Grab 3 Custom Blogger Email Subscription Widgets

What's new today? Well, I have redesigned custom email subscription widgets for blogger and am decided to release some of them here. Recently, SB got several looks and styles, am not just contented so I keep changing some parts of the header, or the overall theme - today, this look is Official. And I am going to offer to you some of my coding experiments that worked well. Recently, I included this to the list of Top 5 Blog Tools for Building a Great Blog. Before I give it, let me tell you some tips on how to code your own:

• Don't start from scratch.
• Look for several coding tutorials and study them with interest.
• Copy those codes, and experiment on it - keep on tweaking, and you will know something your own from there.
• See? You did not start from scratch, but your created a unique idea from the existing one.

Excited for the code of the custom blogger email subscription widget?

This custom email subscription widget is powered by feedburner, if you don't have a feedburner account, better get one now.

3 simple and custom email subscription widgets:

Green - the main theme of SB #347235

<style>
.sbsubscription{
width: 300px;
float: left;
}
.sbsubscription .emailupdatesform{
margin: 15px 0 5px 5px;
width: 300px;
float: left;
}
.sbsubscription .emailupdatesform input.emailupdatesinput{
background: #fff !important;
float: left;
border: 1px solid #347235;
border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
padding: 0px 8px 0px 8px;
color: #000000;
font-size: 12px;
height: 25px;
width: 185px;
}
.sbsubscription .emailupdatesform input.joinemailupdates{
background:#347235;
border: 1px solid #347235;
border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
text-transform: uppercase;
font:bold 12px arial;
color: #fff;
height: 25px;
padding: 0 12px 0 12px;
margin: 0 0 0 5px;
cursor:pointer;
}
</style>

<div class="sbsubscription-wrapper">
<div class="sbsubscription">
<div class="emailupdatesform">
<form action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=thebloggingsolution', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><input gtbfieldid="10" class="emailupdatesinput" name="email" value="Enter your email to subscribe..." onblur="if (this.value == &#39;&#39;) {this.value = &#39;Enter your email to subscribe...&#39;;}" onfocus="if (this.value == &#39;Enter your email to subscribe...&#39;) {this.value = &#39;&#39;;}" type="text" /><input value="TheBloggingSolution"; name="uri" type="hidden" /><input value="Submit" class="joinemailupdates" type="submit" /></form>
</div></div></div>

This dark one, grey? #333 (Also a color theme for SB)

<style>
.sbsubscription{
width: 300px;
float: left;
}
.sbsubscription .emailupdatesform{
margin: 15px 0 5px 5px;
width: 300px;
float: left;
}
.sbsubscription .emailupdatesform input.emailupdatesinput{
background: #fff !important;
float: left;
border: 1px solid #333;
border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
padding: 0px 8px 0px 8px;
color: #000000;
font-size: 12px;
height: 25px;
width: 185px;
}
.sbsubscription .emailupdatesform input.joinemailupdates{
background:#333;
border: 1px solid #000;
border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
text-transform: uppercase;
font:bold 12px arial;
color: #fff;
height: 25px;
padding: 0 12px 0 12px;
margin: 0 0 0 5px;
cursor:pointer;
}
</style>

<div class="sbsubscription-wrapper">
<div class="sbsubscription">
<div class="emailupdatesform">
<form action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=thebloggingsolution', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><input gtbfieldid="10" class="emailupdatesinput" name="email" value="Enter your email to subscribe..." onblur="if (this.value == &#39;&#39;) {this.value = &#39;Enter your email to subscribe...&#39;;}" onfocus="if (this.value == &#39;Enter your email to subscribe...&#39;) {this.value = &#39;&#39;;}" type="text" /><input value="TheBloggingSolution" name="uri" type="hidden" /><input value="Submit" class="joinemailupdates" type="submit" /></form>
</div></div></div>

Well, Facebook Color!

