The problem with headers is that your visitors see the same image no matter what page they are on. I’ve often wondered if there was a way to display different headers depending on what page a person was currently viewing?

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Today I woke up to news that a Sydney Montessori school had replaced Merry Christmas with Happy Holidays! Talk about political correctness gone wrong, especially when it involves kids. I’m amazed that they can’t see they just don’t have the right to ruin Christmas for these kids. It’s almost like your friend telling blurting out to your little ones that Santa doesn’t exist.

Some Christmas Goodies

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So the next thing to do was to use one of the online sites to see if they are still showing the PR of sites and to my surprise they were. This would suggest that perhaps Google had changed the api used on different plugins rendering them useless and one just has to wonder why they would do that. Could it possibly be that they’re deciding to do another PR update soon? That may well be the case as they did one roughly this time last year which I wrote about in my post Googles Latest PR Update In Time For Halloween!

Speaking of Halloween, what a perfect time for Google to come up with something scary for their next update. The only other perfect time would be April Fools Day. I wonder what devilish plan could they have up their sleeve? Perhaps they plan to do away with PR altogether, rendering plugins useless first and then doing away with it completely. Why do you ask? Who knows, perhaps that was the reason why they introduced the Google +1 button in the first place. They know that way too many people game their attempts to come up with an accurate and trustworthy way of ranking websites. So why not do away with it altogether?

Still, no-one really knows why Google does what it does, which is probably why there are so many books around about Google.

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These Amazon ads are possible because of the WP Zon Builder WordPress plugin.

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Many who fail to reach their dream of financial freedom continue the online life because they’ve come to love blogging. After all it has so much to offer, you get to express yourself, to share your knowledge with others and the interaction with your commentators is truly sublime. Unfortunately the rest will give up in disgust once they’ve come to realise it wasn’t as easy as they were made to believe.

Now, I’m not here to tell you that I have the secret because I haven’t and saying any different would make me as dishonest as all the rest. However, over the years I have discovered certain things that every blogger needs to know if they want to make their blog a success.

Traffic

This is the most important part of making money online and yet most of those people selling their ‘secret to success’ fail to mention it. All they tell you is get your niche online and the money will start to flow in. Start up another ten and you will increase your income tenfold. Unfortunately no traffic means no customers which means no money and ten times nothing is still nothing.

Getting traffic is possible though but it takes a lot of work and a fair bit of time to drive traffic to your site. What makes things worse is you don’t want just any traffic, you want targeted traffic. This means if you have a blog that is selling computers you don’t want people coming over who are looking to buy dog collars.

The way to get targeted traffic is all tied into the keywords you use in your domain name, your headings, blog titles and posts. Even that is not going to work unless the search engines think you have something of value, and the way to do that is by getting backlinks via blog commenting, forums, writing articles but most importantly by writing brilliant content so other will link to it. My post How I Am Marketing My Online Lottery Niche highlights some of the strategy I’m using to market my latest blog.

A Product To Sell

Most everyone will tell you to make money online you need something that you can sell, preferably your own. Unfortunately most of us don’t have that and so we do the best we can by placing Adsense ads on our sites or by promoting other peoples products as an affiliate. I’ve had a bit of success selling products like FlexSqueeze (a brilliant blog theme), Market Samurai, web hosts and a few others. The problem with those products is once you sell someone a product they’re no longer a potential customer, at least not for that product, which means you’re forever looking for new customers.

In my post The Secret To Online Success Is Passive Income I outlined a few methods I used that were making me money on a regular basis. I also spoke about my latest venture, one that I am confident will be my biggest earner because I am now selling a product that people buy on a regular basis, lottery tickets. I am now in the process of driving traffic to Buy Online Lottery Tickets with the knowledge that every time I gain a customer I will make money whenever they purchase a lottery ticket online. I’m also offering others the opportunity to become a MyLotto affiliate giving them the same opportunity to make money online, knowing that I also make a percentage of their sales.

Building Your Brand

At the beginning of the post I said the most important facet of making money online was driving targeted traffic to your blog, well that’s not quite true, there is something way more important. The most important part of your online businesses is YOU! You are the face of your business as everything you do online affects the way others perceive you. That being the case it doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to your blog because if your online profile is suspect you’re screwed.

By everything I’m including blog commenting as this is by far the most popular method used by bloggers to market their blog. I’ve known this from the beginning and I am constantly surprised by the amount of people who fail to use commenting to their advantage. This is probably because done properly it takes time and many prefer quantity over quality failing to see that a lot of poor comments only serves to hurt their brant. If you’re not sure what constitutes a good comment I suggest you read Teaching People The Proper Way To Comment as I used this post to grade people on the quality of their comment.

One thing to remember while online is that unlike the offline world you have time to think before responding to any negative comment, or feedback on one of your products, that you may receive. Never, ever, let anger cloud your replies because once you blow up online you reveal to everyone your loss of control and lack of professionalism. Two posts taking about this subject that you may find interesting ate Kristi’s 3 Questions To Ask About Offensive Content On Your Blog, although you can apply this to a lot more than just blogging.

Social Media

Social media is an important facet of your online business and one that I still have a long way to go as far as online promotions go. It’s also very important as far as branding goes and so you have to be very careful how you conduct yourself when using them. Something that many people fail to realise is that almost everything you do online is open to public scrutiny and that being the case acting in a manner that can be seen as untoward by others can cost you business. So be very careful what you say online or even what you link to. You may think that something you saw online was extremely funny and so you tweet the link to all your followers not thinking that many of them may find it very offensive.

When it comes to social media it’s my opinion that ChingYa would have to be the online social media guru, blog posts like her 7+ Major Tips In Enhancing Your Upgraded FaceBook Page just goes to show the wealth of her knowledge. You could do a lot worse than going over there and learning from what ChingYa has to say.

Phew, I don’t normally rave on like this but I reckon I just had a lot to say, and even so there is probably so much that I left out. This is where you guys come in by using the comment section. What are you doing to make your blog a success? What have I missed out and how can we help each other to attain our goals.

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The holiday is over now though, and while I may share some of my experiences, and the best of the hundreds of photos I took in future posts, I have other things that may take me away from my blogging duties.

Some of those duties involve catching up on stuff that have built up while I was gone but more has to do with things coming to a head in my business life over the coming weeks. So while I may still get a post out now and again and I will try my utmost to reply to comments left on this blog I’m afraid that until things settle down I’m not sure that I’ll be able to reciprocate those comments, as stipulated in this post.

That’s it for now, so just remember, while things may be a little quiet here for awhile, I’ll still be around to keep and eye on you guys.

Image via Wikipedia

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The best way to do this is to change your header image. This is easily done if you’re using FlexSqueeze as all you do is point to the directory with your header image file. It’s still pretty easy if your using a normal theme as long as you choose one that has an image in the header

The first thing you do is to find the name of the image being used. It may be header.jpg but it could be anything. Rename that to headerold.jpg so that you can keep it as a backup. Now all you need do is upload your new image that you’ve named the same as your old image and voila, you have a new header. It’s always a good idea to keep the same dimensions so that it doesn’t screw up the rest of your theme.

So where do you get a new header image? You could search the net looking for a free one or you could pay for one at a site such us Dreamstime, which also has free stock photos.

The problem with those options is that someone else may be using the same image and so once again your blog theme is not truly unique. The way to get a really unique banner is to make your own, and that isn’t as hard as it sounds as long as you have a digital camera. Most of the headers I use are from photos I’ve taken, including the one I am using now. You can see the original photo on my Photos2Blog blog.  I almost used this one as my header;

As you can see it was taken from the same photo, and I may even use it at a later date.

So, you see, it’s not all that hard to change your header, and it’s another of the many benefits from hosting your own blog, and if you ever decide to go that route I always recommend BlueHost because it’s the one I use.

That particular photo was take with my Panasonic Lumix.

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Anyway, all this damn heat is going to result in a short post, one whose only intention is to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I hope that next year will bring you some of the things you’ve been wishing for, let’s face it if we’re greedy we’ll probably end up with nothing.

Here’s to good health and a blogging good year.

Should I be lucky enough to attract some comments with post, don’t be surprised if I don’t reply to everyone individually.

I shouldn’t even be on right now and I reckon the wife would have a few words if she found out but I just had to pop in to wish everyone a fantastic Christmas, and I hope that everyone has a blogging good year.

Oh, it wouldn’t be the same if I din’t leave an ad in the post for someone to click on, and I know no-one will but that the heck.

The first thing I had to do was to find a suitable header. I finally decided to borrow one from another theme as I felt it set the right mood. Then I reduced the width of the blog so that it would display the Santa image that I chose for the background.

Adding An Image To Comment Box

I thought it would be pretty cool if I could jazz up the comment box a little by adding some snowflakes so I had a little look at the CSS file to see what I could do. For those of you who were wise enough to purchase the FlexSqueeze theme I thought you might like to know how I did it.

You will need to edit the ‘style.css’ file and I strongly urge you to make a backup before playing around with it.

First find the following lines;

#commentform input, #commentform textarea {
padding:5px;

Below that add the following;

background: url(images/bg-snowflakes5.gif);

Substitute ‘bg-snowflakes5.gif’ for whatever file you want to use as your background, remembering that the file has to be uploaded first in order for it to work. This is a cinch using the upload feature that comes with FlexSqueeze!  I suggest you use a very light colored file otherwise people will not be able to see what they are typing.

Adding An Image To Your Post Background

To add to the Christmas look of the blog I decided to change the background of the post area, and for this I chose a lovely snow scene. If you would like to do something similar to your blog then once again you will need to add a little bit of code to your ‘style.css’ file.

Find the following lines;

#content {
width:935px;
position:relative;
float:left;

Just below that enter the following line.

background: url(images/bg-snow-scene.jpg);

Once again substitute ‘bg-snow-scene.jpg’ by the image you’ve selected.

It is important to remember that these modifications to the ‘style.css’ file of this  theme will most likely not work on your theme. These modifications can still be done on most themes but you will have to find the right areas that need to be changed.

Apart from these style.css changes all other changes were done via FlexSqueeze‘s option page.  The images were all obtained from Free Web Images And Clipart , except for the header which I got from leadcamp.com.

Oh, one last thing. In case you are wondering how I got it to snow, it was by using the Let It Snow plugin.

EDIT: I’ve deactivated the plugin as I noticed it caused a bit of drain on the CPU, and possible made the blog somewhat slower. Even so, I reckon the blog may still remind people of Christmas.