Blogging with Ads and a Blog Store

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From Denny: Whew! I've been blogging for nine months now (on the oldest blog The Social Poets where I started all this craziness) and am just getting into learning about ads. There are so many options and it takes a while to absorb it all. Mostly, I've waited to develop my content on each blog and then see what people find interesting.

You can develop your own aStore with Amazon Associates though it sure takes some time to develop the look you want to best complement your blog in color and design. Of course, I just wear it out trying different combinations so it takes me longer. :) I finally got around to developing this blog's own store.

Amazon is a trusted company for both the customer and the blogger. I prefer an ad company with a good reputation since it's my reputation on the line as well.

Anyway, there are ads for MP3 Music, Gourmet Food, Free Music, Sale Books, Video, Cell phones, and the Romancing The Chocolate Store as choices. Take a look and browse through it all for ideas. If you are like me you just enjoy window shopping! :)

What's fun about some of these ads is they add visual interest to what could be a static blog so I thought I'd try it out and see what appeals to everyone. At least they are tasteful unlike what some companies offer. The ads are placed at the top, sprinkled in the sidebar and above and below the posts area.

Oh, yes, for new bloggers, you definitely want to get Google ads. Why? Forget about making money from them as it's a joke unless you get a million hits. The only sites and blogs that get hits like that are porno and I'm not interested in writing garbage. You only make $1 for every 1,000 hits so it could take you a year or more to make $100.

When you go to join up with Google just make sure you have at least 60 to 90 posts of content. They might turn you down for less. What they are looking for is enough content to analyze to know what ads to place with you. If you post daily it won't take long to develop a theme or trend that Google will find attractive. Once you have been at blogging for a good six months and are not overwhelmed, upgrade for free to Google Analytics. Analytics goes deeper into analyzing how you are doing and what posts are the most popular. They let you know if your traffic is from search engines or direct because people already know about you.

The real reason you want Google ads is because they keep track of your numbers for you to let you know if folks are actually reading your blog. That was the real reason I activated Google ads. I wanted to see if anyone was interested in what I was offering since I was a newbie to blogging. Previously, I always kept private journals and then finally decided to go public. It was a pleasant surprise to learn the level of interest out there in web land! :) Thanks for your support, everyone!

Thank you for your support!

From Denny: Just wanted to take the time to thank everyone for subscribing to the feed on this blog and all the others - and following on Blogger and other sites. You are much appreciated! Blogging is so much more fun when you have company and such good company you all are, thanks! Thank you for your support and hope you are enjoying your time here learning right along with me as I find amazing things for all these blogs! Ah, bathing in chocolate - now that's decadence! :)

New Additions to Photo Blog Roll!

From Denny: "Can I tell ya?" Spent hours and hours this past weekend pouring over some awesome photo blogs, amateur and professional alike, sifting through them to place the BEST on my blog roll for you! There are about 70 choices now - around there, I lost count... :)

If you enjoy looking at photos and want to see what is going on in the photo blogosphere then this is a good place to start. My blog roll list is located at my photo blog, Visual Insights.

Talk about a wonderful way to while away a few hours with beautiful and thought-provoking photos! Take a look and enjoy! Go here.

Added Twitter Counter to ALL Blogs

From Denny: Just added the Twitter Counter to all the blogs! Come by and drop off a link to YOUR NAME on Twitter! Great way for you to boost your followers and just plain fun. Get a little link love! :)

Have also started a reciprocal Link Love on The Social Poets and will be extending it to the other blogs too. Just email me, Denny Lyon, warriorspearl@gmail.com so I know which blog is the best fit for your site's link - unless you have a preference. Keep a link on your site or blog with a link to one of my blogs and I'll keep a link for you too.

If we don't promote each other in cyberspace, who will? :)

Here's the link to the Twitter Counter page to make your own:
http://twittercounter.com/pages/buttons/skydiver

Here are quick links to the various blogs:

The Social Poets

The Social Poets Fav Bloggers

The Social Poets Fav Links

The Healing Waters

The Soul Calendar

The Soul Calendar Fav Links

Romancing The Chocolate

Comfort Food From Louisiana

Dennys Blog Feeds

Visual Insights

Beautiful Illustrated Quotations

Ouch Outrageous Obnoxious And Odd

Thanks for visiting!

New Blog Look!

From Denny: Have spent the day fine-tuning the new blog template. It's just so much fun (not!) when you have to go back to the original sites and generate and install a new code for one thing: the original no longer fits in the new column, too large or too small, the Amazon store and the visitor counter and more. Simple to do but time-consuming. Hopefully, I've gotten all the details. My eyeballs look like a Halloween scary mask, all blood shot! :) (Hmmm... is this where I'm supposed to whine and whine some more...?)

