25 Awesome Examples Of Alluring About Us Pages

Guest Post - Our host is Ben Rogan, In this post Ben has listed 25 amazing About Pages sure to Inspire you.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

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.

Collection Of About Us Pages

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Twenty Must-Have Online Image Tools For Bloggers

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.
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How to Grow Your Readership When You Have a Niche Blog

Guest Post - Our host is Clare Evans, In this post Clare has some useful blog tips for niche bloggers.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

We’re all used to seeing post after post on how to grow your blogs readership. And while all these points are well and good if you blog about marketing, SEO, or design; are they really relevant to the niche bloggers amongst us?

A quick Google search will show you that there is a blog for pretty much everything. Whatever your weird, wonderful, or downright bizarre hobbies, there’s someone out there blogging about it. And these highly niche blogs all have a readership. So why are you finding it so difficult?

Niche Blogging Made Easy

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Disqus, Intense Debate And Livefyre - Use The Top Comment Systems On Blogger

Comments are one of the essential parts that make a blog a blog.Comments help everyone from Mommy bloggers to Fortune 500 company blogs receive reader and costumer opinion and feedback.So it's important you and your readers get the most from your comments system.

The default Blogger comments have come a long way over the last few years culminating in the introduction of threaded comment replies last year.But as a Blogger user you have other options and lots of them.In this post we will look at the three most popular comment systems available and they can all be used on your Blogger blog.The top three independent comment systems are Disqus, Intense Detate and Livefyre.Lets look at all three and how you can use them on Blogger.
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Does Your Blog Have The Right Tone ?

Guest Post - Our host is Peter Nevis, here Peter asks some questions about the tone you set on your blog.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog. Introduction

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.Click Here To View Full Post >>

Quick Tip - Fix Images Breaking Out Over The Sidebar On Blogger

An Email I received recently for a Blogger user complained photos they added to posts were overlapping onto the sidebar.I facet I have seen this on a few blogs and have helped people with the problem.Fixing it is easy and only takes a minute.All we do is add a snippet of Css that makes sure photos and images can only be at maximum 98% the width of posts.So even if you added a huge image this code will restrict it from breaking out of the post body, Lets do it !
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15 Things You Do To Your Blog Without Knowing They Are Harmful

Guest Post - Our host is Patrick Del Rosario, In this post Patrick has some great blog tips to keep in mind so you work with your blog not against it.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

The benefits of blogging in today’s digital age almost go without saying. From better rankings on search engines, more value to website visitors and a forum to speak you and your brands voice, blogs have taken the online world by storm and lent a way for businesses and people to engage better and more with others. Still, in spite of the increasing popularity, many bloggers still make crucial mistakes that hurt the quality of their blog and may end up harming their own image unintentionally.

Here are 15 ways you may be harming your blog without realizing it.

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Top 14 Grammatical Offenses Of Bloggers

Guest Post - Our host is Jason Colantuoni, Jason plays the English teacher making sure your blog is grammatically correct.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Last Month 52,689 blog posts were analyzed for grammatical errors and punctuation errors. It was accomplished through the use of a web crawler, automated software that can visit websites to gather information. Search engines frequently use web crawlers to collect information about what is available on public web pages.

When you're writing for the web, some grammar rules don't apply.But there are some that should be followed. Ones that could detract from your credibility. And cause people not to subscribe or link to your blog. It may sound silly, but some people will harshly judge you on your grammar and overall writing ability.

Top Grammatical Offenses

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Stylish Subscribe Icons Widget For Blogger And WordPress

I seem to have published a lot of subscription gadgets on Spice Up Your Blog over the years.To be honest recently I have tried to take a break from such posts.But readers should have a say and that's why I find myself publishing this post.I had come up with a version of a Subscribe Icons gadget I had seen on a lot of sites.Because of my self imposed break from publishing such tutorials I decided to add the code into jsFiddle and send out a Tweet and add it to our FaceBook page so followers could grab it.Since then I have got a lot of requests from people who don't quite understand how to transfer the code on jsFiddle to their blogs.

