How you can post to your Blogger Blog via email?

Let’s face it: posting via email to your Blogger blog might not be the most convenient way of updating your blog. However, you can think about different situations, when this feature would be useful. For example you cannot access your Blogger account for some reason, or your favorite third party posting application has crashed, or you are on the go, and your phone does not have the data package or necessary feature to make mobile posts. Anyway, be aware that there is a simple method of doing it by sending email message.

The task can be divided in two parts:

1. Registering you email account for posting on you blog.

By default this email posting feature is turned off on all new blogs but if you want to enable this you need to follow the instructions given below.

·         Login to blogger.com and choose the blog (if you have multiple blogs in your account) for which you want to enable email posting.

·         Click on small envelope icon beside blog's title. See image given below:

·         On a pop-up set a secret word of your choice. See image given below:

·         Now Click on the Save Button, After setting up a secret word would make an email address like this:

YourUserName.YourSecretWord.blogger.com

Keep the email address secret as this would be a public email address and anyone from anywhere is able to send an email automatically publishing it to your blog.  Keep it in safe place on your records or just remember it.

Be sure to specify whether or not you prefer your email posts to publish automatically. If this option is not checked, then your posts will be saved on your account but will not appear on your blog until you log in to Blogger.com and publish them yourself.

Alternatively, in Settings | Email you can create a Mail-to-Blogger address which you will use to send posts via email to your blog:

  

     2.      Publishing to your blog via email message.

•      Create a new email from any email address.
•      Add your secret email address of your blog in recipient's address box.
•      Put in meaningful Subject because that would be the title of the post.
•      Write the text in the email body and that would be the text of the post. You can also attach images in your posts by attaching the images in email as attachments.
•      Sometimes email programs append text to the bottom of each sent message; to make sure this garbage doesn't get posted to your blog, put #end at the end of your post.

Notes:

There are two formats that emails generally use: plain text and HTML. Many email clients will have an option to switch between the two modes. Here's what happens when you use either of these formats in Mail-to-Blogger:

Plain Text: Everything is published on your blog exactly as you type it. That is, entering <strong> in your post will not make text bold. The <> brackets will be escaped and your published blog will actually display <strong> as text.

HTML: All HTML is interpreted as HTML. If you use your email client's formatting functions to make text bold, you may not see the <strong> tag, but it will be included in your post and the text will appear bold on your blog. If you want to enter code manually, you may need to use an "edit source code" mode or something similar in your email client.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.geekblogger.org/2010/02/make-post-via-email-in-blogger.html

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42466

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=41452

http://www.joedolson.com/blogger/

Do you check your blog statistics too often?

While monitoring your trends and stats is one of the most important thing you can do to improve your blog, that might become kind of obsession. Not only it takes your valuable time, if you do that too often, at some point it may become one of the conditions of your personal well-being. Your trends go up – you are happy, down – you are upset and depressed. Is that really productive? Are you happier now, when you have one more condition for your mood changes?

I would like to present blogger Vikas Gupta opinion on the topic.

Things Take Time (TTT) and it is one the hardest things to understand while blogging for obvious reasons. Almost all of us at some point of time have watched our blog statistics to get a minute-by-minute idea of how many visits our blog is garnering as analyzed by the various statistics plugins and Google Analytics or StatCounter. It is certainly an enjoyable exercise and one which is hard to resist given the immediate gratification it brings. Here are my views on why worrying inordinately about your blog statistics, hits and blog traffic is not a very good thing to do.

Don’t waste your precious time

Time is money. Many bloggers spend a lot of time watching those stats (often real-time) and getting a lot of satisfaction or tension. More often than not it is tension because everyone wants as many hits as possible and one is rarely satisfied which is normal human behavior. Statistical analyses of your blog(s) once in a while are necessary and desirable but spending a lot of time with it not advisable.

It also gives you tension

You are not getting what you want unlike your rival whose traffic and PR is just shooting upwards! You will only accentuate that painful feeling (aka tension) if you do not control your obsession with your blog’s traffic. Remember, Things Take Time (TTT). Ask any established and successful blogger and they suggest you to concentrate on content and quality more than traffic analyses. Traffic will follow sooner or later. Why torture yourself by thinking about it incessantly?!

