Well, it plays approximately the same role in representing your blog to the world as looks do for women. A pretty woman will definitely be “right” at the moment she appears in front of the people. Later on, she may turn out to be stupid, boring, or even malicious, but she has won the first battle anyway. The same goes for your blog. You may have the best of the content however if you don’t have a good blog design, you’ll still lose a lot of readers just because the presentation of the blog isn’t that good.

Your blog’s design is very important to you. It reflects on you and how you’re perceived by other people. Believe it or not, first impressions do count. A good blog design will absolutely give you a better first impression. It encourages the people to click and read a bit further and get to the all-important content. In the wide world of blogging, the content might be the king, but the design is the queen. So use your first impression and give the content of your blog a better chance to be seen by the world.

In one of earlier poll (which unfortunately is still running, we’ll change it soon) results we found out that more than 80% of this blog’s readers think that blog design is really important in a blog’s success. Apart from that there are some of very renowned blogger/designers share there views about blog design -

1. How important is design to a blog’s success? – by Vandley Design.
2. Better keep a log on your blog (quoting Kiruba Shankar, one of the most prolific bloggers from India)
3. How important is blog design service? – Performancing

What makes a great blog design?

Again a lot has been already said on this particular topic, so I thought it would be best to share those wonderful links with you all -

1. 5 Characterstics of good blog design!
2. What makes a design good?
3. Ten important traits of a good blog design.

The design of your blog is just as important as any other aspect of your business and it will be wise to plan it in your budget. In blogging you can always change things, experiment, see what works and than use it. So take care of your blog design. Start with experimenting in a WordPress theme and if someday you decide to hire a blog designer to help you out, the Blog Design Studio is available and eager to help you any time.

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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(IMAGE – LARGE FONT ADSENSE UNIT)

I’ve recently increased the font size to test if the larger font size will bring any change although, Google has found that larger font size units have done well in their tests.

Also, a bit of advance notice: soon, we’ll also be changing the default font size across AdSense in ad units from ‘small’ to ‘medium’. We’ve heard from some of you that the current font size can be too small, and our testing also showed that slightly larger font sizes improved performance. Any ad units set to the default font size will automatically be updated to display the larger setting. If you’d prefer to stick with today’s font size, you can set your desired font size as ‘small’ across your account.

In order to change the Ad display preference for all the ad units across your adsense account, you may go to “My account” under Adsense Dashboard and under Ad display preference you may change the Font Family and Font Size. However, if you don’t want to make the global change, you can edit the individual ad settings under “Manage ads“. Thankfully, Google updates the ad units as soon as you make the change in the settings and you don’t have to go through the pain of changing the code that we had to go through earlier.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Important question – Why is Google doing so?

Most likely the answer is that Google is experiencing lots of spam clicks as there are many click-fraud networks going on and Google wants to counter them by ensuring that they approve only legitimate publishers and not the click-fraud group members.

I’m legitimate! why aren’t they approving my Adsense account?

Google will give you the reasons for not approving your account, however if they haven’t; send them an email (don’t use all caps ever in any of your email, it’s never considered as polite) and ask for the reasons that were considered as negative for your blog. Remember! they are not your slaves, so you should always keep your tone polite enough. However, I would suggest that you should at least keep these points clear before you even apply for your Adsense account -

1. Top level domain will always benefit you – A top level domain name will leave a positive impression on reviewers mind as that shows that you are serious about your blog/website venture.

2. Try to have at least 30 blog posts – There are many bloggers who’d say that around 10-15 posts should be fine, however I would say that it doesn’t harm if you have some extra posts written and published as it’ll only shift you towards account approval and not towards account denial. Try to publish high quality posts and not just the rants against a person or service. What say harsh?

3. Don’t use black-hat seo tricks – Google is strict against black-hat seo tricks and even bans them from its search index. If at all you know those tricks, simply avoid them as they’d not leave good impression on the reviewer.

4. Submit your sitemap to Google webmaster tools – I’ve already written that how can you create a sitemap and integrate it in your blog. After you’re done with creating sitemap for your blog, you should go ahead and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. That will also ensure that you are serious about your blog and are interested in seeing that how it ranks in Google. It will also help you in improving your blog accordingly.

