Best Small Business Apps You Need To Know About

Below is an Infographic on "The Best Small Business Apps" you need to know about. Best Business apps for Brainstormin,g Customer Service, Cash Flow Helper, Package Tracker, File Sharing, Email Campaign Manager, Business Trip Organiser, Social Media Manager and Best Rolodex Alternative are Discussed in the following Infographic!

Infographic By Irishapps

Gaming Websites Are at Risk

Online games are increasing in popularity with various groups of the population. Many people who start playing these very catchy games have no idea how exposed they can be to hacking. Hackers are looking for gaming websites that don’t have adequate security in place. They look for ways to take control of these websites using DDoS attacks. Once a website is hijacked it takes just a matter of minutes for the attackers to take over. If a website goes down, the damage could be irreversible. And, with over 145 million gamers online each day in over five different continents, having a gaming website that isn't reliable means you could lose your gamers, reputation and any associated gaming revenues in just a single day. 
Gaming websites are big targets for DDoS attackers, but a website doesn't have to make it easy. With the right protection they can keep their gamers, reputation and keep revenue up.

Created by the marketing team at Prolexic Technologies.

Car Theft Worldwide [INFOGRAPHIC]

Below is an infographic with statistics on Car Theft Worldwide!

Infographic by Smf.ie

Women's Influence In Gaming

How much do you really know about women and the gaming industry? Most people don’t realize how much influence women have had on gaming development. Some people don’t even realize that there are many female gamers. While men are known for their achievements because they represent 97 percent of the development staff, there are still many women who have changed this industry for the better.

Major Audience

Even though females compose a large portion of the gaming market, most people don’t recognize just how many female gamers there really are. Men are known as the majority of gamers, and this is true. What many people don’t know is that the market isn’t as male dominated as you might think.

Only 55 percent of the market belongs to men. The other 45 percent of gamers are women. Not only that, but the majority of them are over 18.

Major Developments

Some of the biggest advancements in the gaming industry involved women. For example, Centipede used early artificial intelligence programming that later helped programmers develop modern intelligence coding. Only two people developed Centipede, and one of them was female.

Portal is recognized for its advanced physics and interesting mechanics. A woman helped develop this game. She and a group of friends first started work on Narbacular Drop, which was used as the basis for the Portal franchise.

Women have also influenced writing in the gaming industry. While some games are known for being childish or having thin plots, the Legacy of Kain series was set apart due to its mature story telling and intelligent writing. A woman did the vast majority of the writing.

Mobile Gaming

Another area that is experiencing a major female influence is mobile gaming. The entire Temple Run series was developed by a woman who was determined to make small games that would appeal to the majority of gamers. Some of the most popular mobile gamers were partially or exclusively made by women.

Even though only a small number of women create games, they have left a mark that few can ignore. It’s time for more women to join the gaming industry to create even more advanced games and ideas :)

Choosing The Best URL Shortener

URL shorteners are part of the unexciting world of Twitter and email efficiency. Yes, all the thrills and spills of making your Twitter messages a look a little cleaner of your emails look a little more compact. But, before you fall asleep with giddy delight at the prospect, you should know that not all URL shorteners are alike. They have been known to “introduce an extra point of failure” (life hacker).

An extra point of failure

This is some nerd’s way of saying that a URL shortener can cause you a bit of trouble. The website that published this idea claim that the company WatchMouse monitored a bunch of popular URL shortening tools/services over a month and noticed that they appear to have a few inherent problems.

The quality of the services varies a little with things such as a varying latency and varying uptimes. Their results are only subject to their own tests and bias, but here are a few of the results.

The slowest performance

This has to be the Facebook “FB.ME” which has a performance time that is four times that of its leading competitor. It takes a massive amount of time to connect when compared to the other URL shorteners.

The URL shorteners that are always online

Uptime is difficult to pull off at 100% in any online situation, but somehow the Google and Twitter shorteners had an uptime of 100%. Their tools are called “Goo.gl” and “Twt.tl”. The one with the worst uptime is Snurl. Do not forget the these figures were pull up by the Dutch WatchMouse team and were only based on recorded research that was conducted over a month time period.

Which is the most efficient URL shortener

That has to be the Google tool “Goo.gl” which narrowly beats the YouTube shortener called “you.be”.

The most secure tools

Nobody seems to have published reliable results on this one. However, many of the URL shorteners are from larger companies such as Google, Twitter, etc, which means they have a lot to lose if they are secret back doors for hackers.