<style>
.sbsubscription{
width: 300px;
float: left;
}
.sbsubscription .emailupdatesform{
margin: 15px 0 5px 5px;
width: 300px;
float: left;
}
.sbsubscription .emailupdatesform input.emailupdatesinput{
background: #fff !important;
float: left;
border: 1px solid #3b5999;
border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
padding: 0px 8px 0px 8px;
color: #000000;
font-size: 12px;
height: 25px;
width: 185px;
}
.sbsubscription .emailupdatesform input.joinemailupdates{
background:#3b5999;
border: 1px solid #333;
border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 5px; -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
text-transform: uppercase;
font:bold 12px arial;
color: #fff;
height: 25px;
padding: 0 12px 0 12px;
margin: 0 0 0 5px;
cursor:pointer;
}
</style>

<div class="sbsubscription-wrapper">
<div class="sbsubscription">
<div class="emailupdatesform">
<form action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=thebloggingsolution', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><input gtbfieldid="10" class="emailupdatesinput" name="email" value="Enter your email to subscribe..." onblur="if (this.value == &#39;&#39;) {this.value = &#39;Enter your email to subscribe...&#39;;}" onfocus="if (this.value == &#39;Enter your email to subscribe...&#39;) {this.value = &#39;&#39;;}" type="text" /><input value="TheBloggingSolution" name="uri" type="hidden" /><input value="Submit" class="joinemailupdates" type="submit" /></form>
</div></div></div>

Will they work as expected?

You can conveniently test them without putting it to your blog or any test blog. You can use w3schools HTML editor.

Final Step - make it your own!

Edit the code highlighted in green with yours. How? Log-in to your feedburner account, go to publicize, then Email Subscriptions and find yours, it's the title of your feedburner account.

Any question? Feel free to ask. See you :)

Posted by Editorial Team on 6/20/2012 08:00:00 PM in Custom Email Subscription Widget

How to Find a Keyword for a Better Blog SEO

Are you familiar with keywords? In a simplified term, it's a word, a group of words, or short phrases people "you" used in finding something with the use of search engines. As a blogger and content publisher we need to know these words in order that our contents, posts, articles can be searchable. You can read my previous article about How to Do Keyword Research and Why It is Important?, that will briefly explain why it is important for us bloggers to do some careful and serious keyword research.

Today, my objective for writing this post is to let you know that keyword study must be a part of our system as bloggers. We should not put this in the last list of our priorities when we try to draft our new post. Do you have a fresh or new idea? Do you have a good title to it? It's actually the perfect time to ask the keyword tool for a better title suggestions, by incorporating your ideas to the suggested keywords.

For me - no other free tool that can beat Google Adwords Keyword Tool, it's really helpful and they have just brought some nice update and enhancement to the keyword service. Let's find out. Anyway, please read this post if you are completely new with it - 5 Steps on How to Begin Writing Quality Post for Blogspot Blog. It explained the step by step process.

What's New?

Click the image to view the full size.

• They are group ideas - so meaning related or similar ideas are group together, and you can easily exported it an excel or csv file.
• Important columns - keywords, the rate of competition, the global and monthly searches figures, and the approximate CPC.
• What's the use of this info? - This is your guide in picking one or two keywords for your post. What the most searchable? Consider the rate of competition as well as the local searches.
• What's the use of CPC? - it's the cost per click! If CPC is higher, you have the chance to earn bigger with your adsense ads provided you have a reasonable blog traffic. The more traffic, the more chance they will find one of your ads interesting.
• Would you choose the keywords with highest CPC among the suggestions? No, not necessarily. In your exported excel file, you can add another column for potential earning, multiply global or local number of searches to CPC, then you can have a potential earning estimates. If the competition is lower, and the global and local searches are higher, and CPC is higher = higher potential earnings.

Click the image to view the full size:

So, how to find a keyword? You know the answer by now, most probably. Anyway, those are data and information that would serve as our guides, if we know, or at least try our best to know on how to use and apply them - then it's rewarding! It might be hard and tricky, but I am sure it's worth our time.