5. Have mandatory pages on your blog – There are many pages on a blog that are considered as a must and if you don’t have those pages, possibilities are that the reviewer will think that the blog/website is not complete and may think that it’s under construction. I would suggest that one should have these pages for sure -

a) About blog and its purpose.
b) About page of the author(s) of the blog, if possible put mug-shots as well.
c) Contact page – you don’t need to reveal your email address, you can always use some plugin for contact form.

In short, I wanted to convey that it would be nice if you’d show that you have an active site and a budding community around your website or blog. Your blog should also convey the message that you are not one of the spammers and that you are not trying to game the system.

Do you have any clue as to why Google is getting strict about approving Adsense accounts and if you have come across any other tip ?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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Anyway, this is what the email read -

We recommend that you begin removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible, to ensure that you can take advantage of the available ad space on your pages. At the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units will begin directing users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won’t generate earnings from them once this change occurs.

So, if you are using Google Adsense Video Units, then probably you should take them down and instead use regular text and image ad unit. This way you’ll be able to better monetize it. I’m using Google Adsense for video units on one of my blog, and I was even planning to take it down, till I got this email from Google itself.

What are your thoughts about Google Adsense Video Units, did you ever try them and how was your experience with them?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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I thought that it was my responsibility to inform him that WikiPedia takes donations from the users every year and even put the donation bar on the top, to attract donations and while I was telling him about this, something struck my mind – Why the hell, they are even asking for donations, when they can give donations?

WikiPedia is without a doubt, one of the top 10 visited websites in the world and if they start putting ads on it (non-obtrusive or the ones that don’t ruin the reader’s experience) then I’m sure they’ll make enough revenue to support themselves. Well, honestly they’ll make enough revenue that they’ll be able to donate it to various organizations that are supporting various causes in under-developed countries.

This is one question that has been troubling me from couple of days and I’m wondering if anyone had that idea come in their mind or not. I understand that WikiPedia’s idea is to provide all the information for free and they are not in favor of making money out of the service; well, I’m not even saying them to keep that money, just donate the generated revenue after they are able to support them and they won’t even have to ask for donations.

What are your thoughts on the same? Should WikiPedia ask for donations or should they donate money by making revenue?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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In this post, I’ll come up with smart blog marketing ideas that will help you in getting schwag too!

1. Ok, its pretty difficult to give a heading for this particular point. In this, I got an email from a blogger who was pretty interested in wearing a cap of our logo and branding on it. We will only need to send that cap to him. I found this as pretty interesting idea and visited that blog. It’s a different thing that I didn’t go for this option, still it can work as a crowd puller idea. Unfortunately, I can’t find the link to that blog.

2. Host a WordCamp – If you’ll host a WordCamp, Automattic graciously gives you their schwag. Some will definitely ask that how does it market your blog. Well, WordCamp’s generally attract lot of bloggers and if you are one of the organizers, you’ll get good exposure.

3. Shoemoney Type : Jeremy had made an announcement on his blog that he’d post his photos wearing your brands schwag and will give the link back if you are willing to ship a tshirt or hoodie to his place. The idea worked and Jeremy got lot of t-shirts for this and the series got popular too!

So, if you are interested free schwag and want to market your blog then these were few ideas that you should try.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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1. Choose the topic – It’s important to understand that if your idea is to make money from a blog then it should be focused on a niche and you should find out a particular niche.

2. Choosing the domain – After you’ve decided the topic, one of the best ways of choosing the domain name is by researching through Google Keywords selector. Just type the keywords and try to find out the keyword ideas. It will show you that approximately how many people search that particular & related keywords on Google. Once you find out a good keyword, make sure that while you book the domain you should include that keyword in that domain of yours.

3. Proper layout – Ensure that you work on proper layout and blog design of that particular blog and don’t forget to think about the on-site SEO as initial thoughts will always give you added advantage.

Well, if you can replicate this idea and create a farm of blogs then you surely can make some decent amount of money through adsense and similar pay per click ideas.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

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inLinks is doing nothing new at the moment as this particular service is available through Text-Link-Ads anyway. Now, one may ask the question that if they are already selling these links through TLA, then why are they coming up with a new brand? The answer to this question is that they will try to to come up on the Google with that particular brand name as TLA’s Domain is banned on Google at the moment.

