All blogs have their problems and niche blogs are no exceptions, especially micro niche blogs. The biggest problem is the amount of content one person can write about. Darren Rowse of ProBlooger mentioned last week that one of the emerging trends were multiple author blogs for smaller blogs. This is one of the solutions to this problem, but it is only a stop gap in my opinion.

Micro niche blogs, especially in the blogosphere of blogging will eventually run out of crap to blog about no matter how many authors they have. Many long time blogging bloggers I have been reading for a few years now are really just starting to repeat themselves. They aren’t simply giving a new take on an old subject; they are basically rewriting posts they wrote a couple of years back. In my less than humble opinion, this is when you know a blogger has started jumping sharks and needs to move on. As a blogger if you find yourself doing this, you need to realize if you can’t pull it out you will be eaten by the sharks.

There are workable solutions though. First, you can add multiple authors which will help keep you going until you really have something new to write about. Two, you can slow down the pace of your posting. This is especially true for very small niches. Lastly, you can redefine or refocus your blog. There is no sin in slowly moving from one niche to another. An abrupt change might cost your readers, but so will spouting the same tired information. If you want to know what else you should be covering ask your readers, they will let you know.

In the end starting a niche blog has a lot of potential as a money maker, but you need to think about the long term when you’re starting it. Plan a year in advance if you can. Make the best uses of the resources at hand and know when it is time to move on. As always network, network, network!

I was researching this topic for you when I ran across this excellent article and decided just to give you the whole thing.  it has some stuyff that I am going to go put in practice on my other blogs right now so have a good day.

How to Get Inbound Links from Government and University Sites   by Dr. Deepak Dutta

The inbound link is the holy grail of web traffic. Getting inbound links from government and university sites is a testament to the quality of your site.

You accumulate inbound links not only to increase traffic, but also to establish your site for providing high value to visitors. However, getting inbound links by link exchange or buying text links is not going to get you anywhere. You need to abandon those archaic ideas and jump forward with an inbound link strategy that provides high value authoritative links.

To obtain high value authoritative links, your site must provide high values to its visitors. Original authoritative articles and tools to solve everyday problems are a few ways to provide a lasting value to web surfers. Before you embark on your link-building mission, create something valuable.

Links from the government sites have very high value. If your site enables citizenry to interact directly with the government, it is an excellent candidate for a link back from the government site.

Sites that provide community level services, for example location of Social Security Offices in the USA with interactive maps, will also have high potential for outbound links from government sites.

Other types of sites that do well are sites that provide information about service performance, for example, a nursing home comparison site; sites that cross inter-governmental boundaries; and sites that allow transactions with the government, for example, filing taxes.

If your site is a good fit for outbound links from government sites, start with usa.gov site. It is a central information hub for everything government. On the bottom of the page, you will see About Us and Contact Us links. Read their linking policy by clicking on the About Us before you contact them.

You don’t have to confine yourself to the US government sites only. Explore the possibilities of getting links from foreign government sites also. But keep in mind that your site should provide some values to citizenry of those countries and people wanting to do with them.

For example, most government embassy sites don’t display their embassy addresses in interactive maps. If your site pulls their addresses displayed in simple texts in a web page and place those addresses on Google maps for interactivity, you can contact them to put a link back to your site. Explain to them that your site adds additional value to their visitors by providing richer user experience.

College and university sites provide a good opportunity to develop some authoritative inbound links. The key here is to provide services geared towards students. You may also be able to get links if a faculty member is interested in your contents.

Don’t start spamming university forums, guest books, etc. People may attack your site and bring it down, report to your web host company or domain registrar. You will lose your credibility and reputation. Try to establish relationship by helping others. Let them know that you know your topics and are willing to share with them.

If your site provides some valuable services to students, approach the appropriate university authority for linking. For example, if you have a tool that compares student loans from different sources and suggests the good ones depending on a student’s financial situation, university loan office will be willing to link to your site as a resource.

If you have a blog with original and regularly updated contents that talk about impact of the technology on the society, you may approach a faculty in sociology to link to your site from his or her home page located in the university server.

Government and university sites provide good opportunities for developing inbound links if your website has a match with their requirements. The key to that is quality contents and useful web tools. Once you meet their requirements, it is worth pursuing these entities for spreading your website links to them.

About the Author

Deepak has provided free online marketing tools like free classifieds and free ads sites for more than a decade, followed by article marketing and social media link building tools.

I am in no way an expert in Blogger or BlogSpot, but I am passing along to your a nice free article on how to write a theme there since I know some of you blog there.

How To Create A Blogger/Blogspot Theme by Brad

This tutorial will cover the steps needed to create your own blogger template. Many people have used blogger to run blogs and have wondered how they can make their own theme to use with it. There are a very few hard to find guides on how to do this, so I’ve decided to take up the task to help as many people as I can, create one. Incase you are skimming over the content, this article is teaching you “How to create a blogger / blogspot theme“

To create a blogger template, you will need a graphic editor (Such as Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint will do) to create images for backgrounds, post headers, sidebars, etc.. We will get to that later. You will also need an idea or vision about what you want to create. Without that, you are just wasting your time and electricity. Lastly, you will need to know about C.S.S (Cascading.Style.Sheets) and how to operate them. If you do not know how to do that, you cannot apply interesting effects to your newly designed template (Such as: Positioning pictures or text, creating repeated backgrounds, moving around pictures and text and more). A great guide on how to get started with this is available here.

