Add a Cool Style to Blogger Threaded/Nested Comments

If you need a fresh style to the threaded comments of a standard Blogger template, here's a simple CSS that will help you to apply a different background, make your avatars rounded, add a border with rounded corners and a triangle which is actually an HTML entity to get that speech bubble look on your comments.

You can see a demo here.

To have this style in your comments, all you need to do is to paste the below code inside the CSS part of the template, which is between <b:skin> and </b:skin>

Styling Simple Nested Comments with CSS

Step 1. From the Blogger Dashboard, go to Template and press the Edit HTML button

Step 2. Click anywhere inside the code area and press the CTRL + F keys to open the search box:

Step 3. Paste or type the </b:skin> tag inside the search box and hit Enter. After you found the highlighted code, click on the arrow next to it to expand the code, then search it again by hitting Enter.

Step 4. Just above </b:skin> add this CSS:

.comments .comment-block {
background: #F9F9F9;
color: #555;
box-shadow: 0 4px 10px #EEEEEE;
position: relative;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-left: 60px;
padding: 10px;
border: 4px solid #EEEEEE !important;
border-radius:10px;
font: 1.190em/1.2 Cambria,Georgia,sans-serif;
}
.comment-thread li .comment-block:before {
position: absolute;
display: block;
left: -26px;
color: #EEEEEE;
content: "\25C4";
font-size: 30px;
}
.comments .avatar-image-container {
width: 60px;
height: 60px;
max-height: 60px;
margin:0px 0px 0 -28px;
padding: 0px;
border: 7px solid #EEEEEE;
border-radius:60px;
}
.comments .avatar-image-container img {
overflow:hidden;
width: 60px;
height: 60px;
max-width: 60px;
border:0 !important;
border-radius:60px;
}
.comments .comment-thread.inline-thread {
background: none;
}
.comments .continue {
border-top: 0px solid transparent;
}
.comments .comments-content .datetime {
float: right;
font-size: 11px;
}
.comments .comments-content .user a{
font-size: 15px;
color: #498EC9;
}
.comments .comments-content .datetime a:hover{
color: #777;
text-decoration: none;
}
.comments .comments-content .comment:first-child {
padding-top: 0px;
}
.comments .comments-content .comment {
margin-bottom: 0px;
padding-bottom: 0px;
}
.comments .continue a {
padding: 0px;
}
.comments .comments-content .icon.blog-author {
background-image: none;
}

How to Change Blogger Threaded Comments Background, Border and Colors

- replace the #F9F9F9 value to change the background color of the comments;
- #555 to change the text comments color;
- #EEEEEE to change the color of the shadow around comments;
- 4px solid #EEEEEE to change the border width (4px), style (solid) and color (#EEEEEE) around comments;
- 1.190em to change the comments font size;
- to change the arrow color, replace the #EEEEEE value from color: #EEEEEE;
- to change the border width (7px), style (solid) and color (#EEEEEE) around avatars, modify this part: 7px solid #EEEEEE;
- to change the avatars' size and roundedness, change the 60px value;

Here is a tool from that may help to pick your favorite color:
Color Code Generator (after you choose a color, copy the hex value)

Step 5. Finally, click on the Save template button... and you're done!

Create a CSS3 Image Hover Effect with Animated Vinyl Record

Here is an amazing CSS image effect to reveal more information on your images with a really cool CSS3 hover animation. This is just perfect for blogs dedicated to music or if you just want to show off the music that you love.

So, what we will do in this tutorial is to take an image for our album cover, add some fancy CSS3 transitions and transforms that, on hover, will slide out a pure-CSS vinyl record behind it. Finally, we will add some basic HTML to our post or page where we need to apply this amazing effect.

Demo: hover over the album cover and see how CSS reveals further information:

 
The Wall is the eleventh studio album by the English progressive rock group Pink Floyd.

How to Apply The Animated Vinyl Record on Blogger Images

Step 1. From your Blogger's Dashboard, go to Template > click on the Edit HTML button:

Step 2. Click anywhere inside the code area and press the CTRL + F keys to open the search box:

Step 3. Type or paste inside the search box the tag below and hit Enter to find it:

]]></b:skin>

Step 4. Just above ]]></b:skin> add the following code:

Click to expand the code

Step 5. Click on the Save template button to save the changes.