Amit has suggested that these links will surely be tough to detect, however Google also keeps Cached copies of all the websites they crawl, so they may ban your blog if they compare the old copies with the new copies.

Most of the A – list bloggers suggest that one should not sell the links on their blogs as this may result in ban from Google. Honestly I know many bloggers who sell links from their blogs and nothing has happened to their ranking in Google, rather they are doing too well even with those ads running at the moment.

What’s my suggestion on the use of inLinks ?

I’ll say that its your call. Your blog is your real estate and you are the best judge of what needs to be done with it. I can suggest that you may go for the service, however if you depend on Google then don’t blame me, if they ban your blog. If you generate good enough traffic from Social media then I think you can easily take the risk of selling the links.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2008. | Permalink

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1. What’s the real goal of the blog – There are lot of reasons because of which one decides to start a blog. It may be just for building authority, meeting like-minded people, making money out of it and when it comes to businesses, there is a whole lot more you can think of – be it brand building, finding new customers, building business relationships and what not! You should always keep in mind that what exactly your main goal is and once you have a clear goal in mind, your target should be to achieve it in minimum amount of time and should not deviate from that at any moment. All blogging related activities of yours should help you reach to that particular aim of yours.

2. Amount of hours you decide to invest – Ask any freelancer and you’ll know that the most important thing is that how important it is to calculate that how many hours go in any project. Building a blog is not at all short term thing, so it’s difficult to find out the real amount of time for the whole thing, however one can always decide that how many hours you are ready to invest in it everyday and that’ll enable you to find out that how much time will be invested in coming 5-6 months.

3. Are you ready to invest some money? – You thought blogging is free, Sorry to bust your myth, you can invest in blogs too in various ways. a) A beautiful blog design (ahem! I hope you know whom to choose). b) Ads – If you think that you are ready to target a particular audience then you can use ads to attract visitors. c) Good web host – You’ll always find some cheap web hosts, however if you think that your blog will go to another level, then do consider a better web host (even though they may be expensive).

Small tip – In starting use some shared hosting, however if you see that the blog is getting popular, you’ll need to ultimately need to shift to a better webhost or you’ll need to get VPS or even dedicated servers.

What I really want to say that even if you plan not to invest much on the blog (money wise) still consider this point and mention it in the blog plan and think that will there be any stage when you’ll invest and if the answer to this question will be yes, then decide that how much you plan to invest and when.

4. Making smaller or short term goals – Its important to make various small or short term goals. Remember that we have already discusses that every blogging activity should be focused on one main goal, however these smaller goals help you in realizing that how far is your main goal. These small goals can be either the number of page view, number of subscribers, if the community is building around the blog and what not. There are various ways of counting a blogs growth and one should make small and realistic goals and should try to achieve them to reach to that ultimate goal!

I hope this second post of this series will motivate you enough to pull up pen/paper or any word application to get going in building the blog plan for your upcoming blog. In the next post we’ll discuss that what all should one mention in the blog plan when it comes to marketing of the blogs. Stay tuned or subscribe to our newsletter for regular updates.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2008. | Permalink

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All blogging gurus have written some awesome blog posts where they tell you that what all is required to make a blog successful and generally people still make very basic mistakes when they launch a new blog, even though they’ve been reading those blogs for long enough time. Here are some of the basic rules which one should keep in mind before starting any blog and hopefully these will help you in making your blog plan a success!

1. Decide the topic – Alright, this is like the business idea. One should keep in mind that the blog must hover around a particular niche and al least 70% of the posts should be around that particular topic only.

2. Know your competitors/friends – Good thing about blogging is that your competitors are your friends as well. You compete with them in getting more visitors, you generally quote them and link to them and send visitors to them too. So one should know that who is doing well in that particular niche and accordingly plan that how you’ll become their friends.

3. What keywords one should target – Google Adwords keywords tool is an awesome research tool which tells you that what people are searching for and gives you an idea that how many people are searching for certain keywords in that niche.

4. Choosing the domain name – I’ll always suggest you to have the main keywords (which you found in step 3) in the top level domain.

Well, this is till the point where you choose the domain and now in the upcoming series, we’ll talk about the marketing, link building strategies and monetization and various other topics which will help you realize that making a “blog plan” is really important before starting any blog!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2008. | Permalink

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