Once you have got everything you need, you should start the C.S.S Framework by putting properties such as

body[ background-color: #000000; margin: 0 auto; font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;}

#title [ font-size: 32px; color: #000011; }

so-on and so forth. A basic list of these tags that were taken from Blogger’s simple white theme are available here: (PDF File) XML Tags Blogger List Of CSS. An easier way to do this would be to find a theme that you like and copy and paste the C.S.S, editing it along the way so that time is saved. The only problem with doing that is that every theme is engineered differently so the tags will change.

After configuring your CSS Stylesheet, you must piece it together in HTML. This can be achieved using similar structures.

<div id=’main-wrapper’> <b:section class=’main’ id=’main’ showaddelement=’no’> <b:widget id=‘Blog1′ locked=‘true’ title=’Blog Posts’ type=Blog’/> </b:section> </div>

Do not forget to reference blogger templates that have already been created for the required widgets that you are supposed to put in certain spots. Without doing this, you could not complete making your own template.

Now comes the grueling part that you can either do yourself which could take hours to finish, or copy from another site and edit accordingly. Blogger is configured using widgets. All your posts are just one big widget hence the code up there. An Example of the code that you could type yourself or copy is:

<div class=’post-footer’>
<p class=’post-footer-line post-footer-line-1′><span class=’post-author’>
<b:if cond=’data:top.showAuthor’>
<data:top.authorLabel/> <data:post.author/>
</b:if>
</span> <span class=’post-timestamp’>
<b:if cond=’data:top.showTimestamp’>
<data:top.timestampLabel/>
<b:if cond=’data:post.url’>
<a class=’timestamp-link’ expr:href=’data:post.url’ title=’permanent link’><data:post.timestamp/></a>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</span> <span class=’post-comment-link’>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType != “item”‘>

<b:if cond=’data:post.allowComments’>
<a class=’comment-link’ expr:href=’data:post.addCommentUrl’ expr:onclick=’data:post.addCommentOnclick’><b:if cond=’data:post.numComments == 1′>1 <data:top.commentLabel/><b:else/><data:post.numComments/> <data:top.commentLabelPlural/></b:if></a>
</b:if>
</b:if>
</span> <span class=’post-icons’>
<!– email post links –>
<b:if cond=’data:post.emailPostUrl’>
<span class=’item-action’>
<a expr:href=’data:post.emailPostUrl’ expr:title=’data:top.emailPostMsg’>
<span class=’email-post-icon’> </span>
</a>
</span>
</b:if>

<!– quickedit pencil –>
<b:include data=’post’ name=’postQuickEdit’/>
</span> </p>

<p class=’post-footer-line post-footer-line-2′><span class=’post-labels’>
<b:if cond=’data:post.labels’>
<data:postLabelsLabel/>
<b:loop values=’data:post.labels’ var=’label’>
<a expr:href=’data:label.url’ rel=’tag’><data:label.name/></a><b:if cond=’data:label.isLast != “true”‘>,</b:if>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
</span> </p>

That code translated into human terms controls what goes at the bottom of every post…In this case its the author, time, comment link and labels. To extract the code from other templates, just click the “Expand Widget Templates” button and it is below the stylesheet on a certain template.

Most of creating a template is just trial and error. If you look at the code and try to piece it together bit by bit.. you will eventually succeed and reap the rewards of creating one. I hope this tutorial has covered everything that you will need and comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated as it would be great if this tutorial would become a one-stop source for all of the Blogger CMS(Content Management System) users.

About the Author

This post was created by Brad. This article is from Brad Blogging.com, which is also where he blogs about tips to make your blog better, through personal experience. If you run a blog, or will be considering about creating one in the future, this blog may be the ultimate resource for you to achieve maximum success!!

BlogBoy Notes:To me everything looked quite sound, but I am not expert on blogger or BlogSpot so make sure you back up your current themes and templates.

]]> http://bradtheblogboy.com/wordpress-2/theme/bloggerblogspot-themes/feed/ 23 http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/other-blogging-tools/bloggging-made-easy-easier-ish/?source=rss http://bradtheblogboy.com/how-to/other-blogging-tools/bloggging-made-easy-easier-ish/#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:42:34 +0000 Blogboy http://bradtheblogboy.com/?p=33 Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

One of the best tools I have found of recent to help improve our blogging is the ScribeFire extension for the Firefox browser. It allows you to automatically post to your blog while surfing. It works for self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com TypePad.com LiveJournal.com, and a few others. My hopes were dashed that it wouldn’t recognize MySpace, but that was just too much to really hope for. MySpace wants you on site or not at all, and frankly that is just too damned big of time waste for me right now. It is a good resource to try and tap, but at this point I don’t have the time to repost everything to MySpace on top of trying to write content, upgrading my themes, editing my novel, etc. The next great thing about ScribeFire is it will allow me to switch between blog accounts easily something I can’t do when I use to blog the things I Digg. It will also allow you to post in draft mode so you can use all the fancy Meta tools I am sure I will get around to preaching on later this week.

The next great Firefox blogging tool is a custom hack of the main CSS file ( usercontent.css ) which decides how things will look while browsing. Search Engine Genie shows you how to highlight any rel=nofollow links. Why is this important? As a blogger if you comment or pay for your link to be hosted somewhere that that has a rel=nofollow added to the link search engines will ignore you and not follow the link back to your site. There are many reasons to be both a do follow and a no follow blogger, but those are for another lesson. To get your name and site indexed, I would suggest posting relevant comments on any of the blogs I have listed in my D-List

If you get the coding done right it should look something like this
Google Search

You can mass around with it by using your own coded file with this link <a href=”http://www.google.com” rel=”nofollow”>Google Search</a>