Online blog tips

Saturday, 21 January 2012

50-cool-themes-for-tumblr-blog-beautiful-themes

Posted By Unknown 05:58 0 blog design, blogger tips and trick, css tricks, html tricks, tumblr

Free Themes

Tumblr has always stood out to me as one of the only blogging platforms around with truly stunning free themes. If you’re a designer, the first time you see Tumblr will likely be the last time you look at Blogger!

The collection below is a good representation of the different types of theme design you’ll find across the Tumblr library. I tried to find each little niche and pick out the best looking theme within. However, a few of the themes below are completely out on their own and definitely aren’t weighed down by pre-established norms.

Ava-May

A nice wide content area with a subtle texture background. I really like the layered header, it’s simple but quite attractive.

Grotesk

This one is super classy. There’s lots of contrast to draw the eye in and the generous use of whitespace works well with the condensed uppercase typography. If you’re looking for a clean and minimal yet masculine theme, look no further.

Mellow Yellow

Just like Grotesk, Mellow Yellow uses a condensed uppercase font, but that’s where the similarities end. Here the background is bold and bright with some random scattered dots and each post contains a bold corner treatment.

The Eames

I really liked the typography on this theme. The font is old style with large serifs and lots of contrast between the thicks and thins. It makes for some really attractive headlines.

Floaty

Floaty has a really nice color scheme and layout with lots of nice subtle touches. The background is the element that steals the show though, a large abstract watercolor that almost feels like the reflection of a cloudy sky.

Black Diamonds

Black diamonds is another theme that just feels classy. Most of the page is fairly average but the dark header is a really nice touch.

Inkhorn

Inkhorn definitely has an old school printed feel and contains an efficient two column layout while still keeping the overall content width fairly narrow. One nice touch is the “back to top” button that sits near the bottom and stays with you as you scroll.

Pink Touch 2

Pink Touch 2 has really a really stellar mic of color and texture. The background texture is subtle but adds a lot to the overall design, as do the little 3D banners that wraparound each post.

Revista

Sometimes it’s great to break the mold of linear thinking and a grid of content is one of the most logical and organized ways to do that. This is one of the better free grid templates out there so be sure to check it out!

Glacial simplicity

The design of this one is very similar to Pink Touch above: the slightly textured background and pointy patterned header. However, while Pink Touch is definitely a feminine theme, this brings the same ideas with a more masculine gray-driven color scheme.

Sarah’s Theme

The stripes on this one are admittedly a bit on the busy side, but they do make for an attractive page that really stands out as unique in this list. I also really like the frame treatment on the images.

Diaphanous Theme v1.4

This theme combines lots of transparency effects with stone textured background. The effect is a light, airy feel perfect for the casual blogger.

(More) Important Things

Many of the free themes with a wooden background can be quite hideous, this is one of the better attempts. The large patches of blue really stand out against the wood and help both the aesthetics and the readability.

Last Stand of Stupidity

Here’s another grid-based theme but this time the layout is much more organic due to the variable height of each block of content. The content blocks have rounded corners and the page is topped off with a unique header design.

Boston Polaroid

The header and typography on this theme are super simple but also quite stunning. The biggest thing going for this theme is the increased page width, which makes for huge photos. If you’re a photographer, you’ll definitely want to check out this theme.

Callisto

Great choice of fonts, a nice color scheme, an attractive texture; this theme has a lot going for it. My favorite design element though is the letterpress icons scattered throughout.

Stacky

Another variation on the organic stack idea. This one has a much more horizontal layout and some nice shadow effects that really set the content out from the background.

Brutal Simplicity

Brutal Simplicity is exactly what the name implies, but in a good way! The thick bars with subtle gradients at the top of each post are a very Mac-like touch.

Royal Cameleon

Out of all the themes that I looked at, this one felt completely unique in its design and layout. The colors and texture give it a retro feel but in a way that isn’t cliche or overused.

Pressed

As the name implies, this one is all about the letterpressed borders that adorn each post. The use of the cursive Lobster font here clashes a bit with the clean and technical design, but it’s still a really nice looking page.

Mint

If you’re looking for something that is super clean without being boring, check out Mint. The plain but attractive background keeps your interest and the layout is a solid centered column with some nice contrasting tones.

Shining

Shining is one crazy and random theme. Each post has some random background texture that doesn’t look anything like the one before it. The randomness somehow comes together though and makes for a great looking blog.

Palmatum

The tree image on the left makes for a strong and simple graphic that adds contrast, visual interest and personality to an otherwise simple and efficient theme.

