:1.5em 0 .5em;

  }

.post {

  margin:.5em 0 1.5em;

  border-bottom:1px dotted $bordercolor;

  padding-bottom:1.5em;

  }

.post h3 {

  margin:.25em 0 0;

  padding:0 0 4px;

  font-size:160%;

  font-weight:normal;

  line-height:1.4em;

  color:$titlecolor;

}

.post h3 a, .post h3 a:visited, .post h3 strong {

  display:block;

  text-decoration:none;

  color:$titlecolor;

  font-weight:normal;

}

.post h3 strong, .post h3 a:hover {

  color:$textcolor;

}

.post p {

  margin:0 0 .75em;

  line-height:1.6em;

}

.post-footer {

  margin: .75em 0;

  color:$sidebarcolor;

  text-transform:uppercase;

  letter-spacing:.1em;

  font: $postfooterfont;

  line-height: 1.4em;

}

.comment-link {

  margin-$startSide:.6em;

  }

.post img {

  padding:4px;

  border:1px solid $bordercolor;

  }

.post blockquote {

  margin:1em 20px;

  }

.post blockquote p {

  margin:.75em 0;

  }

/* Comments

----------------------------------------------- */

#comments h4 {

  margin:1em 0;

  font-weight: bold;

  line-height: 1.4em;

  text-transform:uppercase;

  letter-spacing:.2em;

  color: $sidebarcolor;

  }

#comments-block {

  margin:1em 0 1.5em;

  line-height:1.6em;

  }

#comments-block .comment-author {

  margin:.5em 0;

  }

#comments-block .comment-body {

  margin:.25em 0 0;

  }

#comments-block .comment-footer {

  margin:-.25em 0 2em;

  line-height: 1.4em;

  text-transform:uppercase;

  letter-spacing:.1em;

  }

#comments-block .comment-body p {

  margin:0 0 .75em;

  }

.deleted-comment {

  font-style:italic;

  color:gray;

  }

#blog-pager-newer-link {

  float: $startSide;

 }

 

#blog-pager-older-link {

  float: $endSide;

 }

#blog-pager { 

  text-align: center;

 }

.feed-links {

  clear: both;

  line-height: 2.5em;

}

/* Sidebar Content

----------------------------------------------- */

.sidebar { 

  color: $sidebartextcolor;

  line-height: 1.5em;

 }

.sidebar ul {

  list-style:none;

  margin:0 0 0;

  padding:0 0 0;

}

.sidebar li {

  margin:0;

  padding-top:0;

  padding-$endSide:0;

  padding-bottom:.25em;

  padding-$startSide:15px;

  text-indent:-15px;

  line-height:1.5em;

  }

.sidebar .widget, .main .widget { 

  border-bottom:1px dotted $bordercolor;

  margin:0 0 1.5em;

  padding:0 0 1.5em;

 }

.main .Blog { 

  border-bottom-width: 0;

}

/* Profile 

----------------------------------------------- */

.profile-img { 

  float: $startSide;

  margin-top: 0;

  margin-$endSide: 5px;

  margin-bottom: 5px;

  margin-$startSide: 0;

  padding: 4px;

  border: 1px solid $bordercolor;

}

.profile-data {

  margin:0;

  text-transform:uppercase;

  letter-spacing:.1em;

  font: $postfooterfont;

  color: $sidebarcolor;

  font-weight: bold;

  line-height: 1.6em;

}

.profile-datablock { 

  margin:.5em 0 .5em;

}

.profile-textblock { 

  margin: 0.5em 0;

  line-height: 1.6em;

}

.profile-link { 

  font: $postfooterfont;

  text-transform: uppercase;

  letter-spacing: .1em;

}

/* Footer

----------------------------------------------- */

#footer {

  width:800px;

  clear:both;

  margin:0 auto;

  padding-top:15px;

  line-height: 1.6em;

  text-transform:uppercase;

  letter-spacing:.1em;

  text-align: center;

}

]]></b:skin>

  </head>

You see that this ends with /head tag? Enter your Blogger Dashboard / Layout / Edit HTML and delete everything from the top to the /head tag and replace it with the code above.

Voila! You have something that some people might describe as an ugly Blogger blog. 

But I call is simple is beautifull.

Till next time...

Why use Blogger for a new blog?

The big "smart(ass :))" majority of people will have the same answer to the following question:

Q:"Should I use Blogger to start a new blog or website?"

A:"No, if you are serrious about your site get a hosting, buy your own domain and install Wordpress. Blogger is for spammers and you can never make a decent site with it ect..."

Crap.

First let me explain why you really would not want to have your blog/website on Blogger and they why you would want to:).

Blogger review, why not use it:

- you want to sell your website sometime in the future, you will not be able to sell your Blogger blog. This is correct, kind off, but it can be fixed if you plan ahead - get a new Google account that you will only use for one Blogger blog and you will be able to sell it together with your account.

