How to Make Tasty Mustard-Shallot Vinaigrette

How to Make Tasty Mustard-Shallot Vinaigrette

INGREDIENTS

• 1 shallot, minced
• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 2 heaping teaspoons Dijon mustard
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
• 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil, more to taste

PREPARATION

1. In a container with a tight lid, preferably a glass jar, combine shallot, vinegar and mustard. Close tightly and shake well to mix. Add salt and pepper, and shake again.
2. Add olive oil 1/3 cup at a time, shaking very well after each addition, until smooth and emulsified (you may want to wrap a kitchen towel around the container, just in case). Taste and add more olive oil, 1/4 cup at a time, if dressing is too tart.
3. Use immediately or refrigerate up to 3 weeks. The chilled olive oil will form a lump, so remove from refrigerator 30 minutes before using to allow it to liquefy. Shake well before serving to re-emulsify.

Read more

How to Make Money Blogging for Beginners

How to Make Money Blogging for Beginners

1. Google Adsense

Google Adsense might be the fastest and easiest way for a beginner to start earning so-called passive income with a blog.

As the name implies, Adsense is a contextual advertising network that places partner (business) ads on your website. It’s easy to set up – a quick copy and paste of some Adsense code and you’re good to go!

Don’t worry that your blog niche won’t be able to draw quality ads to your site. Google Adsense is one of the biggest networks on the Web, so you should get a healthy enough list of clickable sites to attract your readership.

Just make sure your content is of the highest quality!

Though Adsense is a popular option, I think that affiliate information marketing is also an excellent way to make virtually passive income online.

2. Amazon Associates

Amazon Associates is the long established in-house affiliate program run by Seattle-based Amazon.com – the biggest online retailer in the world today. It offers bloggers the chance to earn commissions (up to 8.5%) by advertising Amazon products on your website – provided visitors click-through from your blog to Amazon.com and make a purchase.

The one caveat about Associates is that it probably suits bloggers who write about merchandising, retail products and shopping a fair bit. Logically, it will help your performance if visitors arrive at your website already predisposed to buying.

The program works by getting Amazon links, banners, or widgets (e.g. slideshows, ‘My Favorites’, ‘Wish List Widget’) onto your pages.

Another way to make money with Amazon is by publishing digital books on Amazon Kindle.

3. Create E-books and Information Products

Regular blogging is the ideal training ground for creating e-books, still one of the most popular forms of information products being sold by online entrepreneurs today.

Consider your blogs as “free” information that you offer to readers to demonstrate your expertise. With time, they become your fans and are ready for more in-depth material. This is your opportunity to make money – by presenting your e-books for sale alongside your free blog.

Just make sure that the e-book builds on your blog output – don’t simply rehash what they have already seen! After all, these people are now paying customers and will get upset with old information. Later on as you become more established and your archived material becomes more extensive, poll your readers to see what topics they’d be interested in learning more about and potentially what topics of e-books they’d be interested in purchasing.

Notice that I avoided putting a specific dollar figure on the amount you can make from blogging. It will come down to your work ethic, your skills as a writer, your ability to generate targeted traffic, and plain old good luck. It’s a bit like baseball: everyone played it as a kid, only a small fraction make it to college ball, an even smaller number become professional, but only the cream of the crop make it to the majors.

You have to decide where in the blogging “big leagues” you want to end up.

The reality is that as more and more people from all over the world come online, the harder it will become to get attention and generate income. That's why it's so important to focus on building your email list, so you can follow up with your visitors, build a relationship and increase sales.

That being said, there are countless success stories out there, and the formula for success is surprisingly simple. It’s just up to you to get it done!

Read more

How to Submit Your Site to Search Engines

How to Submit Your Site to Search Engines

We highly recommend manually submitting your website pages to the search engines. That said, the search engines give no guarantee of ranking your page because you have manually submitted it.  It is a tool that we use to let the search engines know that we have new information to share.

We suggest manual submission of your site's pages to Google, Yahoo! and Bing because they have made it apparent that it is what they prefer. The search engines have implemented manual submission as a best practice to protect themselves from extreme levels of spam.

It is important to submit your site's pages to all of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing) because even though the other engines have less traffic than Google, they still have millions of users. When you submit a URL or domain name to the search engines, it could take anywhere from two to four weeks to get indexed. Sometimes your page will not get indexed after you submit it, if that occurs, wait four weeks and then resubmit the page again.