Royal Ribbon

I really love this theme. The typography is stellar, the colors and texture are perfect and the icons are in an interesting round setting with multiple borders. Both the header and the footer finish off the design nicely with their own unique touches. If you’re a designer, this theme might appeal to you.

Not Bright

Sometimes you can’t beat a simple, dark gray radial gradient as a background. This one pulls off the technique nicely and stays very subdued with the post background color varying only slightly from that of the page.

Grey Daze

This one is another dark theme, but it’s much more quirky than the subdued nature of the previous theme. The post styling and icons are fairly unique, be sure to stop by and see the full-size preview.

Modern5

I love the colors on this theme. Despite being called “Modern”, to me it feels straight from the 70s. Everything has a slightly oversized feel to it as well, which really increases the aesthetic impact.

Blue Heron

Blue Heron has a fairly unique layout that utilizes a narrow content area and comparatively wide sidebar. The hard shadow effect and interesting background make for a great-looking page.

Cheshire

Cheshire is a crazy looking theme that sort of strikes me as the 90s meets web 2.0. I really like the little tabs that stick off the top of each post.

Nightnight

If you’re looking for a dead simple theme with almost zero fluff, check out Nightnight. The dark colors make for a serious and dramatic presentation of content, balanced out by the thin and light typography.

Olde Songs That You Love

You can’t miss the impressive border treatment on this theme. It reminds me of something you’d see in an old illustrated children’s book. If you want something that will really strike your visitors as unique, try this one.

Postage

Every good theme collection must have at least one design inspired by the mail, and this collection is no exception. Postage uses many familiar design elements to this genre and looks simply fantastic.

Vanilla Pod

Vanilla Pod is another of my favorites because it’s has a visual style that’s all its own. I like the button post badges and the almost completely transparent post backgrounds.

Stargazer

The handwritten script font and scribbled icons give this theme a homemade vibe that’s perfect for all you artsy types out there that don’t want to run for the cliche scrapbook feel.

Premium Themes

This hack uses both javascript and flash to implement. The intallation of flash cloud in your blogger blog is very simple. Just you need to copy and paste few lines of code in your template editor. I would like to thanks Amanda for releasing this powerful widget for blogger’s. Here you can see the installed Blogumus in sidebar.

Step needs to Add Flash Label Cloud in Blogger Blog

1. Login to blogger dashboard

2. Go to Layout >> Edit HTML

3. Save Your template first and dont expand widget template

4. Choose where you want to add Flash label cloud in your blog ( Sidebar, Footer, Below Header or Above footer or any section). Now Search for respective <section> (section releted to sidebar, footer, etc). The line of code may look like as follows

<b:section class=’sidebar’ id=’sidebar’ preferred=’yes’>

<b:section class=’footer’ id=’footer’ showaddelement=’no’>

<b:section class=’anything’ id=’anything’ preferred=’yes’>

5. Immediately after any one of the above line, Paste following widget code

<b:widget id=’Label99′ locked=’false’ title=’Labels’ type=’Label’>
<b:includable id=’main’>
<b:if cond=’data:title’>
    <h2><data:title/></h2>
</b:if>
<div class=’widget-content’>
    <object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://halotemplates.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-cumulus-example/tagcloud.swf” width=”250” height=”200” allowscriptaccess=”always” >
        <param name=”movie” value=”http://halotemplates.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-cumulus-example/tagcloud.swf” />
        <param name=”bgcolor” value=”#ffffff” />
        <param name=”flashvars” value=”tcolor=0x000000&mode=tags&distr=true&tspeed=100&tagcloud=<tags>
      <b:loop values=’data:labels’ var=’label’>
<a expr:dir=’data:blog.languageDirection’ expr:href=’data:label.url’ style=’12‘><data:label.name/></a>
</b:loop>
</tags>” />
        <p>Blogumulus by <a href=’http://www.roytanck.com/’>Roy Tanck</a> and <a href=’http://www.bloggerbuster.com’>Amanda Fazani</a></p>
    </object>
</div>

<b:include name=’quickedit’/>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>

6. Save your template and if every thing goes well you will see the Blogumus in your blog.

Customization

250 : To change the width of the Blogumus

200 : To change the height of the Blogumus

000000 : To change the color of text

ffffff : To change the background color of Blogumus

12 : To alter the size of labels

seo-tips-to-increase-traffic-on-your-blog-and-increasing-your-pagerank

Posted By Unknown 00:07 7 blogger tips and trick, seo tips

Increasing blog traffic is one of the major concerns of bloggers. After all its one of the important measure of your blogging success. Increasing blog traffic was one of the first articles i read online and it feels really good to write something about that i have learned over time.

To summarize the entire post in few words, I believe the major contenders in increasing blog traffic are your blog posts frequency (quality post with proper SEO) and posting timings. These few factors play the vital role in driving traffic to your blog.

