Top 10 blogger tips and tricks to improve your blogspot blog

Blogger platform has been the training grounds of newbie bloggers in the Blogosphere. Some stick to blogger while others migrate to a more mature one. The user friendliness of the blogger platform is undeniable, I have to admit it’s one of the easiest place to start blogging. If you’ve been a blogger user before you probably know some hacks and tricks associated in improving your blog. Without a doubt, hacks and tricks  are very important in the aspect of gaining an audience and improving the looks of your blog. Anyway here’s a good list of my blogger hacks and tricks I know during my blogspot days.

1. Read more hack – The younger days of blogger blogs will give you the hassle of tweaking the custom html code of your blog. But the new blogger blog has a feature of read more… similar to wordpress. You can add the read more section by adding the <!– more –> comment in the “Edit Html” section of your post editor or clicking the read more editor to the new post editor of blogger.

2. New post editor – One of the things I hate about blogspot is their post editor, it sucks really bad. The new post editor can be used by going to Settings -> Basic -> Post Editor section. The new post editor performs much better than the old one but still it still sucks to me.

3. Title Tag Hack – The title tag hack enables you to have an Search Engine friendly titles. I’ve posted an article here before describing how you can do it. You can check it out here.

4. Wibiya Toolbar – It’s the newest dig I found a couple of months ago and it’s one of my must-haves in my blogger blog. Adding the wibiya toolbar will do the work of adding the recent posts section, visitor notifier, Social bookmarking,Social Network Integration(Twitter,Facebook), language translation and RSS feeds subscription.

5. Google Integrated Search box – You can easily add your own google custom search box now, The widget is available if you click “Add Gadget” in your blog interface. The cool thing about this is that search results are displayed inside your blog and no redirection need.

6. Favicon – Yeah! that’s right the big “B” logo near the address bar and title tab is an eye sore to some. Adding your own favicon makes your blog look professional and cool. To add a favicon go to “Edit Html” in the layout section of your blog and look for this code “]]></b:skin>” (exclude quotation marks) and paste the code below after the “]]></b:skin>”

<link href=’REPLACE YOUR IMAGE LINK HERE’ rel=’shortcut icon’/>

5. LinkWithin – One of my favorites too aside from the Wibiya toolbar. This improves your content visibility since the thumbnails of images in your post makes it good looking and thus improving Click Through Rate in your blog.

6. Commenting Systems – Intense Debate and Disqus thus it all for you from managing spams and informing you of new arrivals. The Facebook Connect helps a lot^^

7. Embedit Tool – Embeds doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx, pdf, wpd, odt, ods, odp,txt, rtf, csv and html file formats. And they can download the emded file in your blog too.

8. The Floating Button hack – You can have a “Follow us”,”Feedback”,”Contact Me” floating button with your blog by going to Layout -> Add Gadget -> HTML/JAVASCRIPT and putting the code below and replacing the links needed.

<a style=”display:scroll;position:fixed;center:5px;right:5px;” href=”INPUT YOUR LINK” title=”Feedback Please”><img src=”IMAGE OF YOUR CHOICE HOSTED” /></a>

9. Apture – One of the newest hack/plugin you can have. It beautify your posts and adds wonderful effects to links and other types of media. This is a must have. I even use it here in my blog

10. Email Subscription Form - For good traffic conversions you definitely need this one.  You can add this hack by logging in to your Feedburner account(Register if you don’t have one). Click on the “My feeds” at the top page and click your blog that you registered with your Feedburner account.Click Publicize Tab and Email Subscriptions option and choose Feedburner radio button as the service to provide the email subscriptions. Choose your settings under subscription management. Click Activate and copy the code which is generated, go to your layout section of your blog and click Add Gadget -> HTML/JAVASCRIPT and paste the code you copied and Save.