Goo.gl

This is the official URL shortener that Google have released. It is highly trusted and reliable too. It contains public stats and can show real-time analytics for any of your short Google links. It is also the fastest for producing shortened links.

Su.pr

This is the URL Shortener that Stumble Upon have released and many people feel that it is one of the best URL shorteners on the market. It has sharing functions and the shortened URLs help to increase traffic from their own website. It has a history viewer and can tell you things such as the number of reviews and re-tweets that the URL has had. It also has real-time analytics like the Google URL shortener. There is also a very sexy function that tells you to best times to post based on the information it has collected in the past.

Tinyurl

It has a cute name and is not bad at its job. It has a browser toolbar and you can use the preview features too. The tool will also allow you to hide your affiliate URLs. It is not the world’s most feature filled tool, but it certainly gets the job done for you.

Bitly

This is a tool that some people use because they claim it helps them build a lot of traffic. It has a sharing functionality, which is rather nice. It also has analytic data with is good for real-time traffic and data analysis. The good thing about this tool is that you can get it in a number of ways. You can get it on mobile Internet and with browser extensions. You can get it via a website and there are lots of third party tools that use it too.

Budurl

This is a URL shortening tool but it does have a lot of premium features that some people have found useful. You are able to schedule your tweets to go out at a certain time and you can send emails to your clients and prospects. They have a mobile Micro-sites that help you to drive traffic for all of your mobile campaigns, and it is good for affiliate links. You can pull up very detailed statistics for comment sites and blog posts and you can add in advertising links. There is also QR Code integration for your print campaigns. You can add links to your PDFs and you can link to other files from your website or your emails.

Image Credit: Photostock

Author Bio:

Kate Funk is a freelance writer at http://www.aussiessay.com. She is mainly focusing on technology, gadgets and all the latest trends which are interesting for networking enthusiasts.

How To Clean Video Game Consoles Hardware And Accessories

Aside from lag, having to clean your gaming equipment is one of the worst things that can happen to a gamer. Seriously, who cleans their things, anyway? Gaming is for fun, not doing chores. But in those rare occasions when you decide that your console can't really take much more, then you have no choice but to clean it, especially as far as dust is concerned. Dust is the biggest enemy your gaming set-up can possibly have. It can not only make your hardware run worse than it usually does, but it can also damage it beyond repair. And in the light of the holidays and the oncoming Christmas celebrations, when I assume many people get the new generation of consoles as presents, I decided to do a guide on how to properly clean and maintain and clean your console hardware and accessories. This will not only increase the longevity of your console,but it will also ensure that it runs great for as long as possible. It's not going to be pleasant, let me tell you that much, but it's worth doing if you are a true enthusiast and plan utilizing your new (or old console) in the best way possible.

Unplug everything

This is possibly the most important step in the process. You need to unplug everything, otherwise you risk damaging the platform. Not only that, but you can also get hurt so it's a good idea to apply extra caution. After all, you are working with sensitive equipment. Carefully unplug everything that can be plugged and make sure you don't forget anything.

If some of the accessories aren't plugged (like your controllers or headset) and are powered by batteries, instead, remove the batteries. You want to discontinue all power supply to both the console and its components.

Cleaning the exterior

There are several things that you will need here in order to accomplish this fairly simple task. First of all, buying a microfiber towel would yield better results in the cleaning process, even though this part is optional. You can use any lint-free old rag you can get your hands on. You will need two of them – one for the processing and one for the drying out. Also purchase an electronics spray (the kind of spray you can use to clean all sorts of electronics, like laptops, consoles, monitors and more). Spray some of the solution on the cloth and wipe off all the surfaces of your hardware. Dry out with the other cloth immediately so you make sure that everything works well afterwards. Never spray directly on the surface of the console or any of the periphery. This may very well damage the devices so be careful.

Cleaning the interior

Cleaning the interior is a bit trickier. You should open the console because odds are you don't know what you're doing (otherwise why would you be reading this?) so you might damage it. Spraying compressed air into the air vents of your device would be enough to remove a large portion of the dust outside the console. This way you don't need to open it but you will still be able to clean most of it. Something to keep in mind is that compressed air comes out rather cold so you shouldn't be keeping the device too close to the source. Otherwise the air will condensate inside and damage the console.

