Getting Free Content for your Blog

As you may have heard before "content is king". Bloggers are mostly content writers. It is the content that drives traffic to your blog or website. To get more web traffic, you would add more useful content to your blog/site, however you might not be able to come up with quality content as regularly as you might wish(Reasons could be laziness, lack of motivation/interest, blogging fatigue, monotony etc.). In this situation you probably would want to keep your blog fresh with new content by getting free content for your blog/website.

The easy-lazy way is to use the free available content from article submission directories, which host articles from variety of authors on various topics, most of the directories will let you use the content if you follow the terms of usage and give proper credit to the author. Most times, you just have to publish and unlatered with the author/site credit resourcebox in the post footer. However do read the republishing terms of the sites, whose content you want to use as the terms might be different for different sites.

Here's a big list of article directories ( Bookmark & Share!) :
http://www.articledashboard.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.content-articles.com
http://www.justarticles.net
http://www.amazines.com/
http://www.free-articles-zone.com
http://www.myownezine.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.websition.com/
http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.articlesbase.com/
http://www.theleadingarticles.com/
http://www.articleworld.net
http://www.bestmanagementarticles.com
http://www.ladypens.com/
http://www.articlesandauthors.com/
http://www.articlerich.com/
http://www.article99.com/
http://www.ezau.com
http://www.articleblast.com/
http://www.articlesfactory.com/
http://www.seo-writer.com/reprint/articles.html
http://www.my-articles.com/
http://www.en.articlesgratuits.com
http://www.activeauthors.com/
http://www.articlestreet.com/

Get visitors from google blogs to yours

Here's a smart tip for those looking to drive a little traffic to their site/blog. Subscribe to the Official google blogs which are of your interest. I generally subscribe to the feed of those blogs of google services that I use frequently, like adsense, analytics, adwords, blogger etc.

Whenever a new article of your interest is published on Google Blogs, go ahead and make a blog post about the article and include a live link to the page, such as

Source : http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/06/success-story-from-india.html

Then, a link to your post will appear directly under the post that you have linked to. Notice that people visiting Google blogs would occasionaly stop by and check out your blog. Don't over-do this trick though, otherwise your blog will look like a discardable collection of irrelevant articles from google blogs.

Did you come from one of the Google blogs? YES! You see this tip works !

How to add paypal donate button to your blog

PayPal, is an eBay Company,It enables any individual or business with an email address to securely, easily and quickly send and receive payments online.

If you don't have a paypal account yet, you can get a free account

After you have your login ID/password,
Login to your account. Then click the "merchant services" tab

scroll down and on the right sidebar, find the box labelled key features, click on the link named "Donations"

After clicking on that link, you will taken to "Create paypal payment button" page, just make sure that donations is selected in the "Accept Payments for" dropdown box. You can type a name/id for this button

Down below you can customize your paypal button by selecting options like using smaller button, displaying credit card logos, changing language, currency, contribution amount or use your own graphic as a button.

Step 2 & 3 are optional and requires a business account, so leave them for now. and click on create button.

On the next page, copy the entire code from the textbox and paste it into your template of your website or blog, where you want it to appear. Congratulations! You have just added paypal donate button to your blog.

XML blogger users can paste this code by adding HTML/JavaScript gadget to their blogger blog.

(See the demo below)

Installing StumbleUpon links within Blogger/Blogspot

• Download one of the StumbleUpon Icons from it's icon set here . Upload this picture somewhere on the web.
  
  (This is a preview of the available icons, select and upload any one of them.)
  
  



• Login to your blogger dashboard, click manage->template.
• On the template tab, find <$BlogItemBody$> tag
• Copy-Paste this code just below the <$BlogItemBody$> tag

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$">&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>'><img border="0" src="**LINK" alt="Stumble Upon Toolbar" />Stumble It!</a>

• Replace **LINK TO stumbleit.gif** with the full path to the image that you uploaded.
• Save & RePublish your blog.

Sample Preview:


Stumble It!

NOTE : This installation only works with classic templates of blogger. XML Layouts users, check out this post http://zerodollarchallenge.blogspot.com/2007/11/add-stumbleupon-button-to-bloggerxml.html

Blog Graphics

Finding Images/videos/icons and stuff for your blog is a challenging and time consuming excercise. Here's my "unofficial" and "incomplete" list of resources for blog graphics.

Bigoo.ws - Over 50,000 images, all classified as glitters, backgrounds, cursors, quotes, animations, icons etc. Also has layouts and widgets for MySpace, Hi5, Friendster.


Stock Exchange - Free for personal use. Read the license here. [ License ]

Yotophoto.com - Indexes images in the public domain or available for free usage under various forms of "copyleft" licensing.

Freefoto.com - Free photographs for private non-commercial use on the Internet.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net - Free for use in blogs, with some conditions [ License ]

Blogger Help itself list these blog graphics resources for your blogs:

• Openphoto.net
• Flickr Photos - Only those with creative commons licences are free to use.
• http://search.creativecommons.org/ - This search engine should throw up many image resources that can be used on blogs and websites for free.

This list will always be in a "work in progress" mode, as we discover new and better blog graphics for blogs. Do you know of a blog graphics site that you want to share with us? leave your comments.

Standard Feed Icon

While exploring other sites and blogs, you must have come across those orange coloured feed icons that give you an option to subscribe to that site's/blog's feed. Chances are that you are already publishing your own feed.

Here's a free resource that will give you more color options to choose from(for the feed icon), you can also download other file format of the icon to modify and customize for your blog/site.

http://www.feedicons.com

25% of the People Online Use Firefox, do you?

"People are switching to Firefox fast as ever, while IE's share drops every day!"

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According to stats released by W3Counter , Firefox is the first choice for almost 25% of the people using the net. Have you downloaded firefox?