So in this post I will show in easy steps how to add the subscribe widget to your blog.What is unique about this widget ? I like the icon design with the 'Speech bubble' type style, we also have the name of each service below and finally an opacity hover effect.
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Why You Need to Use Tags on Your WordPress Blog

Guest Post - Our host is Melissa Woodson, In this post Melissa looks at the advantages of using tags on your blog.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

As an avid blogger, you should make it a priority to carefully organize your site so that your readers find it easy to navigate. While adding categories to your blog is a helpful way of organizing postings by similar content, tags take your content a step further.

Tags in a Nutshell

Tags are labels that group posts together with a single word or key phrase. They assist your readers in finding posts that are related. They are similar to categories, in that they direct your readers to similar content, but are more versatile, in that they connect the reader directly to a more specialized posting. For example: You might have a category called “dogs”; however, you might be writing about training dogs and include a tag like “training poodles” that will direct a reader to similar postings on that topic, rather than everything that you have written about dogs.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Specific tags, with single words or brief categories, improve your blog’s search engine ranking. Think about a basic Google search: If you were looking up culinary blogs, you won’t be directed to every culinary blog on the planet, just a select few that appear on the first few pages of Google’s result. Tags can help search engine users navigate to your page by helping it appear higher on those search engine results (i.e. on one of the first few pages of Google’s results or even, ideally, the top of the first page). For example: You might include the tag “organic farming” on a blog post; this would help Google associate that blog post with the search engine query “organic farming,” thus improving the chances that your blog post pops up if a Google users enters that phrase.

Tagging Tips

Use the same tags over and over (if they are appropriate). If you write about motivational speaking often, stick to one tag, such as “motivational speaking.” This is less confusing and more organized than using several tags, like “motivational speaking” and “inspirational speaking” and “speaking for an audience.” Also: Keep it simple. You do not want to confuse your readers or use unnecessarily complicated words. Be sure to also check out other blogs. Go to your favorite blogs that are easy to navigate and see how they are effectively using tags. Manage your tags in a similar fashion. Finally, get to know your audience. Use tags that they will easily understand and will connect them with content that interests them. That is the point, after all.

By Guest Author - Melissa Woodson is the community manager for @WashULaw, a top-tier online LLM in U.S. law and a premier llm degree offered by Washington University in St. Louis. In her spare time, she enjoys running, cooking, and making half-baked attempts at training her dog.

Add Flashing Color Links To Blogger

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.

Adding Flashing Links To Your Blog

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Five Strategies To Immediately Boost The Sales Of Your Business Blog

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.

But how should you go about doing this in a way that won’t completely break the bank? One of the best ways is by creating a blog to help drive traffic to your business’s website. This will help boost the sales of your business in more ways than you ever thought possible – but you have to follow the right steps and use your blog correctly.

Here are five strategies that will boost your business’s sales through the use of your blog:
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Don’t Believe The Hype – Why You Should Avoid Automated Blogging

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.

Even though making a quick buck online always sounds tempting, here are some reasons why using automated blogging techniques for your personal blog is not a good idea overall.
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Spice Up Your Blog 5x Hosting And Domain Giveaway Draw

Its time to draw the lucky winners of our great giveaway in conjunction with WebHostingBuzz.We had a big entry for the giveaway with 80 people hoping to Win a prize, I would love to give you all a prize but unfortunately we only have five.
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How To Display AdSense When Using Blogger Dynamic Views Templates

A question I was asked on the post "Always Display The Sidebar On Blogger Dynamic Views Templates" is "Can we have AdSense on Dynamic Views Templates".I had a quick look into it and the answer is yes.So in this post I will show you the steps involved to put AdSense on Blogger Dynamic Views.

Now as far as I can see the AdSense units used are all 768x90 and 120x600.They are displayed between posts, below posts and beside posts.For the classic and sidebar templates Units are on the home page and posts for all other Dynamic templates units are on posts.In fact the AdSense set up on posts, 120x600 unit on the right with 768x90 below posts is great (See Image Below).OK so I have the steps added to a video and in text.