Cleaning peripheral devices

Use a cotton swab and some rubbing alcohol to clean the peripheral devices such as controllers, microphones, headsets, etc. Just make sure to dry it out immediately. If you're not confident in your abilities to clean the console properly, seek the help of a specialist.

Author Bio:

As a professional cleaner at http://www.fasthomecleaning.co.uk , Rose knows how to clean all kind of things.

Take Care of Yourself On/Off the Road

It’s important to take care of yourself while you’re on the road. Whether you’re making a long haul or a short haul, there are things you can do to keep your health and your sanity. Take a few breaks on the road and get out of the truck. Go for a brisk walk to get blood moving and get some fresh air. You’ll feel rejuvenated. It’s important to keep your body fit, even if your work doesn’t require it. Try to exercise a few times per week (even lightly). By staying fit you can actually combat exhaustion and tiredness—two things you never want to suffer from while on the road. Instead of eating fast food or greasy foods, stick to healthy, energizing foods. A good diet is important for overall health but also helps keep your energy level up while on the road in your truck seat. Try to pack a few fruits and vegetables, or stop at a local grocery store on one of your stops to pick up some fresh food items for snacks and skip the potato chips.

Created by Suburban Seating.

Software Bugs Really Bite

This infographic takes a look at the Top 6 software bugs and what they have caused. Below is an exerpt of the infographic.

The advances of time and technology bring new and difficult challenges for software programmers. With the creation of new programming languages and software coding comes new issues or glitches within the application. These glitches are known as bugs.

While software bugs cause unwanted operations with in the program, they are mostly harmless. However, a small oversight during programming or testing can mean a huge issue for the developer, particularly when it comes to the sensitive nature of client information.

Here’s a look at some of the top software bugs from the past few years.

When the ATM becomes a lottery: In 2011, an operation issue with ATMs in Sydney, Aus. gave out more money to customers than they should have.

This bug caused the ATM to run in stand-by mode, meaning that it didn’t recognize the customers’ account balance, allowing them to withdraw more money than they had in their account.

The bug lasted for more than 5 hours and affected more than 40 ATMs across the city.
It was reported that one ATM had a line of over 50 people once the word got out.

Did You Know? It's more cost-effective to code and test carefully than to just fix glitches that come up..

Software Bugs Really Bite

Author Bio:

Kris Dietz loves creating something amazing then spreading the word about it! My mission is to develop and mold SEO into an amazing outlet of sharing valuable resources. I enjoy networking and meeting like-minded individuals.

Webmaster Guidelines for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Google Help

When your site is ready:

• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/.


• Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.


• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.


• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.


• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.


• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.


• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.


• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.


• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.


• Check for broken links and correct HTML.


• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.


• Review our recommended best practices for images, video and rich snippets.

Technical guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.


• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.


• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.


• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.


• Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For example, Google's AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file.


• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.


• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.


• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.


• Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Google's goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, or other tools. For more information, tools, and resources, see Let's Make The Web Faster. In addition, the Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here. It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please let us know by filing a spam report. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. While we may not take manual action in response to every report, spam reports are prioritized based on user impact, and in some cases may lead to complete removal of a spammy site from Google's search results. Not all manual actions result in removal, however. Even in cases where we take action on a reported site, the effects of these actions may not be obvious.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.


• Don't deceive your users.


• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"


• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

Avoid the following techniques:

• Automatically generated content


• Participating in link schemes


• Cloaking


• Sneaky redirects


• Hidden text or links


• Doorway pages


• Scraped content


• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value


• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords


• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware


• Abusing rich snippets markup


• Sending automated queries to Google

Engage in good practices like the following:

• Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears


• Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site

If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.

How to Add/Change Blogger Blog Favicon?

What is favicon?

While using IE, Firefox or Opera you will see an icon on the tab when you visit a page.This is called favicon. Favicon is a small icon/picture (usually 16px x 16px in size) shown next to site URL in the address bar. In Blogger, by default orange colored blogger icon is shown as favicon which looks ugly and it is common also as lakhs of blogger blogs contain this. Also having your own favicon with a nice graphical reminder of your site beside is a good way to attract visitors attention.

As you all know, Blogger has a new feature which allows you to change your blog's favicon without HTML coding (you still can use the codes if you want though).

Add/Change Blogger Blog Favicon?

• Log in to your Blogger's Dashboard

• Go to the Layout

• Click on the favicon Edit link usually present at the top left corner.