And yea, consistency is a backbone too! So lets start with our exciting list of the top 20 ways by which we can boost our blog traffic.

1-Starting Off- Choosing Your Blog Platform

This can play a huge role in your blog's future performance and in determining your blogging success. Many top bloggers often use their own custom content managing systems. This means that they wont be using the popular blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger and instead, they would make out their own blogging system, with posting tools, their own set layout of blog, their own custom commenting system etc.

This can be tricky for the beginners. So for this purpose, most recommend to use the popular content managing systems like WordPress, Blogger, Typed etc.

Just to know, there is nothing like perfect blogging platform. Its basically about fulfilling your needs. Some might be satisfied with Blogger and some with Typed/WordPress.So find out which one suites you best and then move on.

2-Make Your Blog As a Sub domain Of Your Website

As blogs are getting popular due to the way they present information and their interactive nature, many websites (companies) opt in for making a blog for them self too. Notice how we have Facebook blog or Twitter blog.

The whole point of the story is that in case we own a website already and we wish to proceed with having a blog too, then its a wise idea to get register your blog as a sub domain of your website. Why to start all over all with your blog?

Having a blog as a sub domain in (blog.yourwebsite.com) would help out your website in gaining more visitors in future (as blogs attract a lot of traffic due to their interactive nature and the way they are updated regularly, unlike a website).

The page rank of your website (the Google ranking authority), that you have already gained over the years would flow toward your newly build blog and make flourish faster as it would if it had a separate domain name. (www.yourblog.com)

Say if you are just starting out with a blog and you don't have a website history, then you obviously would start out with an independent blog domain.

3-Proper SEO For Your Blog And Every Individual Post

Posting with consistency over a long period of time would give you success, in terms of traffic, loyal readership and revenue. But that's not it. 1000s of posts with wrong search engine optimization (SEO) would not help at all.

We want every post to go out in the competition and rock the world. For that, its a wise idea to choose proper title tags or your blog and post pages.

To summarize the Title strategy, its a wise approach to make your blog post title appear in the following order: (post name | blog name) e.g ( How to make money online | Mybloggertricks ). Choose proper keywords, that are friendly to human eye and are not just for the search engines.

4-Show Yourself Authoritative Even If Your Are Newbie

This might feel odd but its just how many top bloggers started off. No one in the world is perfect when they first launched their blog. So say you blog about cricket. And as i mostly say, that one could never get blogging success if hes not passionate about the topic he writes on. So its the first test you have to put yourself in.

Consider that you are a huge fan of cricket and know quite a bit about it. So as you blog along, you read more articles online related to cricket and then you share your knowledge with your readers in a way that you already knew it. So present what you know in a way that you know it well. Thats the main point i wanted to make here.

It doesn't mean that you spread out wrong information (as you are a newbie). Its just that learn along and present it wisely.

5-Participate In The Community (Forums, Blogs)

This can be helpful to some extent. But i also believe that many beginners get distracted with this strategy and loose focus on the posting frequency part (that is the basics). Consider a news paper company. Take NewYork Times just for an example.

News paper is kind of a blog, that is updated regularly (on daily basis). If you would get a newspaper the next morning with old news, would you consider having it again? Even if we consider that the NewYork Times were busy in making relationships with other bloggers, newspapers and community to increase their scope.

The content is what people come to your blog. So do participate in blogs commenting systems (blogs of your choice, relevant to your niche) but schedule a time limit for it in your entire day plan. May be an hour or so. I personally don't do it on regular basis (to be honest. I try to focus on developing content for my blog).

To find blogs in your relevant niche, say you blog about dogs food, then search in Google like, Top dog foods. That would bring a lot of blogs up. Start following them and participate.

6-InBound And Out Bound Linking

Linking content is really important too. Though this might not directly increase your traffic, but this would indeed increase your page rank (as discussed before) and then would bring quality search engine traffic for sure.

In bound linking is basically when you link your post with some other post on your blog. Notice how i shared other old relevant post that were shared on Mybloggertricks in the past. This is inbound linking. You can directly mention old posts like (you might also like bla bla) or make the link within the sentence. Take an example of the next sentence.

It is always important to know How To Inter-link Pages Smartly To Flow The PR Juice To Ever Single Page!. See? You can make the link part of your sentence too. Its works the same. In this way, the page rank that your present post have gained would flow to these linked posts, resulting them to get higher ranked in search engines.

7-Increasing Post Frequency With Guest Bloggers

There is a limit to the number of posts that you can mange to write in a single day. May be 3-4 maximum. So why not to take help of other guest authors that would help you out in the process. This is the general idea. But to note, you wont be getting any guest bloggers in your early blogging days and no one would feel like posting and associating them selves with a newbie blog.