If you are unhappy with your web page's ranking results, take a look at what your competition is doing.  Make sure you are following the basic rules of search engine optimization.  Make changes to the page and resubmit it to the search engines. You can submit your pages a maximum of two times per month until you are listed in the major search engines' results.

Submit Site to Google

Google's URL submit is very quick and easy. Just go to Google's web page for URL submitting, type in your URL, type in the message that ensures Google you are an individual not a software robot and click "add URL."

You can also submit your site map to Google via their Webmaster Tools.

Submit Site to Yahoo!

Since 2010, Yahoo search has been powered by Microsoft's Bing search engine. When you submit your site to Bing you will also show up in Yahoo's search results. See below on how to submit your site to Bing.  Yahoo! had a paid submission process in the past, although Yahoo! Directory is no longer available.

Submit Site to Bing

Bing allows you to submit your URL, just like Google.  You will first need to have a Bing login, then go to Bing's Webmaster Tools page. Once logged in simply type in the URL of your homepage and press "submit". You will also want to have the URL for the .xml version of your sitemap readily available, as it will ask for this in the first step of submitting your domain. After submitting you will have to verify ownership of the domain. This can be a little tricky if you are not savvy with HTML, as you will need to add a small snippet of code to the header of your site in order to pass this verification process. Once verified, you are finished!

Submit Site to Ask

Ask no longer allows you to submit your sitemap. This was a feature they disabled, and now solely crawl sites.

At Smart Solutions, we add all of our clients' sitemaps to the auto-discovery directive, robots.txt.  This ensures that all of the search engines automatically know about your sitemap.  It does not hurt to manually submit your sitemaps, for the search engines that allow it.

Read more

How to Customize a Google Blogger Template

How to Customize a Google Blogger Template

• Go to your Blogger Dashboard and launch the Template Designer by clicking the Design link. Then click the Template Designer tab. The Template Designer has five sections, and the first one that appears here is the Templates section.
• Choose a base theme to modify by scrolling through the thumbnails and clicking a thumbnail to preview the theme. Scroll through the existing template designs and click various thumbnails to preview the theme on your blog on the bottom half of the screen. There are more selections here than when you first set up your blog. Each template layout also has alternative color palettes. When you’ve chosen a template to use, click it and move on to the next step.
• Click the Background tab, and then click the arrow next to the thumbnail of the existing background image. The Select Background Image window appears.
• Click a tab along the left side of the Select Background Image window to choose a different image theme, and select the image you want. Click Done when you’re satisfied.
• Click the Adjust Widths tab and use the sliders to change the Entire Blog and Right Sidebar widths. For best browser compatibility, keep the width of your Entire Blog at or under 930 pixels. If you want to add advertising to your sidebar, you will want to make sure that the Right Sidebar is at least 300 pixels wide.
• Click the Layout tab and select your blog layout. Blogger has several pre-determined layouts that you can choose from. These will adjust how many sidebars you have, where your sidebars will appear, and how many sections you want in your blog footer.
• Click the Apply to Blog button at the top right. Your changes are now live on your blog.

Read more

How to Install a Google Blogger Template

How to Install a Google Blogger Template

Here’s how to install a Blogger template you’ve downloaded from another site:

1. Log in to Blogger, and on your Blogger Dashboard, click the Design link.
2. Click the Edit HTML tab.
3. Click the Download Full Template link and save it to your computer.
   Make a note of the file name and where you saved it in case you need it later!
4. Unzip the template file you downloaded from another site.
5. Back on the Edit HTML page, click the Choose File button.
6. Navigate to where you saved the unzipped files on your computer, and double-click the one that ends in .xml.
7. Click the Upload button.

If you already have some existing widgets on your Blogger blog, you may get a warning message asking whether you want to keep them or delete them. If you want to preserve the work you’ve done before, click the Keep Widgets button. If you don’t need them anymore, click the Delete Widgets button.

When the upload is complete, you get a message at the top of the page that says Your Changes Have Been Saved.

  8.  Click the View Blog button to ensure that your blog looks the way you want it to          look.

You may have to remove or move some page elements in order to get the template to display properly.

Read more