• Now hit "Choose File" button.

• Browse for your own image(should be less than 100 KB) and select it.

• Blogger will automatically re-size it,and finally hit the "Save" button.

Now refresh your blog you will see your new favicon,If you can't then delete browsers cookies and caches then visit your blog.

Another Way To Change Blogger Blog Favicon

Here is another simple way to change your blog's favicon.

Go to Blogger Template>Edit Html
There find the title tag which looks like

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
and immediately after that add the following code after proper editing

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="URL of your icon file"/>

Remember to replace URL of your icon file file with your icon file's URL
Your new favicon should start appearing in some time.

Well, some blogger, have been facing some trouble with their favicons because Blogger wouldn't show them at all or wouldn't update them to the new one.

If the favicon on your Blogger blog does not update, make sure you clear all history from web browser and then check for it. 
                                             OR
If you changed your favicon on the Layout section of your blog or used the HTML code and it doesn't work or doesn't show the right favicon, just do the following steps:

Step 1: On the address bar, type http://[your blog url]/favicon.ico and press Enter.
Step 2: Refresh the page.
Step 3: Go back to your blog.

Manual method to add Favicon to Blogger blog

To get started, first you need to backup your Blogger template: Click on ‘Layout’ > ‘Edit HTML’ and then click on ‘download full template’ to save it on your computer. Now perform following steps to a change favicon in your Blogger blog:

1. Click on ‘Layout’ > ‘Edit HTML’

2. Then add following code after <head>
<link href=’http://www.URL.com/favicon.ico’ rel=’shortcut icon’/>
<link href=’http://www.URL.com/favicon.ico’ rel=’icon’/>

Above http://www.URL.com is the web address or location where your favicon is stored (hosted).

‘favicon.ico’ is the name of your favicon file. You can use any name like myfavicon.ico and so on. After adding above code, update the http://www.URL.com and favicon.ico in the code. Then click on save template button. Open your blog and your new favicon should be visible in the address bar.

1. Go to Blogger Dashboard > Template
2. Click Edit HTML
3. Hit Proceed button
4. Now find for below code in your template

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

add below code immediately after of above code

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="URL OF YOUR ICON FILE"/>

Replace URL OF YOUR ICON FILE with your own icon.
Now save your template and you are done..

Pradeep Singh

What are nofollow/dofollow and How to make it useful on Blogger

Linking, whether you’re linking to another site or your site is being linked to, is an very

important aspect of SEO . How a site treats links is important because it can determine how search engines treat those links as well. Specifically, I’m talking about whether a site uses NoFollow tagging within its links.

When creating a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code for that link is:

<a href="http://www.yourblog.com">Anchor Text</a>

This includes the HTML tag, the URL the link will be going to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.

You’re able to add more HTML to the code above in order to tell the search engine spiders whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website.

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What do NoFollow and DoFollow mean?

DoFollow Link

A link is determined to be either a DoFollow or NoFollow by the rel tag added to the link . If the link does not have the “rel” tag then it is automatically set to be a DoFollow. When a link is placed anywhere on the internet (Website, blog, forum, YouTube, etc) it will pass some of the link popularity of the page/site where the link is located to the website it is pointing too.

Before there was the DoFollow/NoFollow tag every link anywhere would pass this link popularity. As you can imagine this caused a lot of spammers trying to post links everywhere in order to get a higher page ranking. Spammers would spam comment every blog, forum, anywhere they could comment. This was making it harder for Search Engines to determine which links where genuine and which ones should be given value.

NoFollow Link

NoFollow links where introduced to solve the problem mentioned above. To stop spammers gaining value from links that where just spam and should not have been adding value to the websites they where pointing to, the NoFollow tag was born. Now most links that are posted in forums, blogs, basically anywhere you can comment are tagged with NoFollow.

The NoFollow tag is used to tell Search Engines not to pass any link value to the website it is pointing too. So this means that spamming your link all over forums and blogs will not add any value what so ever to the ranking of the website it is pointing too. The only benefit is that having your link on those pages could possible receive some clicks from visitors which would give you some extra traffic.

You can also use NoFollow links if you want to link somewhere from your website but not pass any “credit” over to the website your linking too. However as you may know the internet basically runs on links and Search Engine rankings depend a lot on DoFollow links which are now most valuable when actually used by webmasters within content on their website.