For applying the animated vinyl record effect on your image, first upload the picture for your album cover, copy the URL of it and then paste it inside a Notepad so that you can use it later. If you don't know how to upload images and get their urls, please read this tutorial: How to upload images and get the URLs

Step 6. When you create a post, add this code inside the HTML section:

<div class="case">
 <div class="overlay"></div>
 <img class="cover" src="http://add-image-url-here.com/"/>
<span class="info">TEXT HERE</span>
   <div class="slotwrapper">
  <div class="slot"></div>
 </div>
 <div class="vinyl"></div>
</div>

Replace the URL in blue with the one that you saved earlier and the text in red with the info to show on mouse over. In case you don't need any info, remove this part:

<span class="info">TEXT HERE</span>

Step 7. Publish your post and you're done! Enjoy!

Top 4 Non-Nonsense Places to Share Your Blog Posts

In my earlier post, I had discussed a smart way to promote blog posts by scheduling them for auto sharing using Buffer. If you had missed that post then I strongly recommend you to read it. And today, I’m going to share some other ways to share your blog posts after publishing them.
One of my blog readers ask me where I do sharing of my blog articles after publishing them. His question gives me an idea to write this guide. I hope you would enjoy it and found worth reading.
Bloggers fails to get and attract traffic towards their blog content because they lack with the sources where to share their posts. This lack of knowledge returns in dead blog posts without any comments and social shares.
You must take care about the places and sources to share your best articles just after hitting the publish button. Below I’m listing the best places where you should share your articles to get referral traffic and quality backlinks too

Share Your Blog Posts on These Popular Places :D

Best Places to Share Blog Content For Traffic

Get your blog quality aritcles noticed on below places:

1# Facebook Groups:

You may definitely using facebook groups to promote your content. What I have noticed is that bloggers join too many facebook groups in sake to get more referral traffic. But it’s not true. If you join limited and quality groups, then you’ll get more productive results.

1. Join limited number of groups.
2. Target Niche related groups with maximum number of members.
3. Look for the active groups, joining such groups where members don’t take interest to view your posts is really a waste of time.
4. Limited number of group are easy to manage, you can easily be active there. First like and comment on other’s submission and then share your own links. Believe me you will get best of the best exposure towards your each posts.

2# LinkedIn Groups:

Same as facebook, LinkedIn also allow it’s users to create and join groups. It’ll be tough to share your content all the time on each places, but do share your best posts in LinkedIn groups.
Points to be notice here:

1. LinkedIn is full of professionals. If you share outdated or non valuable content there, then sorry to say, LinkedIn groups are not for you.
2. Being a group member, you must care about your activeness in the group. Don’t be hungry only to share your articles. Give value to other’s content and help them to get shared their submitted posts. Try to make a bond with them. You’ll be notice as a valuable group member and other members will love to read and share your content with their social friends
3. Bonus Tip: Add members from UK, US in your group if you wanna attract traffic from these countries.

3# Google Plus Communities

Almost we all have our G+ profile and Google plus page of our blog. Right?
But sharing with circle friends and page followers is not the best use of Google Plus for blog posts promotion. As facebook and linkedIn groups, there are many communities on Google Plus. Make use of those communities in following way:

1. Join Google Plus communities where there is your targeted audience.
2. Start hitting +1 button on their posts, comment on them and appreciate their content.
3. Keep patience to share your own posts, first make a friendly relationship with other members.
4. Once you do follow these three steps, soon your name will be notice by other members. And this should be your goal. Grab their attention and prove that you are not there only to spam community with your own links.
5. Once you feel that you have made a solid presence in those communities, it’s time to share your posts links.
6. Share your article’s links, add attractive description and use #HashTags.
   • Get dofollow backlinks
   • +1’s to your posts
   • Targeted readers
   • Comments on posts
   • And many other benefits.

4# Blog Communities

Blog communities are the best places of active and targeted audience. As same as above places, you have to be active in blog communities too to get impressive results.
Below I’m listing few best communities and places for bloggers that are truly worth using for blog posts sharing.

1. IndiBlogger (For Indian Bloggers only)
2. Bizsugar
3. Blokube
4. BlogEngage
5. Triberr
6. Inbound.org

Note: Try to make use all of them effectively. If you are already using them and have any related doubt, query or suggestion, then feel free to leave a comment. I’ll surely response to your comments.
You must take care about your activities you do there in terms to get your posts vital. For best of the best results, perform below steps:

1. Register for an account.
2. Log in to your account and fill all of your profile information.
3. When you are ready with the basic things, it’s time to submit links. But wait, some communities set moderation on the submitted links. To get easy approval you have to be smart there. For first time submission, do submit a post of any big blog. It’ll help you to get instant approval on your submitted links. Once your submissions start getting approval, do submit your own links.
4. Vote for other’s post, build relationship and get votes to your own posts.
5. Maximum votes will bring your posts to the homepage of these communities, means your posts will be shown to a wider audience. Hence more free and targeted traffic to your blog.

