Submit Blog to Blog Directories - Traffic Exchange

How do you attract more readers and visitors to your Blog? To make your Blog more visible, the solution lies in submitting your Blog URL or RSS Feed to as many good Blog directories as possible. There are hundreds of websites touting themselves as blog search engines, blog directory hosts, feed aggregators, and traffic exchanges. A couple of the website creators are out to make a quick buck, selling their sites and member database on eBay the moment they attract sufficient traffic.

Over the past few weeks, I have submitted this Blog and RSS feed to many of these Blog directories for free. The first submissions were of course to Google and Yahoo; if you have not submitted your Blog URL to them, you may read the earlier articles on submitting sitemap to Google and submitting sitemap to Yahoo. At the same time, submit the Blogger Sitemap to MSN and Ask.com too.


Although my blog is only about 2 months' old at the time of this writing, if I were to enter my blog title “candymoney” into Google search, I am able to see it appearing at the top of the search results. Many of the other results are those of the blog directories in which this blog was listed. Listing in directories therefore helps in promoting your blog.

Before you proceed to submit your site to these directories, my personal advice is that you create a free web-based email account solely for this purpose. Should the directory hosts decide to sell their sites and database in future, your present email account would not be compromised. This is also to prevent flooding of your personal email with updates sent to you by the many directory administrators.

The aim of this article is to relate to you my experience in those free blog directories that I have tried submitting to. While I appreciate comments on these, please refrain from posting suggestions of new blog directory sites. A number of them may be fly-by-nights and I will not recommend them unless I have personally used them. Others may have specific requirements such as blogs having to be older than 6 months, or blogs covering specific news contents.

Different directories have different forms to fill when submitting your blog. Their instructions are usually easy to follow. However, you may want to note the following:-

1. Some directories require you to register before adding your Blog. While most of them allow you to submit more than one Blog, some may require you to use a different login name for each Blog. What I did in these situations was to create different login names but using the same email address.

2. If you are asked for the RSS Feed or your Feed URL, check that under your Settings -> Site Feed, the “Allow Blog Feed” shows either “Full” or “Short.” Do not choose “None.” Your Feed URL is yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default or yourblogURL/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss where yourblogURL is the URL of your Blog beginning with http:// Do not type in “www” for Blogger blogs. For example, our Atom Feed URL is http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default You can test it by typing your feed address into a web browser and view. If you have an external Feed address like a Feedburner Feed address, you may submit that too. I shall go into the details of Feed and Feed directories in a separate article.

3. Where you are to create a picture, banner, or link button to represent your blog, you can use Google's Picasa or any image editing software to create a new picture, or resize a current one to the required dimensions. Normally, you are required to upload it onto a free image host or server and provide the URL of your banner or picture. You can read about using free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We also have a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and enables hotlinking to the uploaded files.

4. The “Reciprocal Link URL” is the main page where you will be putting a link to their blog directory. More likely than not, this will be the URL of your Blog.

5. The “meta keywords” or “tags” are keywords that represent your blog's content. Similarly “meta description” is a short few sentences describing your blog. Basically, “meta” tags provide information about your Blog for search engines to identify and match.

As the directory list is long, the article will be split into several parts, and updated as and when I try out the sites. Some sites track the number of the visitors to your blog. You may see voting gateways, which basically give visitors a chance to vote for your blog if they wish to. If they do not want to vote, there is always an option for them to enter the site without voting. Have a look at the directory sites and submit your blog to those you like.

Traffic Exchange Sites

A number of traffic exchange sites have blog directories which can include links to your blog.

Blog Directories

Technorati

They supposedly track 75.2 million blogs. Quite naturally, you would want your blog to be one of them. Register with them and submit your blog. Follow their instructions to claim your blog. They will provide you with statistics like the number of blogs that link to you. You can also invite other members to favorite your blog.

Wikablog

If you are familiar with Wikipedia, this is the equivalent for blogs. It faces the same problems as Wikipedia i.e., while it is easy to list your blog, it is equally easy for others to edit your listing. Nevertheless, for a new blogger, this is one of the fastest way to have your blog appear in a directory. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Fuel My Blog

This is an interesting directory. Unlike the usual text-based blog directories, this site goes by images that you create to represent your blog. When your visitors click a link on your site that says Fuel My Blog!, your image will move up the ranks and appear on the front page, making it more visible to directory viewers.

Blogtoplist


A blog directory listing that is sorted by the number of unique visitors to your blog. Your visitors can also cast a Vote to increase your ranking. The scores are reset every week to allow new bloggers like us a chance to be placed among the top.



Topblogsites

Here, you are ranked by unique hits based on the Votes you receive from your visitors. Many of the comments posted on the directory site are spam comments, and if you can disable comments, you might want to do that. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Mybloggingarea

Another directory that ranks you based on the Votes and the number of unique visitors to your site.

Topblogarea


A blog directory that tracks unique visitors. Unlike the earlier ones, visitors do not vote at this directory.