8-Posting Timings

Hell important. Take on an example of this blog. There is nothing to hide guys. We feel like sharing our experience through these posts. :)

So now days i normally publish posts around 11-12am. (which makes up 8-10am in US, from where most of the internet traffic lands on). This is the time where most of the people check on blogs (as per stats). I may visit tvtvfree in my office once a day, and if there is no new content (even if the authors would post later in the day, i wont get to read it).

So its wise to publish out the article when most of the people tend to read it. So coming back to timings, when ever i get late in post, we tend to see a decrease in the Alexa rank! So posting on right timings would increase it dramatically.

9-Consider Using Ads When You Get Setup

Imagine a blog with no or less traffic is full of ads. What impression would that give? A clean blog with clear cut content gives out a more positive feel. That doesnt mean you should not monetize your blog, but i believe that as due to the low traffic, the Ads wont make you any considerable money, so why not to give a clean look to blog until you get some loyal traffic.

That would be the time to introduce the Ads.

10-Always Talk Hot!

Many of the readers here at MBT shared their views that how we published a post on Christmas Gadgets.Christmas is near so why not to talk about it? Its hot. This is one of the strategies of flowing traffic towards your blog. There is nothing to hide. Thats how the world of blogging works.

In fact this is what blogging is. What if a SEO blogger doesn't tell the top blogging techniques to their visitors? So if there is a particular dog disease out in the world, and you blog about dogs, do write about it.

11-Content Layout- Addition of Pictures/Media

Pictures are better than thousand words. We know that. Notice how pictures in this post make it more interesting to read. Its just some kind of natural force that makes you continue reading out the rest of the post.

Its a must. Find any relevant video to your content to if you could find one.

12-Learn With Your Analytics

Monitor your blog's top articles in terms on visitors, bounce rate, time spent etc and then try to improve those articles. Feature them in your feature post widget for your blog so that they get even more attention. Try to update the content, if there is any thing new to the post theme.

Notice your top performing days which bring most of the traffic and try to utilize it. You may want to add an extra post on that top performing day.

13-URL SEO- Post link layout

Like in WordPress, you write the post url separately to the post title unlike in blogger. In blogger, you can add some additional code to your templates, to make the post titles as your post url. The best SEO url strategy is to make the url same as the post title, with keywords that you are targeting.

14-Be polite, Humble Blogger

Your relationships with your readers is crucial. No one likes rude attitude. When a reader leaves out a comment, greet him in a great way that he would be feel honored to share his thoughts again. This would increase the interactivity of your blog and if you continue to do so consistently, you would find a great people ready to praise you all the time.

15-Table of Contents Can Help

If you have a blog with tutorials, tips, then its a wise approach to have list of contents (sitemap) that would help navigation easy for the visitors. This can increase the number of page views dramatically. So like wise bounce rate would drop (that's what you want).

16-Say All What You Got

Be natural and say it all. When the readers would know that you are straight about what you know and anything that you don't know, they would respect you. When you mention any thing that is still new for yourself, be positive and mention that you are still experimenting on that one.

Every one is in the process of learning all the time.

17-Creating Curiosity And Fulfilling it

The ebook creation series that i have worked over the last couple of days has developed a curiosity among many of our friends here at MBT. Series of posts works pretty well for this purpose. Always mention what is coming next day so that readers would feel like waiting for it.

18- Drive Referal Traffic-YouTube

YouTube has been really in, in terms of driving traffic to my blog. In fact my top performing article is backed by a YouTube video that brings in much of a traffic. You would have seen many top bloggers using YouTube videos to give an extra edge to their content.

You can make a short video supporting your article and embed that into your post. Believe me that gives a great impression.

19- Build a Brand- Work On To Be Unique

Your blog looks and feel are very important in terms on developing a unique brand. Even if you use a template, work on to make it more personel so that it just belongs to you. Clean and clear design can impress the visitors and tend them to push the like buttons here and there. I often go for like buttons on blogs just by their first impression.

It means a lot.

20- Post Frequency Final Note:

Many beginners dont get the post frequency part. They can never decide the right post frequency for their blogs. As here, i would recommend posting out 2 or more articles daily (they can be short around 400 words) and then stick to this for 6-8 months. The results would be self explainatory.

So these are the top 20 tips that would lead you to drive traffic to your blogs may it beblogspot blogs or any other. The idea is universal. Again buddy, the power is in consistency. This is for the motivational purpose. If you don't stick to what you do, there is no use. So lets do it together and sketch our success with our own hands.

Peace!