These are the 4 major places where I always do sharing of my blog posts. Even you can use social bookmarking, blog commenting, JustRetweet and many other popular ways too to promote your content.

Conclusion!

At last I just wanna say that try your own ideas to promote your blog but never ignore the working ideas tested and shared by PRO-Bloggers to be a successful blogger. I’m also learning from my Gurus and that’s why I shared my experience with you guys.
Now it’s your turn. Share your own experience with me.

• How you do promote your articles?
• Where you do sharing for your blog posts to get traffic?
• Where from you get most exposure to your blog?

I’m looking forward for your responses. Thanks

Use Social Media Sites for Higher Ranks in Google

So, SEO has been changed since a long time. Google has been implementing changes in their search engine algorithm and now because of those changes, the SEO strategy has actually changed. The search engines now expect to see some social media activities of your website in the social media sites as well – which means social participation of your business. Google actually makes the things clear – the more your social participation is seen, the more your website would be seen on their search results.

Social Media Sites Improves Ranking

The recent updates including the one in the Penguin world has brought such changes in the search engine policy. You are going to be ranked favorably provided that you are the authority of your business. They observe your interaction with your customers and it can be easily done over the social network; probably that’s the reason behind measuring this change in the searching policy. If you can manage to do the socialization in the right way, you will get higher ranking. Now, how do you do that? It’s easy if you know exactly where to click. You have to know what your consumers actually want from your business. Share lucrative posts on social media about it – be it a service, or product. If you can make them interested – they will share without you telling them to do so. The more shared, reposted, re-tweeted that post gets; the more exposure and rank you earn in Google.
And where are you supposed to do that? In the social media, the ones that get the most hits and here are six of them.

1# LinkedIn

No matter what social network you use for socializing, the most priority should be given on completing your profile first. When you fully complete your LinkedIn professional page and your personal page with profile picture and all the details, you get the advantages of being in touch with the professional people in your workspace orbit. Also, Google prefers results from LinkedIn.

2# YouTube

Google’s own this media sharing site and is a great tool for promoting your business for almost free. You can put video promotional about your product or service and get the attention of your consumers. Videos up to 10 minutes are completely free so it won’t cost a single penny for many businesses. And if done properly, video marketing makes your business more attractive to the consumers.

3# Facebook

There is forever running debates on the cyberspace about how Facebook will or will not lose interest to its users in the future. As we can’t see the unforeseen future so we don’t have any comments on that but Facebook clearly is the most popular social network these days. Proper use of this tool will surely get you the most consumers worldwide.

4# Twitter

It has become ‘embedded’ in many souls all around the world. Twitter has clearly showed how a 140 lines tweet can severely impact people’s lives. I don’t there’s much to say – just use this tool properly.

5# Pinterest

As people can pin and re-pin their interests to this social network, make sure your posts get enough pin to make the other consumers interested. That’s how you engage your potential customers.
So now given that the social networks to higher your ranking, get to work. The more you make the correct use, the more you earn higher ranking in Google and don’t forget to check previous post on this blog written by Varun to know how social media sites plays best role to increase referral traffic to blog.

Top 5 Blogging Mistakes That Could Kill Your Blog Silently

Do you have any idea, which of your blogging mistakes are silently killing your blog?
Or let’s say it in an easy way; do you know which things are the main reasons for the declination of your blog’s growth / reputation / traffic?
Thousands of blogs gets created everyday all around the globe, and about 80% – 90% of blogs gets killed by its owner, because in fact everybody makes some common yet serious mistakes at the beginning of their blogging career.

Blogging Mistakes To Avoid

 

Let’s discuss about the top blogging mistakes by beginners which are responsible for the decrease of their blog’s growth and how to correct them.

