Guest Blogging - Write For Spice Up Your Blog

Guest Blogging is very popular and is a great way to get your name and blog to a new audience.

Here at S.U.Y.B. i have started to accept guest posts and it's easy to get your post on this blog.

What kind of content do you accept?

Anything that is useful for our readers is good content for a guest post here. It can be related to:

Blogging
Bloggers
Tools or Gadgets for Blogging
Tips and tricks on writing
How to write posts effectively
Topics and niches
Promoting your blog

I think you get the idea - if it can help a Blogger in any way i would love to have you write a post.It can also be derived from your own personal experiences within Blogging. There is no minimum length for your post, but usually the guest posts have over 400 words.

There will be 2 links to your blog, website or anywhere you choose added to the post so you really are reaching a new audience and as the primary readership of this Blog is people who keep their own Blogs you are connecting with like minded readers.

Guidelines

* Your post must be original and must have never been published before on the Internet.
* You agree to not publish the post anywhere else (i.e., in your own blog or as a guest post in other blogs)
* You can include up to two links in the byline, which will be displayed at the bottom of the post
* Links are d0-follow to give your blog or website extra help.
* You must enjoy writing the post and not feel any pressure - Only kidding just don't mind the rules and get writing I'm sure your post will rock !

Samples

Here Are Two Guest Posts that was submitted and published :

10 Tips for Writing a Successful Blog

10 Methods of Refining Your Writing Technique

How do I submit my guest post?

You can submit a post in any format, When your ready you can send it to me on the email :

paul@spiceupyourblog.com

I will get back to you as soon as possible.

You can request more information or request a post for your blog by using the form below.

Please include your blogs address and any other relevant information.

Your Name
Your Email Address
Subject
Message
Image Verification Please enter the text from the image: [ Refresh Image ] [ What's This? ]

How To Let Feedburner Automatically Tweet Your Latest Blog Posts

Most bloggers have Twitter accounts and most bloggers have learned that Twitter can drive traffic to your blog its not a new trick.Connecting your blog with the social networks you use is a great way to get traffic to your blog, Right now Twitter is the 'Hot' social network and traffic flowing from twitter is second to none.But before you run off to start Tweeting your latest posts look at the options.I previously covered using Twitterfeed to connect your blog with Twitter now you can allow Feedburner to connect your blog feed with Twitter.

The Google owned Feedburner has now added the 'Socialize' option.When you activate this option Feedburner will automatically Post your latest posts to your Twitter account.As soon as you publish a post on your blog it will be sent to your Twitter account.

Here you can see Google sent this post to my Twitter account.
Notice the URL is 'goo.gl' and 3 minutes ago from 'Google'.

If you don't have a feedburner account it is advised to set one up for your blog it only takes a few minutes Click here for a previous post on the subject.

This has come about with the launch or pre-launch of Googles new URL shortner Goo.gl

Remember you can get all these tips sent directly to your email and stay a step ahead.Its quick easy and of course a free service provided by Google just fill in the form below the post.

How to set up the service to connect your Twitter and Blog



Go to your feedburner account and select the blog feed you want to allow feedburner to connect.

Click 'Publicize' in the top menu then 'Socialize' in the side menu Then 'Add a Twitter account' as shown in the image below :

Before we finish : If you need more help or have an opinion or suggestion Please leave a comment Below. To help you this is a Do-Follow Blog leaving a comment will also help your blogs Google rank.

Now a pop up window will ask you to confirm the connection with twitter - allow the connection.

There are more options to edit how you tweet will be posted once your happy click save and your connected.

Follow me on Twitter : @spiceyourblog

Have you been able to connect? Let us know.

How To Get A Free Domain Name For Your Blog

I have removed this post as the Free domains are no longer available check out how to set up a custom domain on Blogger.

How To Add Your Recent Youtube Video List To Your Blog

Lots of bloggers are dedicated You Tube users so this tip will allow you to add a gadget to your blog listing your latest YouTube videos or videos from any YouTube user you may like.The gadget is very similar to a recent post gadget you may be using we just do a little trick to have it display recent videos titles.This will help you connect your YouTube and blogger accounts as soon as you or the user you selected upload a new video to YouTube your list will update.

You can see a live demo using the ESPN recent videos click here.