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Why Does Nofollow Matter?

For the official word on nofollow links here’s what Google says about them:

“In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.”

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When Should You Use DoFollow Links

DoFollow links are very important and you should use them. If you are running a website and you link to another site because you want your visitors to see that page because it has some value in some way then you should use a DoFollow link. This will show search engines that the page you are linking to does have some value for people interested in the topic of your website. This will help search engines rank the better quality websites above those that try to get spam links.

1) In your blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic) 
Google calls this untrusted content. They think since you don’t know who’s trying to comment on your site (for Pete’s sake, they could be a spammer) you should just automatically nofollow all those links and it will hopefully discourage spammers from commenting at all. It’s worth a try and may cut down on a little of your spam comments, but if you've run a blog for even a week, you already know it won’t get rid of it.

2) Paid links: Again this is recommended by Google. Essentially, your site’s PageRank gives a small amount of rank power to the sites you link to (which helps their search engine ranking). If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. And they don’t like that. Often it’s the person putting the paid link on their site who gets in trouble (not always the guy who bought the link), so you may want to nofollow any paid links on your webpages.

3) Areas of your site you don’t really want in the index
Using a nofollow tag to link to these pages is not a sure-fire way of keeping the pages out of the search engines, but it may help.  You might as well use the nofollow tag on those links as you don’t really want the search engines following them to your exclusive pages.

DoFollow Links Don’t Hurt

Some people slam the NoFollow Tag onto every link leaving their website because they heard that if you use a DoFollow link you are passing away some of your link juice. This is totally wrong, search engines do not punish you for linking to a website with a DoFollow link, they actually prefer that because it helps them rank websites better. It has also been said that linking to a quality website with a DoFollow link can actually help your own search engine rankings. So don’t use a NoFollow link when you link to a website you think deserves it.

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How to Easily Spot NoFollow Links

One way to spot nofollow links is to right click on a site and click ‘View source’. Then go up to ‘Edit’ and then ‘Find’. From there you’ll want to type ‘nofollow’ into the search box.

Using this technique, you can scroll through and see if the link you’re concerned about is nofollow or dofollow.

Another easier way is to download an extension for your browser. The following are a couple of extensions for the Firefox browser that will highlight nofollow tags for you:

• SEO Quake
• Nodofollow

How to add authors to your Blogger blog

As a blog writer there may be various reasons due to which you might be finding it difficult to post your blogs on regular basis. Whereas it is possible that there would be some writers who must be interested to post their blog on your blog column. In such situation it would be better to provide them an opportunity of posting their blogs on your blog. This will enable you to get connected with your potential readers but it will also provide fresh and interesting content to your readers. Other option is to get other writers engaged with you and develop your personal blog team. After which they will write a blog for you without disclosing their name in front of your potential readers. But do you know how to add contributors or authors to your blog in blogger.

Team blogs are quite useful when small groups of people wish to contribute to a single blog. 

Though this feature was already available in wordpress , recently Blogger too has enabled this feature. So now Blogger Users can have up to 100 multiple Authors or co-Authors for their blogs. So this new Team Blogging feature has enabled multiple authors to manage a single Blog. Although the owner of the blog will be the admin by default and all new authors he invites will be given co-author account. They can only EDIT their posts and they won’t have the feature to edit / delete others posts. However the admin can change the privileges of the co-authors anytime.

Need of additional contributors: 

The most common reason of involving more authors or contributors in your blog is that you might be interested in enhancing quality of your blog. 

 

Blog Administrators

An administrator of a team blog has access to the blog's settings and template, as well as the ability to edit and delete posts made by other members of the blog. Additionally, they can add or remove other team members. Any number of members can have admin rights on a single blog.

Adding Multiple Authors to Blogger Blogs

In this tutorial, I will explain how to Add more co-authors or guest authors to your Blogger Blog. Just follow these simple steps to enable this feature in Blogger.

• Sign in to Blogger&nbsp
• First, find the "Permissions" section under Settings | Basic.

• Go to the Settings page of your blog. Click the link for Permissions.

• Click the “Add Authors” button to add one or more new authors to the list of people who can write for your blog. posts   

      

•  Next, type the email addresses of the people you're inviting to the blog, separating each address with a comma. They'll receive an email with a confirmation link soon. Note that they must have Google Accounts, and if they don't already, they'll be prompted to create one.

 

• When you are ready to send the invitations, click OK.