1: Posting Useless Content

Posting useless (too short [200-300 words only], uninformative, self promotional, boring, Non-engaging content or posting just for the sake of bots, the content which is of no use to your readers) on your blog can harm your blog’s health.
Or being a copy paste blogger i.e. copy pasting the content from all over the web to your blog always have a negative impact on your blog, resulting in the lower ranking of your blog in the search engines, decrease in your and your blog’s reputation in the eyes of other bloggers etc.
Real life experience of one of my blogging friends explaining the effects of useless contents on your blog -

When I was totally newbie in blogging about 2 years back with no or very less knowledge about blogging, I started a blog on computer tricks to help other bloggers. I posted about 70+ unique informative articles, but because of running out of blog post ideas I started copy pasting other blog’s articles and posting on my blog (About 25+ articles) which ruined my previous hard work and that blog too.

Correct the mistake -
Better late than never. You can easily correct this mistake, just follow these simple steps -

• If you have low quality articles published on your blog, simply delete them or try to rewrite them in a very new manner enhancing the article’s qualities.
• Always try to write unique, interesting & quality articles briefly explained with full of informative content for your blog readers & visitors which will make them subscribe to your blog for more information.
• It is always better to ask your readers what type of content they love to read, and then writing on that topic. This will increase the engagement of your readers and it will also give you lots of blog post ideas.
• Do not copy paste content from other blog or website on your blog. As doing that will not going to benefit you but it will only decrease the value of your blog.
• Try to post a bit of long informative articles. Ranging word limit from 800-1000+ words which will make it more engaging for your blog readers.
• Always try to break down large posts into smaller headings, sub headings, bullets and numbers lists. So that it becomes easy to read and understand. Check these tips to improve your Blog or Website’s Readability
• Check the forums and other blogs (especially the comment section) of same niche to find out what other people want. Doing so will give you lots of unique blog post ideas to come out with.

2: Infrequently posting

Having no frequency in posting content on your blog can also be the one of blogging mistakes. Set up a frequency in posting content on your blog, as it can help in building up the traffic on your blog.

1. Posting 1-2 article per day: Posting 1-2 article daily will boost your blog’s traffic by 200% – 300% and is mostly recommended to newbie bloggers for building up their blog’s traffic in its initial days.
2. Posting 4-5 articles per week: Posting 4-5 articles per week is be considered good & will help in boosting blog’s traffic by little amount.
3. Posting 1-2 articles per week: Posting 1-2 articles per week is considered decent and mostly preferred only for the blogs which has been established for a long time.

I’ll advice to be frequent in posting (4-5 articles per week) and get benefited by increased traffic which means increased income.

3: No Social Media Exposure

No matter, how unique or worthy articles you post on your blog. Still you need social media exposure from facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc.
The biggest mistake a blogger can commit is no social media exposure to his blog. Most of newbie bloggers do this mistake as they don’t know that social media exposure can help in boosting their blog’s growth tremendously.

Social media can help you to drive tons of traffic to your blog in early days of your blogging career. Social media plays a vital role in increasing the blog’s traffic. So try to create a strong network on social media i.e Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon etc. and get lots of traffic to your blog.
You can join several Facebook groups and Google+ communities to get social media exposure to your blog.

4: Poor Design

Does my blog’s design really matter?
Yes! Your blog design matters more than you think. Having a bad design makes visitors hate your blog badly. If blog visitors don’t like your its design, they will never come back again to your blog which will tend to decrease in your blog’s traffic and hence your blog’s growth.
What does having a bad design means?
A bad design can be defined as not having a decent theme or template, having too much clutter on your blog, having too many advertisements (Specially pop up ads), using irritating colors, using irrelevant graphics and contents etc.
Solution -
You can improve your blog design easily:

• Choose a good, clean and professional looking theme / template and apply it on your blog. Try Genesis Themes (for WordPress blog)
• Remove access of advertisements from your blog.
• Use Proper headings, Sub headings, Bullets, Numbered list wherever necessary.
• Don’t use eye distracting colors or some funky fonts. Make it simple and sweet.

5: Depending on Freebies

Totally depending on freebies can be dangerous mistake that you will ever commit. Mostly newbie bloggers make this type of mistakes as they want everything for free. Thus, they totally depend upon the freebies available all around the internet. Kulwant Nagi from BloggingCage discussed more about this issue. Check his article.
Freebies won’t need any kind of investments but they are not going to help you in blogging. You must invest in blogging for much better and quick results.
Suppose a group of bloggers ‘A’ use blogger.com to create their blog because it is not going to charge them a penny but on other side a group of bloggers ‘B’ invests on hosting and domain and create their WordPress blog.
Now you tell, which group of bloggers have more chances of getting popular and successful? YES! Bloggers from group ‘B’ will be more successful because they invested in something which is necessary for their blog. They are using WordPress rather than a free blogspot blog. If you are a newbie and wants to start your own professional WordPress blog then grab our Free WordPress Installation Service today!
Same works for everything around the web. You must invest in your blog for a better result.

