As I’m surfing around the net today using Blog Explosion, I thought I’d take some time to identify some great blogs.  Some of these are new and some are not so new and some have been around since the beginning of the blogosphere maybe, but all share the characteristics of being great blogs that could benefit from fully disclosed revenue streams through Social Spark.

1. Scooby and His Meddling Family – This site is on blogger and relatively new (just like Scooby) but its a great little blog and has lots of potential.
2. Observing German(s)… – This social commentary almost politico blog does something in English that you don’t see very often, it talks about Germany.  Being of partial German descent myself and being completely bereft of the ability to speak or read German, it is not terribly easy to get a feel for the place and culture as it exists today, but this provides some interesting little snapshots.  Note it is on blog.com, has some good content but the site owner should really move to wordpress and own their own content. 
3. Anything But Wind Chimes – A lot of people come up with some pretty terribly profile bios on Blogger, hell I’m probably one of them, can’t even remember what I may have as a profile there, but I think this bio is cute and funny and does actually capture the essence of the blog articles that I read (cute and funny but also something more there than just cute and funny)
1. “I’m 19, Stressed as hell, and always striving for a chance to just goof around.”
4. Winged Emotion – Nice looking site and I knew I had to click away fast because this post with the Best Smart Ass Replies of 2008 was sure to make me lose a lot of time today.    Seriously, great site, could definitely benefit from a SEO upgrade and new permalink structure to drive more traffic, but doing a lot of things well.
5. runswithscissors – this is a great blog that I have followed for quite some time, more as a lurker reader.  This also one of those sites that has been around for a long long time.  I think this would make a great addition because this blogger is also a writer as in book writer.  I’ve thought for a long time that novelists could definitely get a big boost from both earning money through Social Spark but also the networking opportunity with a network of 200k + vocal bloggers, maybe even a little advertising from time to time.  On a makeover note, I think this blog might be on TypePad.  TypePad is good for many things, but I believe WordPress has eclipsed it with its power house of open source plugins and CMS functionality.  I just did a TypePad migration to WordPress for a friend and client, Dave Courvouisier, who is a blogger, voice over artist, an anchor man in Las Vegas on KLAS-TV, and an Emmy Award winning broadcaster/producer/writer.  I think runswithscissors could move to a higher level off of the TypePad plateau, an extra revenue stream wouldn’t hurt either, even if it is just used to pay for more marketing for the books on the site!

If you are looking for some examples of sites that could work well, make sure you check these blogs out.  A couple of them are so new that they would not yet qualify into Social Spark, but if they keep up what they are doing, I don’t think they would have any problems getting in if they chose.  Some may already be in the system even. 

Yesterday I received a request from the author of Chon’s Magazine.  Actually at the time the initial email didn’t have the blog url, but I got it today and took a look at the site and liked a lot of what I saw, but did see a couple things that could both help this site.

1. A lot of very good effort has gone into this site and it has generated an good result.  But the site is running on the blogger platform and will always be limited by that platform both in terms of functionality like communicating and commenting, but also for search engine optimization, SERP results, traffic, and that all means less potential ad revenue, or lower quality ads.  Please consider moving to self hosted WordPress!
2. If you stay on blogger for another day, week or whatever, please take a look at our blogger favicon tutorial.
3. To get approved by Social Spark, you need to install the stats tracking code that they provide, sometimes known as the itk code.  This has to be inserted into your template just before the </body> tag,  It can take a couple days for approval, so do this right away.  I can’t see anything other than this that will hold you back.
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   2. Update – I received a follow up email from this blogger, and it looks like they have actually properly installed the codes ( note, I could not see them in the source code on their blog when I checked, but they sent the following screen shots)
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   5. I looked again at the source code and was able to find the code installed.  Its located just after the opening <body> tag as opposed to before the closing </body> tag.  It has been my experience that it is better to put this code at the very end, so that nothing on the Izea servers slows down the loading of content or images on your site.  I would definitely move this code to increase loading time of the blog, but it should work.
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   7. Next Steps – Its time for a Social Spark Support Ticket!  Send in a ticket to support and ask them to review the situation.  Sometimes these things get stuck in the system, and just need to be pushed along with a little help from the large staff at Izea.
4. Note, you are already starting to get well connected via blogger, you’ve done a lot of things right.  Once you get setup with Social Spark and start earning some money for your blogging efforts, you can help point your friends in a similar direction and they can earn some money too.  Nothing better than helping a friend earn money.  Give a person some rice and they eat for a day, teach them how to grow and cook rice and they can eat for a lifetime.

Early this afternoon, I received the following request from Srini looking for some help on a blog titled ‘About Everything . . .’

HI Bret…I received your mail and thanks a lot for letting me know about the work that you do…Ur doing a great job by helping us guys in getting more money writing for the products…Thanks a lot for that…i started a blog some months ago and i had submitted it for approval it has a PR3 but still the site was rejected by Payperpost staff..can u help me with this? i will be really happy and thankfull…MY blog url is http://united.co.cc thnx and waitn4 ur reply

Currently this site is not old enough, but in about 2 weeks it will be ready.  It also needs a couple more blog articles to meet the minimum requirements of 20 articles.  To prove that it is old enough and that it has enough articles it also needs a archives section in the sidebar, easy to do with a WordPress Widget.

A more prickly situation revolves around Playboy.  The site links to a couple places that offer free downloads of Playboy content.  Not only is that a potential legal liability (ergo you could get sued by Playboy Enterprises!), but the type of content and the fact that it is 3rd party content could trigger a rejection.

My advice is to get rid of the download links (its ok to talk about the magazine or even an issue in your own words), but be careful with adult pictures if you want to be accepted into the Social Spark or PayPerPost market place.

