Add A Google Sitemap to Blogger Blog - Guide

Here is a guide to adding a Google Sitemap to your Blogger.com blog. Submitting a sitemap to Google can increase your chances of having your site indexed by the search engine.

Below is a step by step guide to submitting your blog's sitemap to Google:

Step 1.


Sign-in to your Google account by clicking in the top right of the Google search pages. You may need to sign-in first if you don't see the 'My Account' text link. Once you are logged in click on WEBMASTER TOOLS (click here for the direct link)

Step 2.


Paste the URL of your blog into the 'ADD SITE' area of the dashboard page. For example http://ukdropshipper.blogspot.com. Click on the 'add site' button.

Step 3.


You will now be taken to thesite overview page. This page will show you the status of your sitemap/s, details of the last site crawl and inform you whether pages from the site are included in the Google index.

Step 4.

You need to verify ownership of the site you're submitting. I find the easiest way to do this is to add some code to your area of the site. To verify ownership click on VERIFY YOUR SITE and select ADD A META TAG from the drop down box. Google will then provide you with some code to add to your site.

Step 5.

In a separate window or tab login to your blogger account, select LAYOUT and choose EDIT HTML. Copy and past the HTML meta tag provided by Google in the previous step into the HTML template just after the first TAG. Save your template edits. Return back to the original window/tab and click VERIFY.

Step 6.

You are now able to add a sitemap. Luckily Blogger supplies a ready made site map in the form of it's ATOM feed. Visit your blog and copy the URL of the atom feed (i.e. www.ukdropshipper.com/feeds/posts/full). Hint: Click on a 'subscribe to feed' link to find out your URL.

Step 6.

Slect to add a sitemap from within the Google Wemaster Tools Dashboard (the original window/tab) and choose "add general web sitemap". Paste the URL from step 5 into the area provided and click "ADD GENERAL SITEMAP" button.

You have now successfully added a Google Sitemap. In time you will be able to view various statitics through the SITEMAPS page including the date your site was last crawled, crawl stats, top search queries and diagnose any crawl errors.

Picapp: Legal use of coyright images for free

Picapp makes it easy and legal to usee coyright images for free.

Small online publishers such as bloggers will be glad to know they can now access licensed images from popular sources such as Getty Images for free.

Using the Picapp tool is easy and will allow thousands of bloggers to include photographs images without worrying about breaking copyright laws or breaking the bank to pay the license fees!

Making Splash content available through PicApp offers an innovative way for thousands of blog sites to enter the content licence market by utilizing our images with PicApps ad-funded technologies and in turn, exposes our rich database of images to millions of people. Splash teams with PicApp to reduce online piracy and to create a new media revenue stream for its contributors,” said Gary Morgan, CEO of Splash News, in a press release on July 7, 2008..

We've had quite a bit of feedback from our online publisher community that suggests that celebrity/entertainment images are difficult for them to attain, primarily due to the high licensing costs and the importance of the delivery timeliness, Eyal Gura, CEO, PicScout, said. Working with Splash gives online publishers easy access to Hollywood celebrities - photos that they couldn't afford before."

Adding Splash content to PicApp's broad image library brings PicApp closer to being the de facto "one-stop-shop" for the widest range of images for bloggers, in many popular categories, including sports, technology, fashion - and now, more than ever, entertainment.

In addition to Getty Images other news and photo agencies license their images to Picapps including Splash News, Corbis and Image Source

The sample image in this blog post shows latest big brother evictee Dale Howard on his eviction night. Purchasing a year long licensing fee for a medium resolution version of this image from a photo agency would cost around £40 whereas it is free using Picapp.

License fees can vary for photographs depending on your intended use, industry, duration and exclusivity. The above is just a random example of a recent news related image.

Making Money From Website Traffic

There are various way to make money on the web these days. Perhaps the most obvious one is selling goods online - be it through an auction website such as eBay or through your own ecommerce website.

However, selling tangible products has it's own advantages and disadvantages. For starters, there is little chance of running a completely automated business - somebody has to pick, pack and post the orders, products have to be purchased to hold in stock and cash flow can sometimes be a problem.