Heres how its done lets spice up your blog :

1.Click 'Layout' ->'Add a Gadget' for your blog:

2.In the pop up menu scroll down to 'Feed' and click the + as shown below:

3.Once you click feed you will be requested to enter a feed URL you will enter the feed for your YouTube channel or the channel you want.

What is you channels feed URL?

Remember you can get all these tips sent directly to your email and stay a step ahead.Its quick easy and of course a free service provided by Google just fill in the form below the post.

All users on YouTube have a feed here is how to get yours.
I am using ESPN as an example their feed URL is this :

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/espn/uploads

So all you need to do is replace ESPN in the URL with your Youtube username :

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/YOUR-USERNAME-HERE/uploads

So yours might be :

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/johndoe/uploads

Add this in the area provided and click 'Continue'

You will go to the preview page.

Before we finish : If you need more help or have an opinion or suggestion Please leave a comment Below. To help you this is a Do-Follow Blog leaving a comment will also help your blogs Google rank.

You can make the following changes to the widgets appearance :

Title=Give the widget a title like 'My recent videos'
Show X items = How many recent videos to display.
Item Dates=Choose to show date of the video on widget.
Item source/authors=Show the video Author on widget.

Once your happy with the look of your widget click save.

Your recent YouTube list has been added to your blog.

Have you added this gadget to your blog ? Let us know.

How To Split Your Blogger Blogs Header For AdSense Or Other Ad Units

The header section of a blog is one of the prime areas for AdSense and other ads so in this post i will show you an easy tip to place ads in your blogger header section.This will help increase your earnings and hopefully help make you more money from your blog.

This image from Google displays the top positions for ads.



There are a number of ways to place AdSense ads in your header and i will cover other options in later posts.

In this post i will show you a nice clean and simple way to achieve this trick.

The ads will be placed differently to how i have them in my header to see a live demo of the ads in a header section click here


Here is how its done lets spice up your blog :

Getting your ad code ready.

Before you add AdSense code to your blog it must be parsed don't worry this is simple.

The first thing to do is go to your AdSense account choose the ad unit you want to use and get the code.

You now have the code copied Click Here to go to my AdSense parser .
Paste your AdSense code in to the gadget and click 'convert' now copy your new parsed code.

If the add you are adding is a simple html banner ad you don't need to parse it you can skip that step.
Placing the code in your template.

Remember you can get all these tips sent directly to your email and stay a step ahead.Its quick easy and of course a free service provided by Google just fill in the form below the post.

1.Click 'layout'-> 'Edit html' for your blog.
(Tick The 'Expand Widget Templates' Box)

2.Find the following piece of code in your blogs html:
(Click 'Ctrl F' for a search box to find the code)

3.Paste the code for your AdSense unit directly Below the code above.


Example:

<-----YOUR ADSENSE CODE GOES HERE----->

Once you have added the code click save.

The ad has now been added to your blogs header,Remember it can take up to 10 minutes for AdSense ads to show on your blog.

Drop your comments and questions below.

Add A Fixed Floating Happy New Year Image To Your Blog

As we close in on the new year we will look at an easy trick to add a fixed new year banner to your blog.Once the tip is added the image will be situated in the very top corner of your blog as a Great New Year greeting to your visitors.I have included four different images to try accommodate different templates and adding the image to your blog is quick and easy.

Here's a preview of the images you can choose from:

Image 1:



Image 2:



Image 3:



Image 4:



You can see a live demo of the float image working click here..

You could also find your own image and use that.

Lets add it to your blog :

1.Click Layout-->Edit html for your blog
(Tick the 'Expand widget templates' box)

2.Find the following piece of code in the html:
(Click 'CTRL & F' for a search box to find the code)

]]>

3.Now Add the following piece of code Directly Above ]]>

#float_corner {
position:fixed;_position:absolute;top:3px;left:3px;clip:
inherit;_top:expression(document.documentElement.scrollTop+document.documentElement.clientHeight-this.clientHeight);_left:expression(document.documentElement.scrollLeft + document.documentElement.clientWidth - offsetWidth);}

You can change the following attributes : top :left
Change them to make the image appear were you like :

top left
top right
bottom left
bottom right

(left is usually the best way to go)
4.Now find this code in your html :

5.And place this code Directly Above :

For Image 1 Add This Code :

For Image 2 Add This Code :

For Image 3 Add This Code :

For Image 4 Add This Code :

---

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---

To add a second floating image just repeat the steps making sure to add the image to a different corner,to use your own image replace the image URL with your own image URL.