Image Source: techwyse.com

See you guys:)

Posted by Editorial Team on 6/18/2012 08:00:00 PM in Keywords

Best Blog Tools for 2012 Blogging

Have you ever asked yourself if there are best blog tools for better blogging, specially this year that you are more determined and excited for your blogging career? Honestly, there are too many tools around the corner of the web, but can we able to use them all? No, we cannot. We can only choose some, try some - and stick with the most effect ones, maybe a few, am sure those can help us move on and make a significant face with our blog posts and traffic!

Why we need some effective blogging tools?

Time is precious, the clock is ticking faster and it won't pause to wait for us - that is why we need to get faster, to hurry for valuable moves, like stuffing some good contents with our own social networks and blogs. How can we do that if we have a lot of things to do? We need some useful tools for better blogging and we can get them if we know how to find them and test there usefulness. Am a blogger for more than a year and I can share some based on my rich experiences, from scratch, from a total newbie. How did I stay in the blogosphere? I seek the help of these tools. They keep me on the go.

The tools that I rely on:

• Blogger.com - it would be always on top. It just simply helped me build a blog without cash, 100% free. Read this post How to Begin Blogging - A Complete Tutorial Made Easy for Blogspot Blogger.
• Google Search - why? I started from scratch, I do not know about coding and everything, I even do not know what is the purpose of blogging before, but I keep on searching, and Google had answer all my questions. It suggested me helpful sites that helped me build my blogging skills.
• MyBloggertricks.com - upon asking Google some questions, upon continuously looking for guides to build my own blog, I stumbled upon MBT! This is a very helpful tech blog that helped me do my coding, my designs, my experiments about HTML!
• w3schools.com - It is always good to know about little and few knowledge about tweaking and designing your blog template, and aside from MBT, this online school and tutorial helped me turn my myself into a web designer, I did coded my own template, from a free custom template completely tweaked and bring forth my idea and taste.
• Problogger.net - Darren Rowse has equipped himself with the skills to help you write quality and great contents! Our blog is like a store, a mini-mart, a supermarket - we are actually marketing our ideas, words, and thoughts. In order to become a successful and problogger, we need to acquire necessary skills specially writing helpful, exciting, persuasive posts for our readers.
• Subscriptions - almost all your favorite blogs have subscription tools. Do not ignore them, enter your email address and receive helpful contents from them everyday. Why? Because it can help you craft some new ideas for your blog post. A blogger actually blogs, you cannot just write once a month, you need fresh ideas and key points so that you can start writing some nice post!
• Here I put Google Adwords Keyword Tool - this will help you find important and commonly used keywords for your post. This is the road map, if you write, you need to make it sure that your content is searchable for your readers. How they search Google? They used keywords. Acquaint yourself with the keyword tool.

Those are only few, there are too many tools around the corners of the web that you can use to make your blogging experience unforgettable. Enhance your skills, it's possible. Here I search for some helpful tools and we got some plenty suggestions. Check them out:

• Blog Tools at Problogger.net
• 50 ONLINE TOOLS TO BETTER YOUR BLOG
• 21 Essential Free Blogging Tools

See you guys, and Happy Father's Day to all loving Fathers :)

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Posted by Editorial Team on 6/17/2012 06:24:00 PM in Blog Tools, Blogging Tips

SEO Tips for Blogs Targeted for Beginners

Blogging can be a challenging hobby when you start learning more in-depth about blogs. If you are a starter all you need to do is check out for more interesting stuff on what really happens in a blog, how they work and what people expect from your blog, etc. Here is a short guidance for you that offer you some interesting simple and basic seo tips for blogs that you can follow being a beginner. Blogging is one of the simplest ways to get you involved into online community to share and learn more to gain knowledge.

Why you need a blog

It is important that you need to start analyzing why you need a blog at the first level. If you wanted to start a blog first decide on what is your goal and decide on the success terms and the motto behind your blog. Blogging can be of any purpose say for business advertising, spread your knowledge, share your opinion and ideas or just for fun. Once you set your goals work on the short/long term goals and start marketing your blog to reach your goal.