• Blogger sends an email invitation to each person you listed in Step 4. If they agree to participate in writing the blog, they respond to the email affirmatively. Blogger does the rest for you.

Changing the permissions of the author

Once the author accepts your invitation , he can start writing in your blog. But he can only edit or delete posts written by him. He can’t delete posts written by others.
If you want anyone of the author to edit others post , then you need to grant him admin privileges. For granting Admin privileges , go to Settings page of your blog and navigate to Permissions sub-tab. Beside the author name you will see a button ” grant admin privileges “.
Pradeep Singh

How To Start Successful Blogging

Choice of subject to blog about

Choose the subject of your blog with care and consideration. Your blog should mirror your passion and knowledge on the subject. Identify whether you will be able to consistently post on the subject. Some topics that are search engine friendly and that never really die out are technology blogs, product related blogs, city concentric blogs and money making blogs. There is always news to give your readers and also there are a lot of points to discuss on. More challenging blogs to write are blogs on thoughts, ideas, short stories, poems. In these blogs you have to be able to provide self- driven original content whereas in the previous kind there are other websites from where you can draw inspiration and ideas. Decide what your blog is going to be about.Your blog can be about anything you want, like politics or romantic comedies or every little thing or anything else you want. It’s a common misconception that blogs are just online diaries, or that every blogger is an aspiring Carrie Bradshaw. Untrue! Blogs can be a place where you write about what happened during the day, or what’s going on in your life, but the topics and themes are endless. Your blog can consist of funny pictures of your cat. Or may be you just want to write about music? So post your own reviews. 

Pick a platform.

Not all blogging platforms are the same. There are a lot of platforms out there right now, but these are some of my favorites:

Blogger
Blogger is extremely user-friendly, and if you don’t know much about HTML and coding, it’s easily customizable. I would recommend Blogger to those who tend to write lengthier posts, often with several different components, like images and video. While most blogging platforms are becoming more minimalist and image-driven—Tumblr and Pinterest don’t tend to feature much text—Blogger stands out as a solid platform for writers. You create an account, pick a template, and compose an entry by writing directly in the text box, no coding necessary. Most templates follow a basic format: title at the top, a large section for your post, and a sidebar for links and pictures.

Tumblr
I love Tumblr. It’s equally easy to use, and you can upload video, MP3s, and photos to the site in seconds. I wouldn’t recommend Tumblr if you want to write long posts that incorporate a lot of different forms of media, because most Tumblr posts are really short. It’s also more difficult to mix media in one post, like including an MP3 AND video. But if you mainly want to post pictures, Tumblr might be the best platform for you. Many long-form blogs and websites have Tumblrs as their simple sidekicks. (For example, if you read Rookie, you’ll no doubt want to follow ourTumblr for extra content.) In the Tumblr feed, all of your posts and the posts of others that you follow are listed in chronological order in one continuous stream. You can re-blog other people’s posts or “heart” them, which allows for a lot of interaction among bloggers.

LiveJournal
LiveJournal is a website for, you guessed it, online journals. The great thing about it is that you can choose very specifically whom you do and don’t want viewing your blog or even specific posts, whereas with other blogs you would have to make all posts private or password-protected. My favorite part about LiveJournal is the communities. A community is “a journal where many users post entries about a similar topic.” I live and die for online fashion content communities like Mixologies and Foto_decadent (which I’m not linking to because it has an adult content notice!) that allow me to look at editorials from magazines all over the world.

WordPress.com and WordPress.org
Wanna know a secret? Rookie is made using WordPress. IS YOUR MIND BLOWN!? Anyway, WordPress.com and WordPress.org are pretty different for a few reasons. WordPress.org isn’t for novice bloggers. First of all, you need to find an internet-hosting service and then download the WordPress software to your computer. It’s definitely difficult to customize and set up for someone who doesn’t know anything about coding, blogging, or building a website. If you ARE familiar with these things and want more control of where and how your blog content is stored, then WordPress.org might be something to consider. The best thing about using WordPress.org is that you’re in complete control of your site, so you can authenticate commenters and fully control spam. It’s also an open-source software, which means it;s free! It gives you a lot more freedom, but that freedom requires some experience.

High Quality Content can get hard to produce consistently

Posting quality content consistently keeps your readers engaged and makes them come back for more. In the initial days posting is easy since you will have a lot of ideas in your mind. However, delivering high quality content to your readers day after day gets tougher as time progresses and ideas dry up. You need to keep innovating and ideating constantly.

