Make money from blogs - Migrating from a blog hosted on Blogger to your own domain

It's a common occurrence; people start out with a blog that runs on a free service such as Blogger or Wordpress.com, and then over a time develop a readership and a Good Page Rank. At some point during this process, the person running the blog realizes that maybe it was a mistake starting the blog on a shared domain (or a free service). It does not look professional, there are limitations on what you can do and the services you can launch, but you are stuck. Moving onto a new domain will mean that you lose your existing readers, you lose your Google Page Rank (and if you have a Page Rank that is greater than 4, there is no greater fear of a blogger than having to lose that Page Rank).
An easy solution could be to put a link on top to the new domain, but that really does not work. The Page Rank is not tranferred, and the readership does drop. So, what is required is a way that the blog can be moved over to your own private domain (hosted on some common hosting company), without losing these items. I was reading a post (link to this post)

But this year, I tried a little different approach and it worked – now Digital Inspiration is located at www.labnol.org and there’s no dip in search rankings, organic site traffic and the RSS subscriber count. Here’s that very secret recipe explained in 10 easy steps:

The author does not have complete success, in the sense that the Blogger / Blogspot blog still generates more visits than the Wordpress blog, but it is getting closer, and there are many seeming advantages to having a Wordpress account. Read the linked post, and see whether you want to go down that path.

What to do when your Blog gets reported as a 'Spam Blog'

I have some blogs running on the Blogger platform. One day, after logging into my Blogger dashboard, I was astonished to discover a message on my blog in the dashboard stating that updates for this blog had been disabled. After some initial shock, hand-wringing about 'I have not done anything against Google policies' and so on, I got down to some serious introspection. The one thing positive in this whole scenario was that Google explains the whole thing clearly, and in this case, Google explained that their automated bots seemed to have made the conclusion that my blog was actually a spam blog. So, what is a 'Spam Blog' ? Refer this page:

The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

And why was a blog marked as a Spam Blog ? Refer this article:

The disabling is a result of our automated classification system marking it as spam. Because this system is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we're continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these. If your blog is not a spam blog, then it was one of the false positives, and we apologize.

You can recover from this problem through a simple link that they have on the same page. The only problem is that they give you around 2 weeks before they delete your blog, and if you are an infrequent visitor to your blog, then it could get deleted before you notice. In my case, I managed to recover my blog within a day, so no problem.

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Adding a 'Digg' button to your Blogger / Wordpress posts

Digg is a very popular site that allows users to vote for the content that they want to make popular, in the sense, the editorial decisions are made by people, not by a separate team. And what is Digg ? If you have not heard of Digg by now, you should have ! Description from the people at Digg !
Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online. How do we do this? Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see. And as per Alexa, 0.5% of internet users come to Digg (which is a huge absolute number).

So, how do you ensure that your posts are added to Digg ? It's fairly simple now, all you need to do is to read a bit about the options posted on the Digg Tools page (click here). This page gives you the code that needs to be added to your blog (or other web page). However, in a majority of the cases, you would want the code to be added such that it shows up automatically in all your articles / posts. You can do this by adding the code to the template ? You might ask, how do do that ? Well, now it gets a bit complicated whether you use Blogger or Wordpress.

For Blogger, if you are still using the older version of Blogger, then it is fairly easy to step into the code of the older Blogger interface, go to the Template option -> Edit HTML, and then go to the section of code where it says <p class='post-footer'>. Add the code from http://digg.com/tools/integrate below this section, and you are good to go.

If you are using the newer version of Blogger, then you need to update your template, a bit trickier option. Remember, if you update your template, you should take a backup earlier. Here is this excellent post detailing how to modify the template (click here). However, you cannot just use the code as described in the blog, since the Digg code has changed and is much simpler. You need to find the section of template as described in the article, and then use the code for Digg from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page.

if you using Wordpress (not Wordpress.com hosted blog), then you need to modify the Wordpress template for making this change. Login into wp-admin for your blog, go to the Design -> Theme Editor -> Single Post.
After you reach the line, php the_content('Read the rest of this entry, in the next line, add the code for Digg from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page.

You should be good to go with this. As to the question of which Digg to use from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page, I recommend that you go with the first option, where it says "Digg This" with Submit Capability.