You will compromise on quality

Blogging is not just about numbers and hits. If you worry about traffic and blog stats all the time you may end up writing for search engines than human beings. Blog for human beings not for bots. Build your credibility first traffic later. As a matter of fact, traffic is a concomitant of good content and will chase you and your blog though it may take some time.

Slow and steady wins the race

Many successful bloggers today are not fly-by-night online entrepreneurs. They worked hard with their blogs and exhibited a high degree of perseverance. “Between saying and doing many a pair of shoes is worn out,”  is a popular Italian proverb. So work more on your blog and less on your stats.

Worrying in moderation is fine

Moderation in all things! As they say you can eat whatever you like as long as it is in moderation. The same sentiments apply here. Do not ignore your blog stats and do not let it get the better of you. Wise bloggers know how to maintain the balance. Be wise and not otherwise!

Popular Twitter application for iPhone: Twitterrific

If you are a proud iPhone owner, using Twitter, you might look for the proper opportunities to read and update your blog from mobile phone. There are quite a few applications filling this users need, but most of the iPhone users prefer Twitterrific to tweet from their iPhones.

Twitterrific is a Mac OS X and iPhone OS client for the social networking site Twitter. The client, created by The Iconfactory, lets users view in real time "tweets" or micro-blog posts on the Twitter website, as well as publish their own. This application has a simple and clear user interface such that a user can find what he wants on the screen. Tweeting is very simple and it displays the recent tweets from your friends and public in two separate time-lines.

You can read replies and direct messages sent by you and reply to the tweets with a single tap. This application supports photo sharing and updates your location to your friends automatically using the GPS of your device and has built-in mini-browser for showing links.

Note that there are several versions of the application, depending on where you are going to use it: your Mac desktop, iPhone and iPod Touch, and iPad.

Website: http://twitterrific.com/

“Top Commentators Plugin” Approach for getting backlinks

Getting Backlinks

The method, proposed by Smartbloggerz, we are going to present today is related to the process of building massive backlinks by leaving keyword centric comments on blogs having Top Commentators widget in their sidebar.

Even the comment section might not have a dofollow attribute, most of the blogs having Top Commentators widget give you dofollow backlinks.

Now just imagine if you are a Top Commentator of a blog having thousands of articles indexed in search engines. You would definitely see a great increase in your search rankings.

If you decide to be amongst the Top Commentators of big blogs like JohnChow, here is what the results could be:

Now let’s see how many indexed pages, JohnChow have on Google:

As you can easily see the huge amount of indexed pages of JohnChow and most of them have the Top Commentators widget which will bring you massive backlinks. Imagine if you just get yourself on Top Commentators list of such 3-4 blogs. Did you imagine that?

List of the Blogs using Top Commentators Plugin

I did plan to create a list for you, but there were others how did the already. So, I can offer you several links to the collection of these blogs:

• Riceblogger’s list: 40 blogs using the Top Commentators widget
• Blog o Ninja’s list: 48 blogs using the Top Commentators widget
• Shankerashi list: More than 100 blogs using the Top Commentators widget.

Installing Top Commentators Plugin to your Blog

If you plan to host yourself the Top Commentators Plugin on your blog to attract more traffic and new readers and commenters, you can do that easily. Find instructions on how to install the plugin on your Blogger blog here or here, and on your WordPress blog - here.

Plugin Usefulness for New Blogs

Some of the experts do not consider the plugin to be useful for freshly created blogs. Chidimar reports his observations that Top Commentator has been heavily abused in new Blogs. People from the Comment Spammers and Link Building Spammers via Comments categories come on New, Fresh and Empty Blogs only on Month startups to grab the top positions in Top Commentators Widget. They come often first week to stay on top and see if they have their place. And then they just vanish till the new month starts. It’s because they know this Blog is fresh, new, has small visitors base and exposure, and no one will come to challenge the top position in the widget, leaving a spammer on top.