We Are Nearly Finished - First A Quick Reminder: If you need more help or have an opinion or suggestion Please leave a comment Below. This is a Do-Follow Blog so leaving a comment will also help Your blogs Google rank.

Of course after the new year you could change the image to a differant welcome image.Leave a comment here if you wish i will send you the code to add a welcome image.

And that's it save your template and check out your new image...

Another Christmas time trick for your blog is adding the snow fall effect Click Here to see how.

Have you added an image to your blog? Let us know what image you liked..

How To Create And Submit Sitemaps To Google Webmaster Tools

If you want to get more hits to your Blog making your blog 'search engine friendly' is an absolute must.Sitemaps basically show Google search bots you recent activity quicker and without the bells and wistles than can cause crawl errors (Dirthy words to a blogger).

Im always trying to provide better tips and improve the tutorials when possable and this post has been updated from the original to include a second sitemap.Why? The first sitemap only contains your 26 most recent posts ! If you have more than 26 posts they are not indexed.You should still add both sitemaps, the more the better.

In earlier posts i posted tips on changing the default title tags of your blog and adding a meta title and description both great tricks in their own right.


There is a number of ways to generate a sitemap for blogs and websites, here on blogger generating a sitemap and submitting it to Google can be done in 5 minutes and can be achieved by even the least experienced Blogger.

What Is A Site map ?

"Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

They also act as a navigation aid by providing an overview of a site's content at a single glance.

Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if the number of links is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site"
(source :Wikipedia)

We have 3 sections to complete this tip

Getting your sitemap address

Submitting your blog to Google webmaster tools

Submitting your Sitemap to Google webmaster tools

So lets see how its done :

Sitemap 1.
I will show you how this is done for future referance.

Getting the sitemap address

Step 1.
Go to your blog and look at your blogs address in the browser at the top of the page it will be :
http://www.YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/
or if you have a custom domain :
http://www.YOURBLOGNAME.com/
Mine is http://www.spiceupyourblog.com/

Step 2.
Add the following to the end of your blogs URL :
robots.txt
So now you have :
http://www.YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/robots.txt
http://www.YOURBLOGNAME.com/robots.txt
Mine is http://www.spiceupyourblog.com/robots.txt
Click enter or go to go to the address

Step 3.
Now once you go to this page it will look like this :

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: http://www.YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

Mine looks like this :

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: http://www.spiceupyourblog.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

Above as i have highlighted in red is your site map address - that's it as far as getting the site map.
Keep this you will need it later.

Sitemap 2.
I will just give you the default 'atom 500' address :

• atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

Now you can Submit your site map to Google.

Submitting your blog to Google webmaster tools

Step 1.
If you do not already have a webmaster tools account to do this you go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ you can log in to webmaster tools with your Google account the same details you log into blogger with.

Webmaster tools is a Great source of information to see exactly how Google sees your blog but that's another days work..

Step 2.
On the homepage if you have not already submitted your site to webmaster tools click 'Submit A Site' .
You can submit your blog URL.Note: just submit your URL here http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com we enter the site map address later.

You will have to verify that you own the blog this is straight forward follow the steps provided by Google.

For mor help adding your site click here

Once you are verified as the owner of the blog we can carry on.

You are now ready to submit your sitemap.

Step 1.

Submitting your Sitemap to Google webmaster tools

Click on your blog address in your webmasters dashboard you will arrive on this page.In the left sidebar click 'site configuration' as shown below ::

Now in the drop down click 'sitemaps' as below :

Before we finish : If you need more help or have an opinion or suggestion Please leave a comment Below. This is a Do-Follow Blog leaving a comment will also help your blogs Google rank.

Click 'Submit Sitemap' as circled in red below and enter the site map you generated earlier:

• feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

As you can see circled in blue below your URL is already there so just type or paste in : feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

Click submit.

Now enter the second sitemap :

• atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

Click submit.

Your sitemaps have been added and the Google bots are heading your way.Why not now Submit A Sitemap To Yahoo.

This is one of the many ways we can help our blogs get ranked higher in search results to see some of the other posts on this S.E.O. Blog Tips.

Dont worry if you struggle first time just take your time and let me know how you get on or if you have some trouble.

How well does your blog rank in Google? Have you any tips that you found successful?

My Top Ten Magazine Style Free Blogger Templates

In this post i will share my top 10 Magazine Blogger Templates.Magazine templates are the most common amongst the top bloggers.Click on the title of each template to get the preview and download details.

Most of these templates have cool built in extras like :

*Social bookmark buttons *Re-tweet buttons * Email subscriptions *Search bars *Read more functions *Featured content sliders *Menu bars and more..

Some of these extras will need to be edited you will see instructions on the download page.

Also See - You can't miss our list of the Top 20 Best Premium Blogger Templates.

Here is the list

1. Upside - Magazine Blogger Template In 5 Colors



2. Superb - AdVanced Blogger Template



3. Personal Press - Stylish Blogger Template



4. iShowcase - Black Gallery Template



5. Mash - Mashable Style Blogger Template



6. Old Paper - Vintage Style Blogger Template



7. Irresistible Blue - Professional Magazine Blogger Template



8. Convergance - Professional Blogger Template



9. Maparaan - Magazine Template



10. Old Black - Magazine Template



You can't miss our list of the Top 20 Best Premium Blogger Templates.So that's the list to be honest i could have added 50 more cool magazine templates.You can find 100's more free templates on Best Blogger Templates Enjoy !

Which one is your favorite or have i left out your favorite magazine template?
Also if you do use one of these let us know so we can have a look !

How To Add A Scrolling Recent Posts List To Your Blog

As always I'm on the look out for tips, Widgets and Gadgets to display your recent and popular posts and keep people on your blog.With a little help we can implemnt a few tricks to achieve this.
This widget is nice clean and simple and will scroll your recent posts across your blog taking up very little space.

You should check out how it looks :

Click Here To See A Live Demo

Once your cursor hovers over a post title it will stop scrolling so you can easily select the post you want.

I think it would be best placed above your posts like below :

So how do we add it to your blog

Step 1 :Copy the code below :

You Must Change My .Blogspot Adderss:

spiceyourblog.blogspot.com

To Your .Blogspot Address :

your-blog-address.blogspot.com

Step 2 :Click 'Layout' Then 'Add A Gadget' for your blog..

Step 3 :Choose Html/Javascript from the menu..

Step 4 :Once You Choose Html/Javascript you are provided with an area to place the code - paste in the code you have copied from above.

Options :

If you like you could write Recent posts above the gadget the post titles will scroll below

You can also change the (speed =175) (maxposts =15) (direction =left) (OpenLinkLocation=N)(BulletChar=•)

If you have expirence there is more you can edit if you want help changing anything leave a comment below


That's it your recent posts scroll has been added.

Have you used it let us know.How does it look on your blog?

How To Add The New Share The Love Social Bookmark Buttons To Your Blog

In this post i bring you another great set of social bookmarking buttons for your blog.I have combined two sets of buttons you may have seen on other blogs to make a vertical style 'Share The Love' set.Social Bookmarking can have a huge effect on your blog and the amount of visitors you get for more info on this Advantages Of Social Bookmarking Click Here

Heres how the buttons will look :

Adding the buttons to your blog , here's how its done :


Step 1.Click 'Layout' then 'Edit html' for your blog
(Tick the 'Expand Widget Templates' box)

Step 2.Find the following code in your blogs html :
(Click 'CTRL + F' for a search bar to find the code)

Step 3.Now copy the code below and paste it Directly Below

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on StumbleUpon Share on Delicious Share on Reddit

Share on Digg Share on simpy Share on Technorati Share on furl Subscribe to Feeds RSS

Before we finish : If you need more help or have an opinion or suggestion Please leave a comment Below. To help you this is a Do-Follow Blog leaving a comment will also help your blogs Google rank. OK Back to business ....

Once you have add the code click save template and the buttons will appear below all your posts.

If you don't understand any of the steps you can comment for help or Click Here for a list of tutorials on the basics.

How do they look on your blog?