Conclusion

Now you know the mistakes which are killing your blog.
These simple mistakes causes blogging failure. Don’t ignore them! Avoid these mistakes and increase your blog’s growth and reputation. But if you fail don’t lose hope, stay focused. Just try, try and try until you succeed.

How To Increase Twitter Followers Instantly?

Blog followers and subscribers are very important for any online business. They are those people who help us to maintain a flow of traffic on our blog. In my earlier posts, I had discussed a trick to increase blog followers that was really appreciated by lot of my readers. And today I bring another trick to increase twitter followers quickly for free. There are lot of programs and tools available on the internet that promises to increase your twitter followers fast and free but let me aware you with a fact about those tools. You can surely gain more followers by using such programs like AddMeFast but those followers will not give you any benefit. We need targeted followers, those have interest in our niche, so that we can expect some retweets from them. Only targeted followers can help us to gain traffic from twitter. That’s why I am going to share a trick to increase targeted followers on twitter.

Steps to Increase Your Twitter Followers

Below are some very easy steps that you have to follow to gain really targeted followers for your blog instantly.

1. Make a list of some big blogs under your niche that have a huge list of twitter followers.


2. Open their twitter page.


3. Now check their followers. Below screenshot shows the twitter followers of a very popular blog MBT.





4. Click on FOLLOWERS link and follow their followers as many as possible.





5. These are those people who have interest in your niche. Follow maximum people to gain maximum followers. There is really a cool formula on twitter that “You Follow Me, I Follow You Back!“. When we follow others, the majority of people follow us back on twitter.


6. That’s it!

These were very simple steps to increase targeted followers on twitter.But there is a problem.
The chances are also high that people don’t follow us back. So, we have to unfollow those people who are not following us back. It’s because our followers should look naturally increased. If we don’t remove the people who are not reciprocal with us, then anyone will get to know about our trick by doing a simple comparison between the number of people we are following and the number of our followers.
You may think that:
How we can check who doesn’t follow us back?
How we will unfollow those people to make followers look natural?

Both the above questions have very simple solution.
Here we’ll use an amazing tool Tweepdash.

This online tool is very simple to use and it’s very effective to check who doesn’t follow us back. We can unfollow them very easily. Let’s check how?

1. Sign in to Tweepdash with your twitter account.


2. Once you log in to your account, you’ll see three columns of Celebs, Fans and Friends.


3. Look at the first column means Celebs. They are those people who are not following you back.


4. It’s time to unfollow them. Click on Red Cross sign to unfollow them.





5. Now at last you’ll get really targeted followers on twitter. You can gain as many followers as you want by simply following this trick.

Final Words! This was the complete tutorial on how to increase twitter followers instantly. I hope you’ll like my trick. Please leave your valuable comments and give your feedback about this tutorial. Keep visiting this blog because I have lot of tips and tricks to share with you. Happy Blogging!

How to add Videos/Images in Blogger/Blogspot Comments

Many of you may have wondered if it is possible to add Youtube videos and images into Blogger comments. Well, after going through this tutorial, we'll be able to do this!

To get these cool features, we just need to add some scripts to our template and use the right tags for the images. For adding youtube videos, pasting their URLs will be enough.

How to add videos/images in Blogger comments

Step 1. Go to Dashboard > Template > Edit HTML

Step 2. Find (using CTRL + F) the following tag:

</body>

Step 3. Just above/before the </body> tag, paste this code:

<script src='http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='http://helplogger.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/youtubevideos.js'/>
<script src='http://helplogger.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pics-comments.js'/>

Step 4. Save the changes by clicking on the Save Template button.

Instructions

Now each time you want to post youtube videos, just paste their urls in the comment box.
For adding images, use the tags below before and after the address of your image:

[img]your-image-url[/img]

Note: replace your-image-url with the URL

Settings

If you want to let your visitors know how to post images in blogger comments, then go to Dashboard > Settings > Posts and Comments and look for the Comment Form Message section, there you need to click on "Add" link and add your text. For example:

Need to add an image? Use this code <b>[img]IMAGE-URL-HERE[/img]</b>

After you have added your text, click on the Save Settings button on the top right corner. And you're done!

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