A blog focused on helping bloggers and online retailers make more money online.

For our third installment in our series on the Top 10 Ways To Monetize Your Blog, we’re talking about tools and techniques to build a more interesting blog.

Add a splash of movement. Use video posts, flash animation, or even images to make your content as engaging as possible. Your readers enjoy visual stimulation; it makes the experience on your blog memorable and gives you more options to keep your content fresh.

Although the jury is still out on what the first thing someone notices when arriving on a new blog, there is still no doubt that the blog’s appearance (as opposed to solely content) is one of the main sticky points in helping that new visitor or even a legacy reader to return to your blog. With the vast number of easy and free methods that bloggers can use to build a stunning blog, your blog should, by default, be polished with a bold and beautiful header that tells the reader exactly what he’s reading about, with a mix of crisp and clean navigation, text, graphics and if you so choose, advertisements to draw the reader in. (However, if you feel like you haven’t gotten to this point yet, I suggest checking out our last post on Blog Harmony, or check out Mashable’s blog post on HOW TO: Build a More Beautiful Blog. If so, continue on!)

The one thing to keep in mind with all of these suggestions is that this is where a lot of the fun in blogging lives! Of course your goal is to garnish interest through your amazing content and engaging elements, but a lot of these tools to help enhance the polish and interest of your blog are a lot of fun to use. Step out of your comfort zone a bit with these tools, and rely on your audience to give you feedback on how your enhancements are making them feel and think. Don’t forget, if you fall in love with any of these tools suggested here or through the links to other blogs, there’s a great opportunity to blog about them yourself!

So, what’s the next step? Integrating points of interest, that’s what!

What are some of the most engaging elements of a blog? Off the top of my head that would be a gorgeous logo, bright images, interesting videos, clean screen shots, even animation if you choose. Here are some suggestions for using these tools to keep your blog interesting.

Get a logo.
One of the first things you should consider is getting a logo for your blog. You don’t need to have the catchiest of blog names to incorporate a logo, it could even be your personal name or the design of an acronym, but if it makes sense then I suggest looking into either creating your own or hiring a designer to give you some creative ideas.

If you are looking for inspiration, check this blog post out:
8 Logo Design Ideas – Lightening Up Your Creative Minds.

Use Images.
It’s so important to add images to your blog post. It’s funny, but this is something that beginner bloggers tend to forget about (add myself to this list!). You can upload a personal picture from your camera or your cell phone, or you can find many great images scattered all over the internet. Sometimes bloggers find it difficult to find places to access free stock images, I know I had this problem in the beginning. There are plenty of paid stock image sites like iStockPhoto.com, Dreamstime.com, Veer.com, however there are many image repositories giving you legal access to excellent quality free images.

Check out this blog post to find a whole list of them!
40 Sources to Download High Quality Free Stock Images.

Don’t forget, just because you have uploaded an image doesn’t mean it needs to stay exactly as it is! There are so many ways you can manipulate, edit and enhance an image to fit with your style and match your blog’s theme. Check out this blog post on 60 useful Photoshot actions to enhance your photos for free! You will need to have Adobe Photoshop installed on your system to give these tips a try. You can access free trial of Adobe Photoshop through their website found here.

Take Screenshots.
Another way to make your posts interesting and engaging is through screen shots. This is especially useful if you are blogging for product recommendation purposes as you can give your readers a walk through of any online tools you’re taking a look at. For screen grabbing software, I’d suggest you try Skitch. It’s by far the best screen grabbing tool I’ve used giving you the ability to overlay text, shapes and so on right on top of your screen shot. Plus, it’s got a drag and drop feature that allows you to take the image from the editor and drag it onto your desktop for easy saving!

Create Your Own Video Tutorials.
Let’s take our last suggestion of screen shots a step further. If you want to create screen recordings to navigate your readers through a fun little desktop journey, I’ve used Camtasia software: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp and it’s very easy to navigate through, claiming that it “…makes you look like a pro.” You can also take the files you create and upload them to YouTube for virality purposes. For more of the same, you can try Jing as well. Jing boasts sharing your videos (and screenshots) instantly over the web, IM, and email.

Upload Viral Videos.
And of course, if you’re blogging about a particular topic and are looking for related video footage to share, you can use YouTube.com or search through the list of any number of YouTube’s competitors.

Here’s a while list of YouTube competitors!

Talk to a designer.
If you have exhausted all of these techniques and the endless list of tools you can use, then talk to a creative team or designer about suggestions to incorporate more points of interest. There’s always the use of a Flash piece to draw visitors in. If you have a bit of know-how, here’s a list of tutorials on creating Flash animations. This, however, would be over my head and I think I’d talk to a professional before spending hours trying to learn a new skill I may only use a handful of times. Keep in mind, this is all about maximizing your ROI.

The great thing about all these types of content is that they can supplement your blog when you find yourself unable to type out a post or have simply run out of engaging ideas (which shouldn’t really be an excuse given the reason’s cited in our last blog post!). There is always something to talk about and share to keep the content fresh and flowing.

We all know it takes time to create quality blog posts, however if you spend your time using great tools of engagement that will enhance the polish of your blog, that coupled with techniques to expand your audience, you’ll soon see your readership and community growing while experiencing a higher ROI.