Identify your viewers

Your reader is based on your goals, check out who are your potential visitors and decide on the topic you wanted to blog about. Your blog should be related to the theme in terms of design outlooks and informative content that has to reflect your reader’s expectation. Identify your audience expectation and make your blog according to their needs on information.

Maintain stability in your blog freshness

Keep your content articles, design and other information to meet its standard and brand to keep up the popularity of your blog among the audience. Communication standard and your blog’s over all standards have to be perfect in terms of images and other messages you offer. You must create an impression among the audience in such a way that they must visit your blog again and again for more updates and useful stuff. Keep your blog fresh with new posts and frequent updates so that your audience re-visits your blog out of curiosity.

Blogging tools

Install some of the useful blogging tools that are meant for best features and take risk with tools that you install in your blogs for a trial and error correction method. You can include some new plug-ins to your blog to improve your blog’s performance and usage. Potential enhancement helps you to meet your goals on time with the timely response and blog outlooks according to your audience expectations.

Last Words

These are basics, like the food that we eat everyday! Well, every beginner should comply the following to have a better blogging experience. Learn more about SEO at What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? at Search Engine Land.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Posted by Editorial Team on 6/16/2012 08:00:00 PM in Blogging Tips, SEO

Top 5 Tools to Download Social Media Icons and Web Icons Sets for Free

Do you have a blog or website? Do you want to spice it with social media icons free to download? It's not a problem, there are actually several websites or icon finders to help you find the best icons for your social media participation such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and many more. Are you excited?

Top 5 Free Web Icon Finders

• findicons.com - so far, it's the best as I have used it for a long time already. I can actually search almost all types and all kinds of icons from there, from social icons to different types of icons you want to download. Simply type a keyword and icons suggestions would appear in numbers!
Highlight: Almost all web icons sets can be downloaded in different sizes and file types such as png, ico, and jpeg and more.
• iconfinder.com - "Search through 162,764 icons or browse 869 icon sets" a lot of offer right? Out from the big counts of icons, I am sure it can give you what you want to use for your blog. Actually, it's my first time to use this one, and what I found out? They have the latest social media icons for you like the beautiful Google+ in different custom colors!

• iconspedia.com - this is the source of your free icons. You can download almost all kinds of icons such as Twitter icons with different sizes, and different file types and you can easily click "add to favorites".
• veryicon.com - well, am amazed as you can also download different quality icons such as png and ico with different sizes! I must try this too!

• iconlet.com - from the word "let", you have the chance to download and get free quality icons with 16x16 or 32x32 pixels icons! They are actually smaller icons such as customizing your author or contact info at your blog posts!

This is the list of top 5 free web icons sets you can download anytime, but I do not number them as am not sure yet which one is a lot better. I put findicons.com at the top because am currently enjoying it.

See you guys:)

Posted by Editorial Team on 6/15/2012 08:00:00 PM in Free Web Icons

3 Steps to Make Your Blog and Webpages Print Friendly

Are you planning to make your blog and webpages print friendly? That's not a problem at all because you can do that in 3 EASY steps. You don't need to be an expert or geek about codes and HTML - any blogger can make his blog print friendly.

What to do?

Sit back, and do this simple steps in front of your PC :)

Go to printfriendly to choose a button for your blog.

1. Select the site type, or the blog platform.

2. Choose style - do you want buttons or links with printer icon?
3. You're almost finished - if you choose blogger, you can allow printfriendly to add the widget by clicking "Install Blog Widget" or you can manually add the HTML codes to your blog template.
4. If you choose the latter, then they have a pretty simple tutorial for you too:)
It's easy so do it - if you want to make your blog print friendly for your readers. Simply paste the codes just after this as shown in the screenshot provided.

<div class='post-footer'>

Why use this widget?

