Month: June 2008

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The Alternatives to Adsense

So, you came back to see what alternative you had to using Adsense. If you have no idea what I am talking about, make sure you check out the other post about distancing yourself from Adsense. The amount of money that you are missing out on because of Adsense is so great that you might actually spend a day or two beating yourself up for not learning this sooner.

The only downfall to the things I am going to suggest to you is that you need some traffic. Adsense is great because even if you only have five people a day coming to your blog, if one of those clicks, it’s money in the bank. That’s nice. However, you need to understand that having some higher traffic is very important for these next tips to work. Sure, you might be able to make some money without the higher amount of traffic, but I really think that if you have more traffic, you’ll really love the results that you see.

Here we go:

  • Sign Up for Kontera: Many people don’t know what Kontera is; however, it is one of the things that I am a firm believer in. However, I have found that it is not that great unless your traffic is high. The ads go into the actual text and if one of the words you used is one that was bid on by an advertiser, it turns into an ad that if someone clicks on, you get money.
  • Sign Up for OIO Publisher: OIO Publisher is a market place for you to sell private advertising. You can sell 125×125 ads and text links (both of which I endorse) and they don’t take any of the profit. By selling those, you are getting private advertisers. Those are going to be the bulk of your earning.
  • If you are against using OIO Publisher, you can set up a couple of slots on your blog for 125×125 ads and text links and try to sell them yourself. Go to webmaster forums and make an ad saying you’re selling the ads for inexpensive prices. First start low and then increase.
  • Find whatever products you can that relates to the niche of your site and set up a place for those ads. I am a firm believer that CPA is a great way to make money and it can definitely increase your earnings.
  • Do reviews. Although I have only ever seen them done on blogs that are “Make Money Online” blogs, I think that any blog can do them if the niche is correct. The amount you can charge for this all depends on your traffic. Some get away with charging $400 PER review. That’s a nice chunk of change, huh?

Look, I could keep going and continue to say what other ways there are for you to make money. However, more importantly, you knowing the fact that you have to get in your head that there are alternatives to Adsense. There are ways other ways to make money. Adsense is one of them, but I hope you understand that it is not the only way or the best way.

Now, to appease those that are addicted to Adsense, take this final word. Adsense is a great supplemental income. What I mean is that if you use it along with many of the other forms of making money as mentioned above, you could really increase your earnings tremendously. Five hundred dollars is still five hundred dollars; however, you want to have more than one revenue stream bringing in that $500. If you do, you’ll really be a happy camper.

Jacob is an avid guitar player as well as a biology major in college with hopes of becoming a professor. When not blogging on The Webmaster Blog, he is over at his political opinion blog.

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How To Promote Your Blog By Sponsoring Our Contest

At The WebMaster Blog we not only give you tons of helpful tips, but also offer you opportunities to promote your own site or blog. You can purchase an ad, be featured in our EntreCard spot, leave comments on our posts…

But what if we helped you have your site promoted by several bloggers at once? Yes, it is possible!

How can you achieve that? It’s easy: be a sponsor to our upcoming contest.

The WebMaster Blog will host a contest from July1st to July 30th, 2008. It will be heavily promoted across the blogosphere. This call for sponsors is a way to add more items to our current prize pool, in order to make this contest even more attractive. And all contestants will have to perform several tasks to be elegible to win prizes. Among said tasks, one will certainly be of special interest to you: participants will be encouraged to write blog posts about this contest and the posts should necessarily include links to all sponsors.

By now you must have realised what’s in it for you… Heavy promotion -> lots of bloggers taking part in the contest -> lots of backlinks to the contest sponsors -> direct traffic and search engine love for all.

As a bonus, all sponsors will also be linked from PR3 blogs owned by Kat and by me.

Now that you’ve seen how advantageous this is going to be for you, don’t wait any longer: contact us and tell us which prizes you can add to our pool.