Why did I decide to change the look? She must be crazy, you tell yourself silently in your own head. (You are right, BTW.) Actually, Himalman of Himalman's Weblog suggested I change my template. He even provided the link to a great template site.

After a couple of hours (remember there are 12 blogs now) of pouring over pages of great interesting templates for the Blogger platform, I downloaded a bunch of them, all excited to get started. One by one, none of them were accepted to upload to Blogger, even though all were compatible with my browser. Great... now what? Well, after studying the best for so long by then I realized I could do something close to the preferred templates - and set about redesigning the blogs by using Blogger's established templates.

Hope you enjoy the new look and find the navigation much easier! Thanks for visiting! And me? I'll be the guy at the drug store buying eye drops so I won't scare the neighborhood children...

Recipe: Chocolate and Pistachio Surprise Cake

From Denny: If you haven't heard of the fabulous blog Chocolate and Zucchini, written both in English and French, then, "Honey, you ain't living!" :) Seriously though, this wonderful site has been around a few years on the web (since 2003) and is written in a friendly manner, stuffed full to the rafters with awesome recipes! The writer is a Parisian woman by the name of Clotilde Dusoulier who started this blog to share her passion for all things food-related. Over time her passion for food writing made it possible to quit her day job and write full time!

While I'm putting up her recipe here, you really do need to go read what all she wrote before giving you the recipe. She's a wonderful and chatty writer, brimming over with information and good times. Take a little extra time and check out the rest of her site. She gives her recipes in both metric and American measurements.

Here is a small excerpt of her humorous writing: "To me, cakes pretty much fall under two categories, chocolate and non-chocolate, so I asked the birthday-girl-to-be (her sister) which kind she wanted. Her reply was that she simply wanted a surprise cake, so I followed my deeper instincts and went, well, the chocolate route."

Now does this sound like a woman after our own chocolate hearts or what?!! :) She also suggests you bake this cake a day ahead as she believes that dark chocolate cakes taste better on the second day, talk about making our life easier!

Chocolate and Pistachio Surprise Cake

Ingredients:

- 270 g (2 C) flour

- 2 tsp baking powder (1 envelope)

- 1 tsp baking soda

- 150 g (2/3 C) butter, at room temperature

- 300 g (1 1/4 C) white sugar

- 4 eggs

- 1 1/2 C (3 x 125 ml) plain yogurt or sour cream

- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

- 2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder

- 60 g (1/3 C) chocolate chips

- 2 Tbsp pistachio paste

- 60 g (1/3 C) shelled pistachios, chopped


Ganache:

- 120 g (3 oz) baking dark chocolate

- 125 ml (1/2 C) whipping cream


Directions:

Preheat your oven to 180°C (360°F). (350 degrees will do if your oven is not this exact.) Grease a 25-cm (10-inch) cake pan, preferably nonstick with a removable bottom.

Prepare the chocolate batter. In a food processor, mix together half of the sugar and half of the butter until fluffy. Add in two of the eggs, one at a time, mixing between each. Add in half of the yogurts and all the vanilla extract, mix again. In a medium bowl, combine half of the flour with half of the baking powder, half of the baking soda and all of the cocoa mixture. Add the flour mixture into the food processor and mix again until just combined. Pour the batter into the cake pan, and reserve in the refrigerator.

Rinse the bowl of the food processor, and prepare the pistachio batter: mix together the rest of the sugar, the rest of the butter and the pistachio paste. Add in the two last eggs, one at a time, mixing between each. Add in the rest of the yogurts and mix again. In a medium bowl, combine the rest of the flour with the rest of the baking powder and baking soda, and all of the chopped pistachios. Add into the food processor and mix again until just combined.

Take the cake pan out of the fridge, and sprinkle the chocolate chips evenly over the surface of the chocolate batter. Gently pour the pistachio batter on top, and smooth out the surface with a spatula. Put into the oven to bake for about an hour or until a cake tester comes out clean. Let rest for five minutes on the counter, then turn out on a rack to cool completely.

Prepare the ganache. Melt the dark chocolate with the whipping cream in a double boiler (or in a bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water), stirring with a spoon regularly until completely melted and velvety. Let the ganache rest until it has thickened a bit, about 30 minutes, and frost the cake using a small spoon.

You can either wait until the ganache has cooled and set before serving, or frost the cake just before you serve it, but the cake itself needs to have cooled down completely, it tastes better that way.

New Link Pages: List for Fav Bloggers and Fav Links!

Links Image by cobalt123 via Flickr

From Denny: Hi, everyone! Been busy on the blog's housekeeping and you all know how much I don't like (OK, despise) housework...