How To Add AdSense To Dynamic Views Templates

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Upload Photos And Videos From Your WebCam And Phone On Blogger Blogs

Over the last year Blogger really have added a huge amounts of improvements to the platform.We all know about and most of us are using the new blogger interface that while has had it's teething problems in my opinion is now settling in (I wont mention the lack of URL, why they change draft posts to be the same color as published and the redirect page after publishing a post, oops I did).But apart from the large changes there have been so many small changes.In fact as a Blogger user for many of my blogs I seem to be having a "That's new" moment regularly.One of the recent one I posted about last week was the new option to Turn Off The Blogger Navbar.

In this post I want to cover something I noticed a while back and think is worthy of a post.Blogger have added new options both to the Image and Video uploads for your posts.The stand out changes are the options to upload Images and Videos directly from your web cam to your blog posts.Lets take a look.

Blogger Image Upload Options

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A Lightweight Pop Up Style Survey For All Blogs

Something I have been seeing a lot on blogs and websites is the pop up survey from Qualaroo.It's actually a neat way to run a survey on your blog, it sits in the corner of the page big enough to grab the attention of the reader but not so big as to block content.It also has a close option so if readers are not interested they can get rid of it.

The default survey is set to ask readers how they found your site but there are a number of set surveys and you can create your own with any questions you want.You then have an account dashboard you access to view the stats and results.I added a version to this test blog on blogger so you can see it in action.

The survey can be easily added to Blogger, Wordpress (self hosted only), Tumblr and TypePad blogs and below I have links to tutorials for each.

Add The Survey To Your Blog

First you need to set up your survey and get the code here is a link to Qualaroo to do just that.

Once you have the code Qualaroo have tutorials for each blogs platform :

Add To Blogger
Plugin For WordPress
Add To Tumblr
Add To TypePad

What do you think, will you use it ?

Drop Your Comments And Questions Below.

Author - Paul Crowe is the owner and main author of Spice Up Your Blog.Paul lives in Ireland, has been blogging since 2006 and writing Spice Up Your Blog since 2009.You can find him in the usual social networks.

Facebook Like And Twitter Share To Download Buttons

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).

Anyway when I looked into how I could do it I came across some easy to use resources.In fact it is incredibly easy to create the following :

• Facebook Like To Download
• Twitter Follow To Download
• Twitter Tweet To Download
• FeedBurner Subscribe To Download
• Pinterest Pin It To Download

Live Demo
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5 Steps To Creating A Successful YouTube Channel

Guest Post - Our host is Josiah, in this post has some great tips for a successful YouTube channel.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

A significant amount of traffic that flows throughout the Internet every year is by users watching YouTube videos. YouTube.com has led to an enormous success for many people. Users came along, had an idea and made it happen. Whether the idea was to upload video game play, cooking recipes or even hair and make-up tutorials, users all over the world are thriving using YouTube. Many Bloggers have also managed to harness the power of YouTube adding video content to their blogs.This not only gives readers a fresh way to view the blog but also attracts traffic directly from YouTube. You may be thinking of starting a channel of your own soon. These steps will ensure that you take the right approach and stay on a path that will lead you to success.

The Vision

What is your channel going to be about? You can bet that there are already channels on the subject you have in-mind. It’s important to think of an angle, a unique twist that will make your channel different and offer something more unique to your viewers. What software and hardware will you need to get started? Take a moment to figure out if you’ll need to step up your editing software or buy a new camera. Another important question to ask yourself, “How often will I be uploading videos?” Set realistic goals based on your lifestyle.

Picking a Name

Take a look at the top featured videos and skim through the usernames. Some are long, some are a bit generic but what you’ll find is that most are short, catchy and memorable. Thinking of a name that will stick in people’s heads is what you’re looking for. Think about your channel, the direction it may lead in the future and write down names that are short, sweet and make sense even of the direction of your channel changes over time. Once you have a list, seek out other’s opinions on which username you should use. Ask your friends and family or take to message boards a chatrooms for more opinions to help you decide.

Perfecting your Appearance

How would you like your audience to view your channel and your videos? What style, flare or uniqueness would you like to come across in your videos and on your channel background? It’s time to think about intros and outros for your videos, or will there be any at all? Sometimes it’s best to let more skilled individuals handle the more involved editing tasks. Your YouTube channel background is also seen by users from time to time. The channel background should reflect the content you are providing. Your Avatar can reflect your username and be branded with a logo that you might use in your videos.

Marketing your Channel

Once you have your channel setup and a few videos for users to watch, bring awareness about your channel and videos is should be top priority. Marketing is all about presenting your content to as many people as possible while targeting those who you know might be interested. You’ll want to create a Facebook fan page and Twitter profile. These two social networking sites will allow users not on YouTube to be exposed to your channel. Don’t hesitate to interact with users on Facebook and Twitter in-order to gain fans and followers.

The above can also be applied to YouTube. Find channels and videos that are in the same genre as yours or find videos that you know its viewers might have an interest in your videos. Subscribe to those channels, comment on those videos. Let others know by the way you comment that you know what you’re talking about. A sneaky trick is to leave comments that will almost certainly get replies. This will expose more users to your comment and to some extent, your channel. Don’t spam! Excessive commenting or comments that just say “go check out my channel” will get marked as spam and could lead to your channel being suspended.

Consistency

As mentioned before, take time that you know you’ll have available. If you have all the time in the world, make a video 5 times a week, if you don’t, find out how much time you can set aside each day of each week to put towards your channel. However you do things, stay consistent! Your viewers and subscribers will slowly begin to trust and view your channel as an authority on the subject (whatever that may be.) Subscribers will come to expect to be entertained, educated, etc., by your videos on a regular basis.

It’s important to stay consistent and put out videos at the same time each week. Never let your channel, your video comments, your Twitter and Facebook page stand still. Continue to put in a little time for each component regularly. Make small achievable goals and as you pass one, set your sights on the next. Stay focused, persistent and your channel will be a success in no time.

By Guest Author - Josiah has been helping YouTube users reach success for several years. Check out his site BackgroundTube for free and custom YouTube backgrounds.

Latest Google Page Rank Update August 2012

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 Spice Up Your Blog is holding steady with a page rank of 5.You can quickly check the page rank of your blog to see if there was any change using our free page rank checker tool. :

Google Page Rank Tool
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25 Best Free Templates For Blogger From 2012

It's been a few weeks since we looked at The 30 Best Free WordPress Themes Of 2012.Now it's time to see the best Templates for Blogger released this year.We are well past the half way stage of the year and as always Blogger Template Designers have been hard at work.They are of course all Free Blogger Templates and you can click the name of each to get the demo and download details.

Included are all styles like the classic Magazine design and a few unique and niche styles.

Also See - You can't miss our list of the Top 20 Best Premium Blogger Templates and The 25 Best New Free Blogger Templates Released In 2013.

25 Best Free Blogger Templates Of 2012 List

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What The New Google+ Tab Means To Blogger Users

Google are really playing for keeps with their latest venture into social networking; Google+.From using it to break news for their various products, making it an integral part of their search results, +1 on AdSense units and a real push to integrate it into blogs hosted on Blogger.

After adding the option to use you Google+ profile as your Blogger profile and providing Google+ gadgets for Blogger they have now added a tab to the Blogger dashboard dedicated to Google+.

To be honest the Google+ tab on blogger looks pretty bare at the moment so what options does it provide ?

Connect Google+ And Blogger Blogs With New Google+ Tab

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Creating Great Blog Content With Lists

Guest Post - Our host is Eric Nacul, In this post Eric lists the best list making services.See How To Become a guest author on Spice Up Your Blog.

Santa isn't the only one who should be making a list and checking it twice. Bloggers interested in increasing traffic to their websites should, too.

There’s simply no denying the popularity of lists. They’re everywhere and on every topic imaginable. Readers like lists because they’re quick and easy to read and provide instant gratification. They’re easy to share as well, and can break complex information into its simplest form.

Of course, bloggers should like lists because readers like them and the increased traffic that comes with those readers. Lists are also easy to write, offer visual appeal, and can create interest and discussion on a blog.

While bloggers can snap up or link to countless lists on the web, collaborative lists, also called crowdsourced lists, tend to build the most interest and because they involve readers in their creation can help a blog create a sense of community.

A list of lists sharing apps

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