You can offer cash (preferably via PayPal), advertising space, gift certificates (like those available at Amazon), design services, SEO consultation, books… anything that could be of value to webmasters and bloggers. Please, keep in mind that in case you offer a prize that can’t be delivered by digital means, you should be responsible for shipping it to the contest winner.

We already have sponsors!

The University Kid will offer eBooks and consultation.

The Smile Guy will donate EntreCard credits and an ad spot.

TwinsHappiness is willing to donate EntreCard credits.

Better Interpersonal Communication agreed to make an ad spot available.

If you had already offered to sponsor our contest, your link would have been added to the list above. See why I told you not to wait any longer? Click here and contact us right now. Or leave a comment below to let us know what prizes you will donate.

News on The WebMaster Blog’s first contest will be available at your favourite feed reader when you subscribe to our RSS feed.

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You Need to Distance Yourself from Adsense

One of the big errors that bloggers make when they set up their blog is to solely use Adsense for their earnings. I have been guilty of that same error. They see these people that are making $50,000 a month or more from Adsense and they get excited…Downright, overly, incredibly excited. So, they stop after adding Adsense and then start writing article after article, hoping they will make money. And they don’t. Or, if they do make money, it’s not nearly as much as they were hoping to make from their blog.

I’m not trying to say don’t use Adsense. As you can see, we use Adsense right here on this blog. What I am trying to say is that you can’t use only Adsense. If you rely entirely on Adsense, you’re missing out on a huge stream of profit. I am not anti-Adsense; however, I am anti-ONLY Adsense. There are so many other ways to make money that if you tap into them, you can really make a considerable amount of money.

I remember when I was reading John Chow’s blog, way back when, he used to only use Adsense to bring in money. Sure, he was bringing in about $500 a month. And sure, he was writing about a topic that he loved. However, when you think about it, was it really all that fantastic? Of course not. The amount of money that he was bringing in was just not as great as the amount of money that he is bringing in now. When he started to bring in different streams of advertising, suddenly, he began to bring in more money. He raised is ECPM enormously and that is why he is making so many thousands of dollars a month.

Other bloggers have all had similar success. When Adsense came out, it was the dream for all webmasters. We could just put up some code and voila, we would make money if people clicked. No longer did we need to go out and find advertisers. However, the real problem was that Adsense started to demand more. They took a heftier % as time went on and people’s earnings went down. Adsense, though, still was a great way and still is a great way to make money.

Now…Some bloggers will swear on a Holy Book and back that Adsense is the way…Some will say that there is no other way to make good money. I am going to tell you straight up that you are 100% incorrect bloggers. There are tons of other ways to make money blogging. You can…Well…How about I just save that for another day.

If you are interested in finding out all the ways I’d suggest you make money on your blog, subscribe to our RSS feed.

Jacob is an avid guitar player as well as a biology major in college with hopes of becoming a professor. When not blogging on The Webmaster Blog, he is over at his political opinion blog.

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Which Domain Registrar Is Your Favorite?

I have only started buying domains a few months back. Before I actually took the big step and signed up for a new domain, I pay attention to the discussions on some webmaster forums. From the discussions there, I realized that everyone has his or her own preferred domain registrars. What’s yours?

The seasoned webmasters would, probably not have a single favorite domain registrar. It is more likely for them to have multiple accounts with different domain registrars, as this would be convenient for sellers to push domains to their accounts. By buying and selling domains registered through different registrars, they actually get to know about them better, their quality of their services, their reliability and efficiency.

For the small time webmasters though, who would buy maximum a few domains per year, there is a big probability that they will start buying their first domains from a single domain registrar and continue doing that for their subsequent domains if they are satisfied with the domain registrar in the first place. A similar scenario can be observed with the purchase of web hosting.