Happy Blogging! And by all means, share with us what you’ve done to improve your blog or suggestions on any other tools to use! We’d love to see it all.

Social Network Time-Savers Can Help You Keep Up.

Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc…all these social media platforms contain excellent ways for you, your friends and followers to disseminate your content, bring readers back to your blog and build you up as a credible source.

In our second installment of the follow-up series to Top 10 Ways to Monetize your Blog for 2010, we’re talking about “Keeping up with the Jones’” with regards to participation in various social networks. In our last post, we discussed ways you can help monetize your blog by expanding your blog readership. But we know that every day more people are joining that latest and greatest social media craze. Be it Google Buzz or FourSquare, these new tools of engagement are popping up everywhere and with all the buzz and distraction, it’s very easy for you to get lost in the shuffle and your blog’s readership and community attention diverted this way or that. So the question is, how do you keep up?

If you are looking to keep your audience as engaged and plugged-in to your content as possible it is absolutely necessary to be seen frequently where the eyes are focusing. This all ties in to the notion of as your audience grows, so to does your opportunity for increased revenue. But the game is trying to be seen in as many valuable places as possible while still trying to manage your time in engaging relationships and conversations as efficiently as possible. You only have so many hours in the day! And if you’re trying to make money blogging as a part time gig, then it’s even more important to get heard and be seen in the least amount of time possible while still maintaining quality of engagement and discussion. So here are two problems bloggers and publishers face when trying to remain connected with their communities, and some great tools that can help to alleviate the extra effort!

Problem: You want to say something short and sweet, but just don’t want to log in to 80 different social networks to get your thoughts heard.
Solution: Update your status to multiple social networks from one console.

HelloTXT.com

This is a very friendly tool that syncs your status updates with a whole handful of social networks via the web, SMS, email, and a number of applications including iPhone. You can add images, video, music, and schedule your updates as well. HelloTXT also has a “Recent Friend Activity” feed which shows the status updates of your community as it happens. This is a true status update aggregator worth taking a look at if. I’m impressed with the number of social networks HelloTXT can sync with.

Ping.fm

This is probably the most recognizable social network status communicator that’s available. Also with a healthy list of social networks it’s enabled to post to, Ping.fm lets you do much the same as HelloTXT.com by updating your social network status via the web, mobile phone, SMS, MMS, instant message, and a number of 3rd party applications. I do know a ton of people who use this tool for mass updating, and have great things to say about it. The one thing I did notice is that Ping.fm has a very lively and active community at GetSatisfaction.com/pingfm as well as their help and information wiki – plenty of helpful information for the first-time user.

HootSuite.com

A self-proclaimed “Professional Twitter Client”, which is slightly confusing to me as it does aggregate status updates across many of the more recognizable social networks, and seemingly well! I am very impressed with this tool and would describe it as a similar to TweetDeck, but with major perks – you have monitoring dashboards for LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and Ping.fm. This is slightly different than Ping.fm or HelloTXT.com as it becomes a two-way communication tool of sorts. Not only can you monitor feeds from these spaces but you can mass update to all these social networks with the option of drafting and scheduling posts. I really like the look of this tool, it’s fun and friendly and generally easy to maneuver.

Problem: Not enough time to blog, period.
Solution: If you find that you just can’t seem to get seated in front of your laptop for the amount of time needed to produce a meaty blog post, yet you know that what you need to say is going to be longer than 140 characters, why not try mini blogging!

Tumblr.com

Tumblr is a great tool for speedy posting to a mini blog via SMS or Email. They offer an iPhone application, a dashboard widget and even audio posting! So it makes posting a status update, photo, or mini blog post from your desktop or mobile phone easy and fun! They do have a Twitter integration where Tumblr updates your twitter status, but it’s strength lies in quick, slick looking web updates providing a great way to ensure that even if you are away from your desk you can still make sure you engage your audience and keep your updates flowing. And from the horse’s mouth, here are 24 reasons why you’ll love Tumblr.

Posterous.com

With Posterous, you have virtually no excuse for not blogging. Because if you have email, you can blog. But Posterous isn’t just small-time blog posts, it can do so much more. If you sync up your various social networks with Posterous, you can auto post to them at once via only a simple email! This includes updating your blog with not only your original content, but images, music and files as well! Not to mention it does intelligent things with Twitter posts, it will post your status update up to 130 characters and past that will append a shortened URL that redirects to a slick looking webpage to showcase your post in whole. You can learn all about some of the powerful things it can do here. But in my opinion, the coolest part of this tool is that you don’t need to create an account to get started. You can post your first blog simply by emailing post@posterous.com!

There are so many amazing angles to both of these mini blogging tools, but there is an absolutely great comparative review by Mashable on the two found here. Definitely worth the read!

My point in providing you with a quick glimpse of these tools is that no matter where you are, if you’ve got a phone or an internet connection you can stay up-to-date and keep your community engaged. Not to mention, there are real ways to consolidate your efforts and keep you sane! But I guess the last thing I want to say about all of these tools is that they’re all FREE! So if you are truly looking to make money blogging, it costs you nothing to try these amazing and powerful tools out – but could save you valuable time…and we all know the old saying. Time is money.

Happy posting!

Stay tuned for our next installment in our series profiling the Top 10 Ways to Monetize your Blog for 2010, we’ll talk about tips and tricks to adding interest to your blog with splashes of movement!