- branding, it's kind of no cool to brand URL that says mashed-up-blog.blogspot.com LOL

Blogger review, why use it:

- having your own hosting and domain is cool but it is also a waste of time. Because with Blogger blog you eliminate all sorts of problems. Problems like:

- hosting bill

- other hosting problems, like server being down, your site getting hacked, bandwidth problems, space problems, unresponsive support problems... you do not have to do any of these. All will be taken care off by Blogger.

- spript problems. I don't really like Wordpress that much, read my cons on Wordpress in the review. Anyway, most of the websites probably run on some sort of CMS script. This again means a waste of time for:

- installing the script

- configuring the script

- upgradeing the script and making sure its up to date so your website doesn't get hacked

- etc.. it work, work, work.

As I said. If you have one website you have lots of time to run it, to do maintenance etc.. it's cool, it's fun, it's a hooby, it's why you do this in the first place. If you have 20 websites this will soon become a pain in the ass.

All you have to do with Blogger is login and write. Everything else is taken care of. And if you tink you are worse off SEO wise because you are using a blogspot blog - you are not.

Will do-follow comments bring you web traffic?

Since this blog is mostly related to websites I make money from and it's a part of the shhhhh...farm of websites, which is still much to small. Right. Anyway... so I thought it would also be nice if I would write a few posts about how to generate web traffic.

As far as I am concerned there are two ways of bringing traffic to a website:

1. Search engine traffic.
2. All the other crap :).

If you want to have a constant surge of fresh people coming to your website, a source of traffic that will not cease as soon as you stop writing, commenting, submitting, kicking and screaming and being an attention whore, a source of traffic that can pretty easy be monetized - then you want search engine traffic.

If you don't want any of the above mentioned things then you can look for other sources of traffic. Traffic like people coming to your website from comments on other blogs, from websites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit and other social bookmarking websites, traffic from your advertising on other websites, bought traffic etc... This kind of traffic is either expensive or it's not worth much if you want to make some money from it.

Getting the first kind of traffic is all about getting on the top o the search engines rankings. There are many (many many many many...) factors that influence where in the search rankings will you appear, but the most important one is links with the right anchor. So getting links should be one of your priorities.

There are many methods of getting links. Some even include links from sites that otherwise fall under the second category of traffic sources. So yes - you can get links from social sites or you can get links from other blogs. Just be aware that if you are getting links from other blogs in the form of comments - most of the blogs today have a no-follow tag on their links.

What the hell is a no-follow tag? It is a tag that tells the search engine spider that this link should not be worth anything, that it should not pass any juice, that it has no value. So if you want to get links from the comments on other blog then look for blogs that have a dofollow plugin instaled. This dofollow plugin will remove the nofollow tag and links will be worth something.

So gettin' links from dofollow blogs will help you get search engine traffic. Yey! (just make sure you include your keyword in the anchor). Comments are not worth much even with dofollow enabled but ask yourself - what is better: A link that is not worth much or no link. Right.Sitting and thinking this doesn't work and that doesn't work means you are just sitting and doing nothing. Get of your ass and be active.

Maybe one more thing - if you own a blog you can get some traffic on it if you install a dofollow blog yourself. People will come to your blog and they will try to make "usefull" comments on your posts that would bring them link juice if you approve their comments. This kind of traffic is not worth much and the comments will be in the range of: "U, great article" to "I like your site" to "I agree" to "Nice template" to "I will look into that, thanks!" to something even more obvious... you can almost always spot a comment that was written deliberately for getting a link.

Well, when you think about it, why not. Give some links, it won't kill you. to bad that Blogger blogs all have nofollow comments that can not be removed.

Til nect time.

Food, Recipes, Sports, History and Money... ALL THAT?

One thing I would like to make clear but I can't make it clear before I decide it for myself. Is this one of those "how to make money online blogs"? Brrrrrr... even the name gives me the shivers. I hate all those so called make money online blogs, because there are sooo many many many (many many... to many, like yaaaawn, good morning, today I will start a blog...hm...what should I write about, well lets write about how to earn a few buck on the Internet, I heard there is good money in that...clap clap, yeah real original) of them and they all keep puking out the came rehashed crap over and over again. How to write a good post, how to get more RSS subscribers, how to make your title attract hot chicks that will wash your car in their bikinis (ups, sorry, that one is from another blog...actually, I should make a blogpost about that), how to totally persuade people to join some crappy affiliate program that is THE NEXT BIG THING since Google...no, really. Yuck!

But on the other hand, I do have a few websites and they do bring me some pocket money every now and then. And this blog is titled so stupidly Food, Recipes, Sports, History and Money because my sites are about those things and the general idea so far with this blog is to have a blog so general that I can throw anything on it. From hot chicks washing my car in their bikinis..

The only problem is, I hate that kind of blogs. Blogs about everything and nothing. Blogs where you can learn that the writer is not in the good mood today and that he had cereals for breakfast... God, now I can die happy. BTW, I had no breakfast yet and this is one of the reasons I am in a bad mood :)

Anyway, until I clear this out with myself, this is not.... I repeat NOT, a make money on the Internet blog. So go and check those crazy Aztecs instead :).