Considering the importance of having a good experience during the purchase of your first domains, I would like to recommend here several domain registrars which I have had experience with. So far I could only comment on the pricing, the ease of use and the quality of the assistance provided by the registrars, I wish I could talk about domain transfer but I don’t have the privilege to do that just yet. Anyway, here are a few registrars which I have tried, I consider all of them to be good and would highly recommend them, but that is my own opinion. In any case, you should take this as a starting point, write down their names, their website addresses, go google about them and enquire further in webmaster forums before you try them out.

GoDaddy
GoDaddy is an unanimous choice among most webmasters, it is fairly safe to say that GoDaddy is the world leading domain registrar. It is a standard setting domain registrar, every so often domain registrars would be compared with GoDaddy. There has not been much complaints from its clients, I suppose that its staffs are very professional and you should have no trouble during domain transfers. GoDaddy is also known to provide affordable and stable hosting. Unfortunately, I do not have the privilege to register a domain through GoDaddy yet, mainly because it does not accept payment from unverified PayPal accounts. Enough said, its price for a new dot com domain is $9.99, there is no free WHOIS protection, but you could probably get discount coupons by googling. Discount for mass purchases is also available.

Namecheap
Namecheap is a good domain registrar, I have 1 dot com domain registered through NameCheap. I do not have any problem setting the domain name server (DNS) to point my domain to my hosting, this is really unfortunate because I don’t have the chance to evaluate the support given by the support team. Its fee for new dot com registration is currently $9.29 per domain, which comes with a free 1 year WHOIS protection. I hope the WHOIS protection is free for subsequent years as well, otherwise I would consider transferring my domain to other registrar. Payment methods include credit cards, verified and unverified PayPal.

Name.com
Name.com is actually my favorite among 3 registrars that I recommend here. I have 2 dot com domains registered through Name.com and helped a friend to register one domain through it too. It is fairly easy to change the name servers of your domain, but on Name.com there are other more advanced settings such as DNS management settings. I have emailed the support several times and the staffs got back to me in less than 12 hours each time, they actually read through my problems and provided me with genuine advices, and don’t just point me to their help documents. Thumbs up for their support! Here are other reasons why I like registering my domains through Name.com: its fee for new dot com registration is only $5.99, and the new registration comes with free WHOIS protection (indefinitely as long as your domain is renewed through them, I suppose) and free Google apps which include 6GB email capacity (which you can create up to 200 email addresses with your dot com suffix for friends and family), free webpage creator powered by Google, calendar, etc. This means that for as low as $5.99 (and $9.99 for subsequent years), any family can have their own firstname@lastname.com email addresses and some simple webpages without having to worry about separate web hosting accounts, now this is a great deal! Payment methods include credit cards, verified and unverified PayPal.

There you go, these are the registrars which I have dealt with and would recommend to any budding webmasters depending on their needs. As for GoDaddy, I would confidently register my future domains through it, if I have my PayPal account verified.

Do you have your own favorite domain registrars? Which one is your most preferred registrar and why? Do you have advices on how to choose a good domain registrar? I hope you would be willing to share your advices and tips with us by commenting here.

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Finally, Flipping the Site For Maximum Profit

So, you are ready to flip the site? Good. The site is on the web, probably three or four months old, has a ton of links linking to it, is bringing in some very nice amount of money each month ($50 is nice when working with this). Good. Now comes the fun part and the part that really gives you gratification. You’re going to sell it.

This is not really that hard to understand; however, people tend to get duped and sometimes lose out on some money when doing it. There are two places that I strongly suggest selling your sites. The first is Digital Point and the second is Site Point. Each has its benefits and each has its cons. However, it’s your decision to pick which to use.

With Digital Point, you’re going to get people very interested in your site very fast. If it is bringing in ANY money each month, they’re going to pay from 10 months revenue to one year revenue and that’s it. So, if it brings in $50 a month, they’ll pay anywhere from $500-$600. That’s nice; however, the site, arguably, can be worth more if the content is good.

That leads me to Site Point. On this site, people are willing to invest more for each site. I have seen some sites sell for 24x revenue; however, that can be rare. Try and push for 16 or 18 months. The downfall is that they charge $20 per listing, so it can get very expensive and begin to chisel away at your overall earnings.