Marketing your blog is hard work

Once you have content in your blog, its time to tell the world. The challenge is – ‘How do you tell prospective readers that your blog has what they are looking for?’ Social networking sites like stumbleupon, orkut, twitter, facebook and a zillion other websites are breeding grounds for finding prospective readers. Building your network can be a time consuming, never ending task, but it doesn't end there, you need to make the effort to make your network aware of your blog. The benefits can only be exponential. Getting them to post comments is a completely different ball game.

Technical know how is required

Lack of technical know-how can hinder you from tweaking your blog and giving it the finesse and feel that you envisaged for your blog. Serious bloggers will have to dabble with HTML, JavaScript and so on. It is this technology that can give the blog the uniqueness, user-friendliness and functionality that makes it stand out. Be prepared to invest some time in learning web technologies. Being search engine savvy can go a long way in getting the traffic that you are looking for.

Research, Read, Reflect

Every post is a brand new post. Don’t be surprised that you would have to regularly research on your topic, as there is always something new out there. Read what others have to say and reflect. It involves a lot of hard work, patience, persistence to read content, assimilate and formulate your own content. At times, you should be ready to dig deep within your self.

Expect to ride an emotional roller coaster

Do not expect an easy ride when you blog. You can put in a lot of hard work and then realize that nobody is commenting on your post and on the other hand you will write a one liner and you will have the whole world talking about it. You will have days when you will be banging your head against the wall wondering what to post about and then there will be days you have so many ideas in your head that you don’t know where to start. So be ready to enjoy the ride.

Be prepared to sacrifice something in life

Since all this hard work is going to use up your time, you have to be prepared to give up something. For those that have a full time job – your personal life or work life is going to take a hit. Maybe some of your other hobbies or interests will get affected. So you need to decide carefully on the things in life that you are ready to forego in order to become successful as a blogger.

Writing a good post takes time and patience

There may be few gifted bloggers out there that can churn out interesting posts easily. Some have this skill from practice, and for some, it is a gift, but for the majority of us it is hard work right from coming up with the title to the way the post is structured to the content of the post. Be prepared to go through many iterations of it before you come up with the post that you would feel proud to publish.

Make your blog look effing sweet.

Truth: people like good-looking websites. I’m a very visual person, so when I started my blog, personalizing its aesthetic was important to me. Being able to easily manipulate your layout is very useful. Don’t be afraid to pick a standard layout, and then fool around with sizing and colors. One of my favorite music blogs,Fluxblog, has a minimalist design and is easy to navigate. One of my favorite art and design blogs, Booooooom, features a changing header and multicolored links. And It’s Nice That breaks the usual format of posts on one side, sidebar on the other, by including tiny, square-shaped previews that you click on to access the full post.

This is why I strongly suggest learning a little bit of HTML. Most blogging services (such as the ones I’ve listed above) can be customized using HTML. People have made their Tumblrs look and feel like professional websites, but it’s just coding that does the trick. If you’re reading a blog and you like the way it looks, right-click (control-click on a Mac) and hit “View Page Source” or “View Source” and you’ll get the HTML coding for the blog’s layout. Don’t steal it, but use it as a guideline.

Finally, 10 commandments for blogging.

1. Thou shalt not spew anonymous hate in comment sections, because that’s really immature and terrible.

2. Honor thy fellow bloggers and re-blog with proper credit! Whether you’re re-blogging a work of art or a piece of text, always give credit to the original source.

3. Thou shalt not feature music that plays automatically, because that’s just annoying. Sorry!

4. Make thy blog easy to read and use. No complicated Flash animation on thy blog!

5. Thou shalt not judge the success of one’s blog by the number of comments or followers. It can take time to gain a readership.

6. Thou shalt not ask aggressively for link exchanges from other bloggers.

7. Title thy blog wisely. Snuffle Pug Fashion Kisses might get tiresome after a while.

8. Thou shalt not assume that everyone on the web is who he or she says they are. I don’t want to sound like a mom, but seriously: trust your instincts, and beware of randos!

9. Thou shalt respect the privacy of other people! Blogs give you an outlet to write, but it doesn’t make you a journalist. It can be unethical to share information about people who don’t want that information given to the public.

10. Thou shalt exercise caution, for what’s on the internet is there FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER.