Bloggers Festival Guru

Whether you own a personal blog or manage an ecommerce platform; the ‘about’ section of your site should be the place where your personality really shines. However, so many sites succumb to the typically dry bios, which ultimately lack originality and a unique ‘voice’. Here’s a variety of sites in a variety of niches, which do a great job of breaking the mould; whether it be a witty write up, clever design, or a mix of the two.

I know we all like to have a unique look to our blogs and some unique icons to display our social profiles and feeds.So here I have a Subscribe and Follow section for your blog using a neat set of triangle social icons.You can add the icons with links to your feed and profiles to your sidebar on Blogger and Wordpress.

The icons are from Design Cauldron and look fantastic,Included in the gadget we have the code for are icons for your Rss Feed, Email Feed, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Pinterest And YouTube.You can easily remove any of the icons if your not on one or more of the sites.

Guest Post - Our host is Nick Steeves, Here Nick shows us how he has managed to get huge brands promoting his content.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

So you’ve got a blog and you’re picking away at the basics - getting backlinks, optimizing your tags and meta-data and posting to but you’ve yet to see any major spikes in traffic.There are people out there with established audiences which you would love to tap into, but how? These people are bombarded with requests at all hours - how do you get their attention?

Here are 12 best blogger templates for bloggers i found all these templates all over the web and select few of them for you so you can choose preview and download any one of them for free.

 

Today we have a Freebie for all Spice Up Your Blog readers.We have designed a fantastic set of social media icons you can use on your website or blog to display your Social Profiles and Feeds.The icons have a 3D high quality design using the logo for the social sites and feeds along with the names across the icons.

One of the things I wanted to do with these icons was have the name of the service on each.While everyone is familiar with the Facebook and Twitter logos I feel some newbies online are often confused by some icons.

Now that we have entered 2012 it's time to look back at the best modern themes and templates for Wordpress and Blogger released in 2011, starting here with 25 awesome Wordpress themes.The following collection of wordpress themes are totally free to download and use.I have taken care to include various styles such as Magazine, Personal, Minimalist and E-Commerce.To access the demo and download for each theme simply click the title.

Guest Post - Our host is Goranka Radojcic, in this post Goranka goes through the best online image tools.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

The Web has definitely gone visual. Pinterest is the latest craze and trend. Various surveys and reports show that the site is a great source of traffic and incoming links to content creators. And the popularity of visual content is still growing. Savvy bloggers turn this visual trend to their advantage.

Here is the list of twenty free and nifty web tools that can help us to create more appealing imagery for spicing up our blogs and sites.

Today i want to bring you another neat Image slideshow for Blogger users.The slide show is simple to add to your blog, looks great and has some neat options.The width can be changed to the size of the area you want it placed on your blog, captions can also be added to the images.Once on your blog it will auto scroll through your images and also has controls for the user to manual scroll.This will look great on Photography Blogs, Business Blogs or for anyone looking to display some cool pics.

Continuing from my recent post about the Page hack in Blogger, I have been asked by some of my readers to implement the same thing inside a Post. Well some might why is it needed in the first place? , the reasoning behind that is to make your Post look a little short (Even when they are not). The method I will be employing is in no ways a clean one and will require to include a JavaScript file individually in each post followed by a full rearrangement (Just Copy-Paste) of the contents.

A very popular effect used in magazines and newspapers is a drop cap first letter to paragraphs.This effect can also be found on many blogs and websites.The effect is a large first letter stretching down three or four lines with the text wrapped around.The drop cap letter can also use a different font and can be a different color to the rest of the text.Almost two years ago i published a post showing how to add a Drop Cap to your blog, in this post i have an even easier more effective method.This method needs just a few lines of Css to be added to your template then the first letter of every post on your blog will automatically be a drop cap.You can then choose the color and font of the drop cap.Check out the Blogger screenshot, demo and tutorial below.Wordpress users can use the Wordpress Drop Cap Plugin.

Last week i published the "25 Best Free Wordpress Themes Of 2011" and as promised today we have a list of the best Blogger Templates of 2011.The standard of Blogger templates took a huge jump in 2011 with more options and better designs and features.Scarcely a Wordpress theme is released that's not converted and available for blogger within a week combined with lots of designs unique to Blogger.This year also seen the release of the Blogger Template Designer and Dynamic Views offering up even more options for your blog.

Last week i published the "25 Best Free Wordpress Themes Of 2011" and as promised today we have a list of the best Blogger Templates of 2011.The standard of Blogger templates took a huge jump in 2011 with more options and better designs and features.Scarcely a Wordpress theme is released that's not converted and available for blogger within a week combined with lots of designs unique to Blogger.This year also seen the release of the Blogger Template Designer and Dynamic Views offering up even more options for your blog.

Included in the list are all manner of styles to meet your needs, simply click on the title to see the demo and download links.

35 Best Free Blogger Templates Of 2011

Hire Me - Pro Magazine Blogger Template

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Poker Point - Stunning Free Blogger Template

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Sunset Farm - Nature Theme Blogger Template

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Poker Stars - Poker Theme Blogger Template

As a blogger, unless your blog serves an online personal diary, building an audience is important. One way to build a loyal audience is to set the right tone for your blog. There is no one right tone for every blog. Being clear on the purpose of your blog and the audience you wish to reach can help you set the proper tone.

We are over half way through 2012 so it's about time we looked at what WordPress Theme designers have been up to.At the start of the year we published the very popular 25 Best Free WordPress Themes Of 2011 this time I have listed 30 free themes for WordPress from the first half of 2012.



Click the title of each theme to see the demo and download details.

I know you all keep a close eye on the page rank for your blogs, I have to admit I also look out for it.Google usually update toolbar page rank four times a year so around every three months.Well today we we have noticed a Major page rank update taking place.A number of my sites have seen a page rank change, at the time of writing bloggers festival is holding steady with a page rank of PR0.You can quickly check the page rank of your blog to see if there was any change using our free page rank checker tool. :

Many freebies such as Ebooks, Themes, Templates and Icons although free have a stipulation attached.More and more these days we see a Like, Tweet or comment to download.So instead of seeing a download button there will be a Tweet or Like button and once pressed the download appears.This is a way for the creator of the freebie to get some exposure for their content.When i published the Free Set Of 3D Social Icons last week I have to admit I considered using one of these.In the end I decided not to but I have nothing against others using them (I remember a year back giving advice to a designer to never use this but times change).

If you look at the bottom of the posts in many blogs you will see they finish with a signature.I think the signature looks great and adds a bit of style to the posts.These signatures are very easy to create and add to your blog and in this post i will show you how.You can actually use a small pad to write you signature or pick from one of hundreds of pre-made signatures.I suggest using the pre-made signature, using the pad to create your actual signature is almost imposable.

Last week i published the "25 Best Free Wordpress Themes Of 2011" and as promised today we have a list of the best Blogger Templates of 2011.The standard of Blogger templates took a huge jump in 2011 with more options and better designs and features.Scarcely a Wordpress theme is released that's not converted and available for blogger within a week combined with lots of designs unique to Blogger.This year also seen the release of the Blogger Template Designer and Dynamic Views offering up even more options for your blog.

Guest Post - Our host is David Lazar, here David takes a look at the autoblog trend that we have seen online recently.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

If you do a Google search for “automated blog posts” you will mostly find a bunch of tools that perform this function and a number of websites that promote automated blog posting as a great way to make some easy money quickly. While this type of practice could be able to yield you some money in the short run from Google AdSense, it’s generally not that lucrative in the long run.

Guest Post - Our host is Aileen Pablo, In this post focused on Business Blogs Aileen has tips to boost your sales.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

You have a young business that is organized, staffed, and ready to go through the roof. Your product or service is sound, and now all you need to do is focus on boosting sales.

Sometimes you want to grab the attention of readers and draw that attention to a specific link.So here we have a very easy way to add a flashing effect to specific links on your blog.You have two options, you can have the link text flashing or add a flashing background.This can be helpful as a call to action once you don't go overboard adding it to all links which will just serve to irritate your readers.Check out the demo (You can see the flashing links at the top of the sidebar) and tutorial.

How to add adsense ads inside Blogger blog posts or between blog posts:-
Adding adsense ads inside blog posts is a very good thing to do to increase your CTR.
CTR means"(the number of times your ad clicked) divided by (number of times it is shown).So,the more CTR you have,the more $$ you get.

As we know,there are more chances for the ads to be clicked when they are in the middle(blog posts) rather than at the sidebars(especially the right sidebar),footer,etc.So,

Learn how to hide,disable or remove the blogger navbar(navigation bar) from your blog.
First,let us see what blogger navbar is:

With Blogger introducing the option for Custom 404 Page for blogs recently, its been a much welcomed feature. A separate page type has also been created to give more control over these 404 pages. This feature is only available for New Blogger Interface nearly marking the end of the Old Interface (Its being officially shelved on 1st April ). Firstly we will be discussing how to use this feature followed by the collection of 30 witty 404 pages designs.

With the introduction of Custom permalinks in blogger, you now have a great opportunity to utilize this new feature to improve the usability, aesthetics and forward-compatibility of your links. It also helps you to target your rich keywords. I wrote a detailed tutorial when Custom Permalinks were first introduced in Blogger draft on June 25th 2012. Permalinks can now be seen on blogger.com also. We highlighted several areas of this feature by discussing Character limit, what Characters are accepted, good and bad permalink practices but after observing the permalink keyword structure in majority of blogs, I felt the necessity to explain its importance more because newbies are really not using it the correct way in order to drive traffic from Search engines. Just like a title tag, permalinks are also now a victim of keyword stuffing. The Character limit for a permalink is different for both Google, Bing and Yahoo. Understanding this restriction is what we will learn today. You will also learn today why You should always follow Mashable but not always TechCrunch when you talk of SEO.