Sometimes, or oftentimes depending to how helpful our article or post is - our loyal readers would love to print a copy of our post, to give them some extra convenience, we can easily provide them a print friendly version of our webpages in a single click! Here is the sample:

• Readers can able to print your post - or download a PDF copy.
• Readers can adjust the texts - they can actually choose to have a bigger texts sizes.
• They can email your post to their friends and colleagues.
• They can choose to remove images and undo changes.

Do you want to grab the button? Do it now!

See you guys :) a short SB updates from me - Prime Aque

Posted by Editorial Team on 6/06/2012 08:00:00 PM in Miscellaneous, Print Friendly Blog

Backlinks Service Vs. Manual Blog Links Submission

This is a quick update for today. Am actually busy looking for a cheap quality backlinks provider and I read reviews and forums about it - it's always good to listen to other experiences and opinions and I came to some important realizations that:

• Well, cheap backlinks service will also give you cheap backlinks.
• Talking about cheap backlinks, there are PR0 sites, and they don't count that much. If you are asked to solve such mathematical problem - 0 x 0 = 0!
• Am not sure if they are all PR0 sites, but mostly - according to some forums - not really helpful to boost our blog search results or page ranking.
• It's general submission, so your link will be submitted to all types of sites - if you are blogging about apple, your link might be submitted to birth control blogs, sounds what?

Backlinks Service Vs. Manual Blog Links Submission

I choose the latter. It's always safer to choose the sites we are going to submit our links, of course with some safety measure - we cannot appear like spam.

• First, we need to search for do follow blogs.
• We will check if those blogs have PR, PR1 to 10. We can use prchecker!
• These blogs must be relevant or related to our topic or niche.

I got your lists of Do Follow Blogs from YoungPrePro.com!

Enjoy several lists of do follow blogs, but check their PR and of course, if they are related to your particular blog! You can share your opinions - always remember - do not be a "Spam"! Here is the link - List Of 51 Dofollow Blogs to Comment On!

Image source: Backlink Tutorial | What are backlinks? @ bluesmanofmlm.com

I will be checking each link one by one the next time, keep posted guys!

See you. All the best - Prime Aque :)

Posted by Editorial Team on 6/05/2012 06:35:00 PM in Quality Backlinking

Create Free Infographics for your Facebook Page in Few Clicks

Guys, heard about infographics? Well, do you wish to make your own - but you don't know how, or you don't know what free tool to use? It's not a problem anymore.

Anyway, what are infographics?

According to InstantShift, infographics are visual representations of information that use the elements of design to display content.

Infographics can be easily comprehended, as this is a simplified representation of complex ideas usually represented in texts or long sentences. Images or graphics are combined to portray a direct and precise information for any given data.

Let's create your own infographics!

Sounds exciting? There are several free tools on the web to create your first infographics. A Do It Yourself!

But, I found one that is a total instant maker for our Facebook and All-Stars Twitter Infographics! You don't need to practice or learn how to design or drag objects, add information or whatsoever! It's instant, like pouring hot water in a cup of noodles!

Create Your Infographics at Visual.ly

Here's what they do for you?

• Build an infographics for your Facebook Fan Page in minutes!
• Create a custom monster from your Facebook Stats (your Facebook account)!
• Make a twitter account showdown of your favorite stars or You and your friend's!

What to do?

1. Select a story - a particular infographics!
2. Connect your account, if it's Facebook infographics, allow Visual.ly app to access your Facebook account! That's it!
3. Customize - Select from available themes!

Now that you have your beautiful infographics, share it to Facebook, twitter or pin it! After that, get ready to download your infographics or just embed it! Well, here is the example below of SB's Facebook Fan Page!

create infographics with visual.ly

Want more infographic tools?

Browse for 9 Awesome Powerful Infographic Tools at InfographicsArchive

Posted by Editorial Team on 6/02/2012 08:30:00 PM in Infographics

How to Edit or Remove Watermark from Downloaded BannerSnack Banners?

I received an email from one of my readers, and I am happy to write a post to solve his/her problem. We will remove watermark from BannerSnack banners without going premium :) How that sounds?