Blogflare

This is a simple, nice blog directory that tracks your unique visitors and pageviews. [Update: This site has been down for quite a while and link is therefore removed.]

Topblogging




Here, you are ranked based on unique visitors. Although there is a count for votes in, somehow the code provided by them did not track this vote count.

Blogroll


I joined this directory only about a week ago. A simple directory that monitors the Votes and unique hits.

Worldtopblogs

Ranking is by the Votes cast by the visitors to your blog.

Topbloglists

There is a voting gateway for your visitors but ranking is based on unique pageviews.

This article continues at Submit Blog to Blog Directories (II).

For more visibility, you may want to submit your Blog to Feed Directories and ping your Blog every time your contents are updated. Also, submit your Blog to the various Search Engines for maximum exposure.

While you are looking at blog directories, you may also want to consider earning money while you are surfing the net. AGLOCO seems to have a nice scheme for you which you may want to take a look. You may also want to consider having AuctionAds to display an eBay auction widget which is compatible with AdSense and other ad systems. No harm trying it since it might give you an extra income.

Author comments - Different Styles

Bloggers generally welcome constructive comments and feedback on their posts. Among the ways to encourage comments are to remove the “nofollow” tag and to add a Recent Comments widget into the template. Comments highlight issues that readers might have faced, and the author's reply to these comments may be useful to other readers as well. If you have many comments posted in your blog, it would be nice to add different styles to the author's comments to make them stand out from the rest. Readers with questions on commonly asked issues may easily find their answers in previous posted comments. This tutorial shall explain how the author comment styles can be added to the template.

After 7 months of blogging, we have today hit the 300,000 visitors mark. It is not a big deal to many bloggers but it means a lot to us, knowing that whatever leisure time we had given up to write these articles was worth the while. Thanks to all! While we were reviewing our articles earlier, we realized that there were so many comments in several of them that we had a hard time finding our own comments. We have therefore decided to highlight our comments to make it easy for our readers to sieve through and check if their issues have been addressed. An important point to note is that some of the answers we posted may have been superseded by events and you are still free to post the questions again.

Modify Template

Since this article is about setting a style for the comments that appear after a post, we assume that you have configured your Blog to display the comments. Check Settings -> Comments and select “Show” Comments.

Before you begin to do anything, remember to backup your template. Go to Template -> Edit HTML. Click the “Download Full Template” link to save a copy of your template.



Click the check-box next to “Expand Widget Templates”.

Press Ctrl+F and search for the word “comments-block”. You should come to these lines. Insert the code (shown in red):-

<br /><dl id='comments-block'> <br /><b:loop values='data:post.comments' var='comment'> <br /><dt class='comment-author' expr:id='"comment-" + data:comment.id'> <br /><a expr:name='"comment-" + data:comment.id'/> <br /><b:if cond='data:comment.authorUrl'> <br /><a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl' rel='nofollow'><data:comment.author/></a> <br /><b:else/> <br /><data:comment.author/> <br /></b:if> <br /><data:commentPostedByMsg/> <br /></dt> <br /> <br /><b:if cond='data:comment.author == data:post.author'> <br /><dd class='blog-author-comment'> <br /><p><data:comment.body/></p> <br /></dd> <br /><b:else/> <br /> <br /><dd class='comment-body'> <br /><b:if cond='data:comment.isDeleted'> <br /><span class='deleted-comment'><data:comment.body/></span> <br /><b:else/> <br /><p><data:comment.body/></p> <br /></b:if> <br /></dd> <br /> <br /></b:if> <br /> <br /><dd class='comment-footer'> <br /><span class='comment-timestamp'> <br /><a expr:href='"#comment-" + data:comment.id' title='comment permalink'> <br /><data:comment.timestamp/> <br /></a> <br /><b:include data='comment' name='commentDeleteIcon'/> <br /></span> <br /></dd> <br /></b:loop> <br /></dl> <br />



Comment Styles

After you have inserted the above code, scroll upwards in the template and Ctrl+F to search for the word “comment-body”. In the Minima template, you should have this code:-

<br />#comments-block .comment-body { <br />margin:.25em 0 0; <br />} <br />#comments-block .comment-body p { <br />margin:0 0 .75em; <br />} <br />


According to our Poll, the second most commonly used template is the Rounders template. In Rounders, this is what you will find:-

<br />.comment-body { <br />margin:0 0 1.25em; <br />padding:0 0 0 20px; <br />} <br />.comment-body p { <br />margin:0 0 .5em; <br />} <br />


In other templates, you should see “comment-body” classes similar to the above. This is the current style for the display of all comments after the posts. To have a different comment style for the author, copy what you have in your template, paste and rename the class. For example, in the Minima template, we shall add the code (shown in red):-

<br />#comments-block .comment-body { <br />margin:.25em 0 0; <br />} <br />#comments-block .comment-body p { <br />margin:0 0 .75em; <br />} <br />.blog-author-comment { <br />margin:.25em 0 0; <br />} <br />.blog-author-comment p { <br />margin:0 0 .75em; <br />padding:5px 10px; <br />border:1px dotted #254117; <br />background:#C3FDB8; <br />} <br />