Finally, I’d recommend to general things.  Write some more!  The site is a little verbage lite and could use some more content in the forms of words.  Playboy aside, you are doing good including images in your articles.

I’d also recommend using a more unique WordPress theme.  You can download and legally use many free themes, or you can even design your own theme without needing any programming experience these days.  I’d also suggest considering a domain that you own entirely and hosting it yourself.  co.cc sites are definitely good to get your feet wet and learn how things work without spending much, but just a little more money, time and effort with your own self hosted domain name on your server account  will generate much better results.

I recently tried out an add on for WindowsLiveWriter called XPollenate.  It was tremendous.  It is designed to make it easy to cross post an article across many blogs that you have access.  Think of it as a localized press release tool.

Here’s how it works:

1. Publish an article to the source site or blog
2. Leave your WLW window with that original article open, then click the button for xpollenate in your sidebar or in your menu (depends on how you configure WLW).
3. Select by check box option, which blogs you want to then cross post to(the cross post can include a linkback to the source article if you choose.
4. Hit OK, when you are done and watch the status bar fill up as your article is cross posted to many many many sites!

Advanced Tips

• If you want the original article to be published in Blockquotes in the additional sites, just put a <blockquote> tag in the header box option(last thing in this box) and a close </blockquote> tag in the footer box option (first thing in this box).
• If you do not want to re-publish the entire article, there is an option for setting a summary and limiting that summary to x number of words.
• If you want to re-stimulate buzz, don’t re-publish to all sites at the same time, just open that original article and hit the button, then cross pollenate the post to a couple blogs one day and maybe a couple more blogs the next until you have hit everything you want to hit!

I have worked for almost 3 years now as a blogger, and close to two and a half of those years as a professional blogger, deriving the majority of my income from blog related ventures and my own writing.

Today, I have grown my ventures to the point where I manage over 50 different sites powered with WordPress.  Some of those sites are blogs, some are corporate sites and some are a mix of the two.

I rarely have to log in to WordPress other than to manage comments and respond or upgrade a plugin or something. (Auto upgrade of plugins is coming in a future version of WordPress).

I simply write the article using the free WindowsLiveWriter software and hit the publish button and it gets sent into my site.  It also enables me to publish and manipulate pictures very very easily. I can simply copy (right click) a picture from a folder and paste it right into the text of my blog article and then format its placement and much more from WLW.  Then I publish it and the picture is automatically uploaded to my blog.

This software is created by Microsoft and amazingly THEY GENERATE VALID HTML THESE DAYS!

As a web designer I do recall the days when it was like pulling teeth to get Microsoft to offer software that created good code, which is essential to good SEO practices. 

The software also makes it very easy to get a word count of your articles while you write and before you publish.

All in all if you are a serious blogger you should be using WindowsLiveWriter with a self hosted domain running WordPress.  These are the three main requirements that any blogger needs to be successful!

I recently wrote an article that recommended to bloggers that if they had a blog powered by blogger, whether they owned the URL or not they needed to get rid of the ugly Orange B (blogger favicon).

Article Title:

10 Tips to Help ‘Good’ or ‘Improving’ Pacific Rim Bloggers Avoid Being Type Cast as ‘Bad’ Pacific Rim Bloggers

These little orange backgrounds with the white B are called favicons and they are typically saved with an extension of .ico and the default name on many sites is usually favicon.ico.  That said there are several ways to get normal images to work as a ‘favicon’ that I will not go into here.

So Courtney of The Many Ramblings of Me asked me the completely legitimate (and obvious) question.  How do you get rid of that Google Blogger orange favicon?

Right off the bat I knew the answer to this question, but upon testing learned that I was a fool and didn’t know anything so I had to look around the internet for the answer (and I finally found it!)

Now I came across one article that told me what I already knew about favicons.  The article was on a blogspot site and the article was titled How to Change favicon in blogger blog.  But remarkably this particular site still had the Google B favicon icon present!

Obviously they didn’t completely know what they were talking about, but they were partially right.

All you have to do is

1. find a place to host your favicon icon image
2. They recommend Google Pages but just about anywhere that you can store an image will work.
3. Then link to that file with the following meta tag info:

   <link href=’http://yourdomain-image-storagelocation.com/favicon.ico’ rel=’shortcut icon’/>
   <link href=’http://yourdomain-image-storagelocation.com/favicon.ico’ rel=’icon’/>

4. Put that code after the head tag in your blogger template (make sure you expand to show all code) and back up your template (although I’ll admit that I rarely backup my blogger templates. Shame on me!)
5. Save your changed template, view your blog and

IT DOESN’T WORK!!!!

That’s where I then found the real solution from my favorite new blogger resource on the web. (This site rocks and if you haven’t found it you can thank me later for pointing it out to you now.  This will probably be the most important find of your blogger little lives.  (it was mine!)

The site is called BloggerBuster.com.

Unlike the last site, when I went to BloggerBuster they had their own custom favicon.  I have no idea if they really use blogger for their blogging platform, but well, That’s the Point!

You don’t want people to know that you use blogger, because the world is full of anti-blogger snobs.  So if you can use a simple and easy tool (because you are too stubborn to move to WordPress) then more power to you and this site will help you milk at least another year out of Blogger as a platform.

THE TIP TO MAKE IT WORK – GETTING THE FAVICON TO DISPLAY ON A BLOGGER BLOG IS POSSIBLE

So the trick here as the geniuses at BloggerBuster point out in their article is to place that same code I mentioned to you just before you CLOSE the Head tag </head>.

Google has some goofy XML code that I can’t read that tries to call and display the google orange b favicon higher up and by putting your favicon just at the end, it will replace the Google favicon.

Note, I can’t get this to work in Internet Explorer, but that browser doesn’t pull up the B either when you follow this example and no B is better than a B.