The Social Poets has become a bit of the Wild Wild West. Read that as too much overwhelming info on one page. Too much on one page has really slowed down the final load time of this blog too. Surely you find it as annoying as I do! So, something had to be done and two more blog pages were born:

The Social Poets Fav Bloggers

The Social Poets Fav Links

OK, so I'm one of those people who enjoys a clean house, everything in its place, neat and orderly - I just don't like the effort it takes to do it! (Hmmm... TMI...)

Seriously though, if you are a blogger or are thinking about starting a blog, maybe try out the same idea for your convenience. For both content and link worthiness it's a great idea to have links to other blogs and sites. I just choose to do so by fitting it into my niche because I'm a total information junkie. Sigh... TMI yet again... :)

Actually, I've been wanting to expand on finding additional blogs to fit my categories and have been limited - until now. I really see the potential for how I could create additional interesting pages/related blogs!

Currently, on The Social Poets Fav Bloggers there are blogs on general musings, poetry blogs, writing blogs, political and social issues, creativity blogs, and more will be added. If you have some interesting blogs or sites you have run across (or your own) you think warrant as an addition, feel free to drop me an email with the link and I'll be glad to consider it! (Always looking for new talent as life is a team effort.)

On the links list page, The Social Poets Fav Links, there are links to my original poems (parked in various places so required a link page area), links to my friends who write poetry (let me know if you want to add your poetry page, be glad to do so to help promote fellow poets), writing sites (let me know your contribution to helping others develop their writing skills and be glad to include your site), poetry sites, music and more.

For your convenience the new links are located right before the day's post. The link pages also have a link to navigate you back to the home page of The Social Poets blog too.

Blogging is a lot of fun! Always learning how to solve "all the problems of the world." Now if world politics and world peace were just this easy...

Passed 100th post milestone!

From Denny: Well, I hear we blogger types are supposed to jump up and brag about reaching the 100th post milestone. ;) You can tell I'm really "great" about some anniversaries as I've already passed that milestone with now 120 posts. Oh, well, so much for showing off!

Follow Fellow Bloggers!

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Most of the folks who follow this blog (THANK YOU!) and all my other blogs subscribe to feeds from feedburner, MyBlogLog and several other sources, even email. Not too many have ever used Blogger's Follower function. Maybe it's perceived as Old School?

A couple of weeks ago I dumped as many gadgets as I could from these blogs in order to speed up the page loadings. So, added back in is the area where if you are a fellow blogger on Blogspot you can follow this blog too.

(In proper circus barker loud voice) Step right up, folks! Join up on a rising popular blog! OK, now, no pushing and shoving to the head of the line like this is a 95% off sale...! :)

Seriously, thanks everyone for supporting all my blogs. It's been a blast to start them a few months ago just out of curiosity to see what would happen. Besides the fact I have learned a lot, and still learning, it's been fun to watch the blogs' traffic rankings go from the cellar skyrocketing upward toward the heavens! Every day lately every blog has grown by 100,000 or more in global traffic ranking according to the Alexa software. Pretty cool!

I have no idea where all of us are going but one thing is for sure - we will all enjoy the rocket ride! Thanks for becoming part of my growing community. You are well loved.

Just scroll on down toward the bottom of this page near the visitors count and you will find the Blogger followers area. Thanks for joining! I'm currently carrying over 5,000 feeds (mostly in Bloglines) so let me know and I'll be glad to join yours too!

Even More April Fools Day Funnies

More April Fools Day funnies over at another one of my blogs, hike yourself on over there: The Social Poets, go here.

What started out as a dumping ground for my poetry and other serious writings ended up a Wild Wild West place for human interest news and lots of humor too.

More April Fools Day Funnies

For more April Fools Day hoaxes from the math and science geek crowd, hike yourself on over to one of my other blogs: The Soul Calendar - go here.

On that blog I place a lot of articles about the mind, how the brain works, some astronomy (killer eclipse photos) and anything else mildly geeky I enjoy when I read magazines like Discover. Enjoy!

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar @ flickr.

Feedburner Glitch

Now I know why my feed counts have been going up and down wildly. Turns out Feedburner keeps deactivating them: on all 7 blogs! So, apologies, if you have found this maddening; join the club. Guess it's taking Google and Feedburner longer to merge and work out the gremlins than they are telling the public, oh, well... Meanwhile, rest assured I will be now manually monitoring these feeds twice a day to keep them activiated. Thank you for your patience everyone!

Don't you just love this photo of an ass? Such a good fit when things go wrong because that's how you feel and look to others! Might as well have some fun with screw-ups, right! ;)

Thanks go to the folks over at flickr who place their photos in the Creative Commons area for online writers and bloggers like me, much appreciated! They can be so funny.


Photo by gidibao @ flickr