Once you have sold it, transfer the domain name to their domain company and get the site off your FTP. Congratulations, you have just flipped a site and you have a nice chunk of change in your hand. However, for the amount of work you probably did and the time you spent, the money might not seem like an all that great amount. So, here’s what I suggest.

If you are working on a Monday-Friday time schedule, each week, dedicate time to making five sites. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday write the content for the sites. Sure, it can get very tiresome writing so much content; however, you will get all the content writing done fast. Get the sites up at the end of each of those days. Use the same steps I described in the previous posts.

Now that the sites are up, spend Thursday and Friday promoting the site and building links for it. If that is your ONLY job for those two days, you’re going to be able to get a lot done. You’ll be able to submit to directories for each of the five sites (that may take two hours) and you’ll be able to really do some blog commenting. Basically, you want to consolidate all the work in chunks so you are as effective as possible.

Do the same thing each week and, after a few weeks, you’ll have an array of websites. Once they are bringing in a comfortable amount, sell. One note, though. Although I suggest waiting for $50 a month, you can wait for $10 a month or even less. However, I really suggest that if you can wait for it to get to $50 a month or even more, do it. The gratification at the end will be much greater.

So, there you have it. This is my step by step method in creating a site for the sole purpose of flipping it. It’s a lot of work; however, the reward is great. If you have ten sites that are bringing in $50 a month, that’s $500 residual income. If each site sells for $500 (10x revenue), that’s $5,000 a month plus that $500 residual income. Not bad, huh?

However, please remember one thing. This is not a full proof method. It does take experimenting and sometimes, sites just don’t work. If a site is not working, keep trying, but don’t waste too much time on it. After a while, just say, “Whatever” and start a different site.

All in all, this works. It’s what my friends use and, when I do it, it’s what I use. Try it out for yourself and see if you can replicate it. Perhaps you’ll find even more success. Hey, you may make a living from it. You may not. But, regardless of whether you do it for some side cash or for a business, I wish you the best of luck. It can be irritating at times, but it can be very rewarding.

You won’t miss any of this four part series on Flipping a Site if you subscribe to The WebMaster Blog now.

Jacob is an avid guitar player as well as a biology major in college with hopes of becoming a professor. When not blogging on The Webmaster Blog, he is over at his political opinion blog.

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Monetizing the Site to Flip It

Alright, alright, so now you have the site and now you’re promoting the site and getting traffic to it, whether it is organic or not organic really not mattering. But, the important thing that I am sure you want to know about is how to monetize the site. I am going to be honest and say that monetization is not just throwing up an Adsense ad and calling it a day. It can be very difficult to monetize a site; however, if you experiment, you can definitely start making money from the site.

Since we are playing around with the idea of a website about the Solar System, I am going to tell you how I would monetize this. If you can think of other ways, that’s fantastic. It is those that can be creative that will make the most money. So, for a Solar System website, you’re probably asking me what to use.

First and foremost, please go ahead and slap up an Adsense ad. However, play around with the colors. If you are getting moderate traffic, play around with the colors and the placement to see which is going to bring the best clicks. Try and place the ads near the content since that’s where the reader’s eyes will probably be. This will give you a CPC means of earning.

Sign up for Clickbank or Commission Junction or any of those and try to find a product that has to do with space. Perhaps promoting a DVD collection about space or something might get you some good affiliate sales. Sure, you may not make much from it, but if you can start getting more and more traffic, this could really help.

Another alternative to this is to use Amazon.com and their affiliate program. Although with the Solar System idea, it won’t make much, the nice thing about it is that they leave a cookie so that if I were to click on an ad on your site and then I buy something else on their site after you directed me to Amazon, you still profit. So, if you’re promoting a book and I buy a 50” TV, all the better for you.

Finally, sign up for John Chow’s TTZ program. I suggest doing this because even if you don’t make a sale, you make money because that’s another CPC. However, since it is products, that can bring in some money for you. Once again, it’ll probably be books and movies about space. It may not bring in much; however, we’re not looking for much.

In the end, what you are looking to do is try and make the site earning about $50 a month. If you can get the site to earn $50 a month, you’re going to definitely bring in a lot when you sell it. However, that’s the final step…How do you sell it? How do you really make the site bring in the most when you sell?

You won’t miss any of this four part series on Flipping a Site if you subscribe to The WebMaster Blog now.

Jacob is an avid guitar player as well as a biology major in college with hopes of becoming a professor. When not blogging on The Webmaster Blog, he is over at his political opinion blog.

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Developing and Promoting a Website to Flip

I talked about how you could create a website using a free WordPress theme, a .com domain name, and some relatively simple content and then flip the site to make a profit. Sure, you can do it that way if you are looking for very fast satisfaction; however, if you have patience and want to try and make more money for the sale of the site, what you can do is develop it and promote it. The content is there and the site is ready to earn…It just needs your help.

First and foremost, I don’t advise you to spend a ton of time promoting the site. It really is not worth it because you’re going to be making a ton of these sites, chances are, and if you dedicate so much time to promoting one site, it will defeat the purpose. These following steps are things that I strongly suggest you do to try and get traffic to your site.

First and foremost, submit the site to about twenty five directories all on the first day. If you can, find directories that allow you to deep link so that you can link to your articles. Pick keywords that are not overly competitive. Therefore, if I wanted to link to the Solar System blog, I might use the anchor text: Learn the Solar System or Our Solar System. I want to rank for those words so that in a month or two, I can start getting search engine traffic.

Consider buying traffic. If you pay very little for traffic, it will come to your site and then, they may click the ads on the site. This is called arbitrage and it is argued that it is an effective means to profit. However, some consider it falsifying information, so I don’t suggest it unless you are in that sort of a mood.

Submit the articles to StumbleUpon over a period of a week. Don’t do it all at once because they’ll think you’re a spammer and that’s never good. Since it’s a blog, also use Blogengage to get some traffic. You want to try and get as many social marketing sites to send traffic to you. Traffic can mean quite a bit of money for you and it looks great when you are selling the site.

Spend about thirty minutes a day just commenting on blogs that are in the same niche as you. If they allow the “do follow” tag, then you’re going to be getting some fantastic link juice which will just mean more rankings for you. This will send traffic to your blog and, as well, send the bots looking for you so that you can get better rankings.

In the end, we want the search engines to like us. Sure, having the other traffic is nice; however, those that are going to most likely click on the ads are those that come from the search engines. Find them and you are going to make money. Develop and promote the site the correct way and I guarantee that you’ll start really making money. But…How?

You won’t miss any of this four part series on Flipping a Site if you subscribe to The WebMaster Blog now.

Jacob is an avid guitar player as well as a biology major in college with hopes of becoming a professor. When not blogging on The Webmaster Blog, he is over at his political opinion blog.

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Creating a Site to Flip It

When it comes to the practice of building and flipping sites, there really isn’t all that much to it. However, that’s not to say that the task is as easy as 1-2-3. Alright, perhaps it is as easy as 1-2-3. Or maybe 1-2-3-4. That’s what these next four posts are going to be, a step by step method in which you can build, develop, and then flip websites. Rather than trying to make a website huge with profit, what your sole purpose is that instantaneous gratification. You don’t care about making $100 a month from your site. You’re just looking for that nice check that says “here’s what we consider the worth of your site, let me buy it from you.”

If that’s you, allow me to lead you on a four part journey that will, hopefully, allow you to find that success that you are hoping for when it comes to flipping sites. What I intend on doing is educating you on the creation, development, monetization, and then flipping of the website. So, first and foremost, let’s talk about the creation of the site.

Contrary to my post about picking a topic that you are interested in, when it comes to flipping sites, what you really want to do is just create a site that brings in some decent money each month. Therefore, the first thing you want to do when creating it is pick a topic that you know you can cram out ten or fifteen articles for, but also a topic that has enough ways to monetize it. Don’t pick something so far out there that there is no way to profit from it; no one will buy it.

Once you have picked the topic, sit down and open up Microsoft Word or Wordpad or just take out a notepad. You want to figure out what to write about for each article. So, let’s say that I was going to do a website on the Solar System. I would write down: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Asteroid Belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and then whatever else might be included in the solar system. I have what I want to write about all prepared.

Now comes the more difficult part. You want to write about each of those topics. If you are not that great of a writer, that’s alright because you can find someone to write the content for you for relatively inexpensive. Although I argue that the content should be exceptional, some people argue that as long as the keywords are thrown in there correctly, there is nothing to worry about. I like to make the content as high quality as possible. One thing to remember is the need for unique content. Don’t take PLR (Private Label Right) articles. You want unique content.

Now that your articles are all done, open up a program that you can create a logo in. You want to make one that has the solar system in it. Simultaneously, go to WordPress and find a theme that you like. If you are not all that great at creating templates like me, you’re going to want to find something that is free right here. Take it and then create the logo around the color scheme of the WordPress theme. Try and find a theme that offers places for advertising since you’re going to want to monetize the site as best as possible.

Upload the articles, try and find some pictures for each of the articles to make it a bit more interactive (and nicer), and then get the domain name. Well, getting the domain name and the hosting should be your first step; however, I mention it at the end because of how important it is. I want this part to really stick in your head. Get a domain name that ends in a .com. Some say that getting .info domain names is fine; however, I am a firm believer in getting a .com ending. Sure, it costs more money; however, if you buy in bulk, you’ll save. So, get your hosting and your domain name, put the site up on the web, submit the articles and voila, the creation of the site is done.

Once the site is created, you’ve accomplished the first of four steps in creating a content site for the purpose of flipping. It might seem like a lot of work; however, if you can focus and dedicate two or three hours of time, you can make the content necessary. For me, writing those X number of articles would probably take me an hour and a half; however, I am a fast typist. That’s why I suggest hiring people so that you can get more sites ready and made in faster amounts of time. However, that’s up to you.

You won’t miss any of this four part series on Flipping a Site if you subscribe to The WebMaster Blog now.

Jacob is an avid guitar player as well as a biology major in college with hopes of becoming a professor. When not blogging on The Webmaster Blog, he is over at his political opinion blog.

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Bloggeries: A Directory for Blogs

In our continuous efforts to try and increase the ‘findability’ of our blog, sometimes, we do things that don’t make a lot of sense. We submit to random, back-alley directories. We waste so much time buying advertising on blogs that just won’t help us. And, we try out very best to comment on blogs, only to find out that the blogs we’re commenting on really don’t get much traffic. What, oh what, is a blogger to do?

Find Bloggeries. Bloggeries is a directory that specializes in blogs. While other directories have sections for all different kinds of sites, Bloggeries took that extra step and focused in on one thing: a blogger’s desire to be found. And, with a page rank of six and an Alexa of 87K, it’s definitely a site that could be beneficial in your growth to be found.

First and foremost, allow me to comment on the structure and design of the site. Although I don’t really like green for websites (just my own preference), this site does have a calming feel to it and keeps my eyes from growing cataracts. Right on the home page, in the center of the site, we can see a list of each of the sections. For example, there’s a section for science blogs, political blogs, humor blogs, just to name a few. That is exactly the place to have the sections; it makes their customer’s blogs easier to find.

On both sidebars, there are a series of different places you can visit on the Bloggeries’ website. The left sidebar includes the submission button, an affiliate button (which I will touch on later), as well as links to the many different resources Bloggeries offer. They have definitely created a directory that offers everything. Your one stop to being found.

Now comes the question everyone is probably asking. How much do they charge? It all depends on what you want. If you want a featured listing, which is found at the top of the category that you pick, it costs $49.99 annually. Is it worth it? Arguably. It depends if the niche is very populated and you want to get right to the top. However, if you don’t need to be on the top, the other form of getting listed is the regular link, which costs $29.99 once. For that cost, you get your link there for life. Not too bad a deal, if I do say so myself.

To suck you in, they argue that by getting a link from here, you’re increasing your chances of getting indexed because they consider themselves an authority directory. Back when Google went to war against link sellers, they said that authority directories that sold links would still carry weight IF there was a definite screening process. If you didn’t just approve any old blog, you’d still have the ability to carry link weight. Obviously, Bloggeries passed this. Furthermore, they offer much more in your submission. You can get a link right to your RSS feed which is definitely beneficial. Moreso, you get 3-5 deep links. The deeper you go, the longer the reader will stay.

There are numerous other resources found on this site. They have their forum, their recommended blog hosts, and their free WordPress themes. Overall, Bloggeries really is the one stop spot for all your blogging needs. However, one final question must enter your mind before forking over $30 to get a listing.

Is it worth it? Are you blogging to make money in the future? If so, I recommend signing up. Now that I’ve found it, I intend on submitting all of my blogs to the site as well. They’re authority links and we need those to become found. Should it be your only means of promotion, though? It shouldn’t be your first. However, put it on your list of ways to increase your ‘findability.’ It can’t hurt. Try Bloggeries.

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Add a Contact Form to Blogger

One of the shortcomings of Blogger against WordPress is the native support for contact form, there are various contact form plugins available for self-hosted WordPress blogs while WordPress.com allows users to add contact forms just by using the tag [contact form]. However, despite this disadvantage, all is not lost for Blogger.

Bloggers on the Blogger platform can actually host their own HTML form in any of their blog post, but they would need to link to an external PHP or CGI script to process the form and send an email containing user-inputs to their own email accounts.

You can of course host your own external PHP or CGI scripts if you have your own hosting to play with. However, there are a large number of users on Bloggers who do not have their own hosting. Besides, it would be troublesome to code a script to handle forms anyway, so I would recommend using third-party services to accomplish the task of adding a contact form to Blogger blogs.

There are various third-party services to help you with this task and most of them are free too. For example, feel free to check out Contactify, FormSpring and Response-o-matic. You are free to choose the service that suits you the most, and you can present your contact form in different ways according to situations. Here are a few ways to present your contact form on Blogger:

  • Embed it in a blog post (you can link to this post on your navigation bar with the anchor “Contact Us”)
  • Present it in a pop-up window (again you can put a link to this from navigation bar or anywhere in your blog posts)
  • Put a link to an externally hosted form (this happens if you use Contactify, you can choose to open this in an external window or a pop-up window too)

I will not being going into the specifics of how to sign up with those third-party services and how to use the code of the forms on your Blogger blogs, you will find those instructions on the links I provided above.

Not all of the third-party services are equal, some are simple and sufficient for basic use while others are more powerful and for a monthly subscription fee, you can actually use various types of forms for different purposes such as accepting orders from clients and doing surveys.

No doubt bloggers using Blogger have disadvantage such as not having the ability to upload external Javascript files on its server and not having native support for a contact form but as demonstrated earlier, bloggers who require extra functionalities can always look towards third-party supports. Bloggers who need to use Javascript functions can upload external files to other free servers and there are now ways to replace the commenting system of Blogger to a better one.

Do you feel disadvantaged using Blogger for your blogs? Do you wish to have extra functionalities currently not found on Blogger? What are the tasks that you found difficult to accomplish with Blogger and wish that there are solutions to your problems? Share with us your problems, and who knows, one of our many authors and webmasters here might just have the perfect solutions for your problems.

BobbyT is a 23-year-old blogger, freelance writer and internet marketeer wannabe. You can visit his blog at http://bobbytoat.blogspot.com