You can name the new class anything you want by changing the “.blog-author-comment” to something else. (Don't omit the full-stop in front.) Just remember to rename that bit of code discussed in our earlier section. In our example, we have used the same margin settings but added a padding (space around the text) of 5px at the top and bottom, and 10px on the left and right. We introduced a thin border surrounding the text and added a background color. For more color codes you can refer to our Color Code Chart. The author's comments block will look like this:-



If you are using the Rounders template, follow the same steps as above, copy the “comment-body” styles and add the new classes. For example, the code can look like this:-

<br />.comment-body { <br />margin:0 0 1.25em; <br />padding:0 0 0 20px; <br />} <br />.comment-body p { <br />margin:0 0 .5em; <br />} <br />.blog-author-comment { <br />margin:0 0 1.25em; <br />padding:0 0 0 20px; <br />} <br />.blog-author-comment p { <br />margin:0 0 .5em; <br />padding:0 0 0 20px; <br />color:#F6358A; <br />font-style: italic; <br />} <br />


Did you notice that we have not changed the margins and padding? The author's comments will be different though as there is now a text color and the font-style is in italics. This is what you will see:-



If you are using other templates, do the same by copying the current “comment-body” styles and inserting the new classes and new styles. Experiment with the different style options and colors. If you need more ideas, you can refer to the list of properties in our article Links - Hover and Rollover Effects.

You can even insert a background image to the author's comments and change the font to a larger font or a different font typeface. The code will look like this:-
<br />.blog-author-comment p { <br />margin:0 0 .75em; <br />padding:5px 10px; <br />font-size:120% <br />font-family:courier; <br />background: url("URL OF IMAGE"); <br />} <br />

Alert Message and Dialog Box

You can display an alert message box to give a special announcement, provide information, or warn the readers before they view the full contents of your site. The pop up box will contain your message and have an “OK” button for viewers to proceed, or a prompt or cancel button to redirect readers to another site. We can further customize our Blog by asking for the reader's name and inserting this input automatically into a welcome message. This tutorial will show you how the JavaScript for these alert and dialog boxes can be inserted into your Blog.

Do note that because JavaScript programs run the moment the page is loaded, many users may, for security measures, set their browsers to disable JavaScripts. Also, too many of these scripts may make your page slow to load. Insert this only if you think it appropriate or useful. Since these are system dialog windows, they may look different in different browsers and operating systems.

Alert Box with OK button

You can have a serious message for sites with adult contents:-



Or a light-hearted humorous message just for the fun of it:-



To create an alert message box, login to your account, go to Template -> Page Elements -> Add a Page Element in your left sidebar or post body area, and select HTML/JavaScript. Paste the code shown below:-






Substitute the words in red with the message that you want to have displayed when users view your Blog. The words in green are the alternative text which will be displayed if the users have turned off their JavaScript functions.

Alert Box with Confirmation button

Although free speech is the order for the day, as authors of Blogs, we should be sensitive to the ethics and morality concerns of the people all over the world. If the Blog contains contents that are explicit or unsuitable for a select group of people, give the readers a choice not to proceed to read your Blog. The JavaScript for this alert box shows two buttons – “OK” and “Cancel” – which the readers can select. If their option is to “Cancel”, they will be redirected to a safe site. For this example, we have used Google's site as the safe landing page.



To insert the alert dialog box, login to your account, go to Template -> Page Elements -> Add a Page Element in your left sidebar or post body area, and select HTML/JavaScript. Paste the code shown below:-





Your message appears in the red portion. Enter your Blog URL in the blue colored part of the code. This is where your visitors will go to if they click “OK”. In the orange part, enter the URL of the place to redirect your visitors to should they click “Cancel”.

Alert Box with Prompt field

Another type of dialog box prompts the user to enter some information. For instance, the prompt box can ask the reader for his name and use that to customize the web page. Be reminded that many browsers are configured to disable scripts that ask for information. Have fun customizing your Blog but don't make this a key aspect of the contents. For example, if you have a story that keeps mentioning the name of the reader, the parts where the name should be will appear “null”.

In Template -> Page Elements -> Add a Page Element we add a HTML/JavaScript and paste the following code:-





The question can be changed. The user will be prompted to enter something in the dialog box. He can of course leave it blank and press “OK” or click “Cancel”.



Below this JavaScript, in your main body, add another HTML/JavaScript page element. This time, you can type in this:-

Welcome back ! Feel free to look around. If you like what you read, mention us in your post or link to this site. Hope to see you again



This is what will appear in your Blog, based on the input that the reader keys in.



Change the wordings to suit you and wherever you want the reader's name mentioned, add the script (shown in red). Try to phrase the wordings such that if the user enters nothing and clicks “OK”, the blank space is not obvious. A prompt dialog box like this adds a personal touch to your Blog.