A little more tempting is the sale of downloadable products. This opens up the opportunity to run a more automated web business. I stress the word MORE because it's still impossible to run a completely automated business - even customers buying downloadable products will demand a certain level of customer service. Who will answer pre-sale questions? What if there is a problem during the checkout process or with the automated delivery system? How about if somebody demands a refund?

Both of the above require a certain level of interaction and maintenance. Running an ecommerce store may feel like you're being your own boss, but ultimately you are anwerable to someone - your customer. Your site must be maintained, be in full working order and meet security guidelines, especially if you are taking payment directly through your site.

In recent years people have been earning money online without selling tangible or downloadable goods. Instead they simply rely on advertisers to pay for page impressions or clicks on their websites. This opens your site up to being fully automated so you can sit back and watch the money roll in and be safe in the knowledge that you really aren't answerable to anyone. Well, theoretically all this is possible. However, in order to be successful your site must attract visitors and this usually means providing useful information through your website. Depending on how the advertisers pay you they won't be too bothered about how popular your site is but if they pay monthly you will still find you're answerable to someone!

Whether you update this information daily, monthly or annually is up to you and it depends on your circumstances. How much money do you want to earn? How much time can you dedicate to creating new material? How much demand/competition is there on your topic? Do people want to read the information you're supplying? How quickly will the information become dated or obsolete?

I don't want to go into a discussion about site content in this post, instead I'm going to look at the options available to you if you wish to monetize your informational website.

1) Google Asense or Yahoo Publisher Network
Both are free to setup and automatically pair paying advertisers to your website based on the content. This saves you having to find advertisers to sponsor your website, however, you only receive a percentage of the ad revenue with Adsense/YPN taking the rest.

2) Seek own Advertisers
Particularly useful if you've created a local website. You could approach businesses to pay you for displaying their ad on your site. You can charge a monthly fee, per impression fee or per click fee. The first option is quote easy to set-up and maintain whereas the other two options would require some software to track impressions/clicks.

The advantage of sourcing your own advertisers is that you will receive 100% of the money generated, however, you may have difficulty finding advertisers and it may take a few months to fill all your ad space. Customers may also demand to see proof of past visitor numbers before advertising

3) Affiliate Schemes
Affiliate schemes were very popular a few years back, however, many people switched to using services such as Adsense etc. Now, however, affiliate schemes are growing in popularity once again as mpore website owners look for the most profitable option. Companies like Commission Junction allow you to group affiliate schemes together, allowing you to pool revenue and receive bigger & earlier payouts.

One of the main reasons people abandoned Affiliate Schemes in the past was because many never received a penny in commission due to certain 'minimum payout' thresholds etc.

With multiple options available to you including selling tangible goods directly to consumers, B2B services/products, dropshipping, downloadable products and advertising revenue you are sure to find some way of creating money from your existing website. Exactly how much you make is entirely down to you and the popularity of your site.

Bookmark & Sharing Button - AddThis

If you've been looking for an easy way to allow visitors to your website to share your content throughout their social networking sites then look no further than AddThis.

Effective, easy to use and a doddle to set-up, AddThis could be your ultimate FREE tool for generating extra traffic through social networking websites.

Visitors can easily add a link to your site on Digg, MySpace, Reddit, Furl, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, Slashdot, Facebook and more. Gain more hits by receiving repeat visits from users who add your site to their favourites and new visits from people the refer through social networking.

AddThis also includes free statistics to help you keep track of usage. If you are having problems displaying your statictics make sure that you are logged in before creating your Addthis button. Once you have everything up and running you'll be able to check how many people have bookmarked your site or added your feed through the AddThis button.

The button can be added to your website as a whole. or alternatively if you're a blogger you can add it after every post.

Installing AddThis on a Blogger Blog

To add the button to Blogger you must insert the code for the button within the "POST FOOTER" of the layout file. To do this click on EDIT HTML, ensure the "Expand Widgets" box is ticked and search for div class='post-footer'.

Simply paste the AddThis code below this DIV CLASS and voila - a button will be placed beneath evey individual Blogger blog post.

http://www.addthis.com