Hi

I read with interest your great article about bannersnack, and I too have since found them to implementing the premium charge to remove watermarks.

Your idea of saving to a larger size and then editing post download sounds great, but I was wondering how exactly you'd edit it once you've downloaded the over-sized version? Do you need a certain artwork package?

Many thanks

I previously write an article about BannerSnack and how it helps us in creating beautiful banners for our blog pages specially header banners or ad banners. It will easily allow us to create interactive flash banners, html5 and gif banner ads.

BannerSnack - Free Banner Maker for Your Blogspot Blogs

Before, we can use all banner sizes for free, but now we are asked to activate our premium options to download created banners without watermark. But, it's not a problem because we can download banners with watermarks and edit it afterwards.

How to edit or remove watermarks from the downloaded banners?

If you need 250x250 pixel banners exactly for intance, you need to create like 275x275 banners, or over-sized the banner so that when you crop it, you can still have 250X250 banners without resizing it. Cropping and resizing is different, when you re-size image or banner, there would be a change to it's quality - so just crop!

1. Create or edit an existing banner >> download it with watermark if you choose not to spend some cash with it.
2. Use your existing photo editor in cropping the over-sized banner OR download PhotoScape! It's a photo editor that will let you crop the banner to your desired size not including the watermark. Read Make Free Professional Blog Banners with Transparent Backgrounds or go directly to CNET - Download PhotoScape.
3. Install PhotoScape and start cropping your banners from BannerSnack. I used PhotoScape for more than a year already :) See screenshots below:

• Original banner size 50x450 pixels.

• Desired banner size 50x440 pixels. Crop it to 50x440 pixels as shown:

Important Reminder: Rename the banner before saving to have a good quality output. If you overwrite the original banner (with watermark), it will give you low quality banner.

What's new at BannerSnack?

BannerSnack has improved again! They just recently added 200 pretty templates for most used banner and ad sizes!

Disclaimer: SB is not affiliated with BannerSnack.

Posted by Editorial Team on 5/31/2012 08:00:00 PM in Banner Making Tutorial for Blogger, BannerSnack

Do You Think Facebook Browser Would Work Better than Mozilla or Chrome?

Am trying to catch up with the latest news this morning, and since I am addicted to Facebook as well - the news about the coming of its very owned browser excite me in many ways.

I have no problem browsing Facebook using Mozilla, Chrome or Internet Explorer, well it's so friendly with all the present browsers available. But how about Facebook Browser? It's not just the social network, but it's about our entire browsing experience... What's the edge? If they are planning to have their own browser, they must have something new to us! It's exciting of course.

According to my trusted social media sites, such as Mashable and Pocket-lint, Facebook would acquire Opera Browsers! Instead of starting from scratch, they have a great advantage of buying Opera Browsers because it has over 200 million users worldwide in the present, as they claimed it.

What would be the future of Chrome? Which appeared to be on top! According to Mashable, Google Chrome is now the No. 1 browser in the world! In fairness, I have used Chrome of several months, but since I love tweaking my blog, I found out that most of my CSS styles won't properly worked at Chrome so I stick to Mozilla, checking my output at IE as well, but I also realized just now - since Chrome is widely used above all, I have to use it to check if my blog looks good in there!

But let's talk about the future of these current browsers? Would Facebook Browser would kick out Chrome at its current position? We would know in the coming days!

Let's talk about Opera Browsers, as in Opera Mini - Facebook is trying it's best to penetrate the world, since people are not just using their desktop or laptop in browsing, they would try to make mobile browsing experience at it's best! I know, as I browse Facebook at my mobile almost everyday, Facebook Apps is not enough, Facebook browsers specially for mobile phones would - Opera Mini would work best if it's true that FB would buy the Opera Browser!

Anyway, as of now, it's a rumor (Mashable Author Sam Laird says) - let's wait for the next news, exciting right?

Posted by Editorial Team on 5/26/2012 11:10:00 AM in Best Browsers, Do you know?