Google Blogger today introduced a new feature called template designer. As we all know, few of the official Google Blogger templates are already customizable to some extend. Blogger took it one step ahead  by launching a new template designer with plenty of features.  All Blogger in draft users might have already seen the new option above their post editor. Others can just go o draft.blogger.com and set Blogger  in the draft as their default dashboard. After this, go to the post editor and select Blogger template designer. So far, there are 15 template designs that are available in 2 column and three column layouts. Each template can be personalized using the collection of images and patterns provided in association with iStockphoto.

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Paypal has became a widely accepted payment system for online purchase and fund transfer. The advantage of Paypal is the security it provides. It helps users with debit or credit card to purchase online by using email IDs, without exposing their real card number to the merchant. However, Paypal posses few limitations if its not verified using a credit card. Paypal forces all users to verify their account with a real credit card or debit card to enhance the security of the overall process. But getting a credit is still a difficult task in countries like India, although the wishers are in a credit limit to get one.  The transfer and withdrawal limitations of unverified Paypal accounts can be removed by using virtual credit cards or VCCs. In India we have many private and public sector banks offering internet banking and virtual credit card service. HDFC is one such bank that provides  facility called Netsafe, free for all their customers. Verifying Paypal without a real credit card is not recommend. But the HDFC Netsafe card would help users in a very needy situation. In this post we will show how you can Verify PayPal without credit card in India by creating a HDFC netsafe card.

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Hostgator and Dreamhost are two web hosting services much discussed among webmasters. Dreamhost provides cost effective shared web hosting with unlimited plans and easy to use control panel that’s ideal for  newcomers. Hostgator specializes on the reliable and fast web hosting with great live chat support. Hostgator provides advanced cPanel web hosting management software for its customers. CPanel  implementation usually cost more. However, without cPanel, Dreamhost charges the same as Hostgator. First time users would love Dreamhost setup as here the installation of scripts can be done on one click. Both Dreamhost and Hostgator provide promo codes and coupons for new customers. Promo codes on Dreamhost will cut down the prices for the first year web hosting to near 90 % of the total cost. Whereas Hostgator provides coupon codes for up to 20 % discount for all webs hosting plans payable via Paypal. Checkout our comparison between Hostgator and Dreamhost to make your choice.

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Traffic is the most important factor that decides the success of a blog and earnings.  Blog traffic can be from various sources; like search engines, forums, related blogs and web 2.0 social networking sites.  As a reader of Techknowl, you might have learned some of the traffic building  methods that we had  discussed earlier. Here I have arranged all those methods together to form a quick reference guide of blog traffic. Read it and leave your thoughts in the comment section.

1. Write high quality articles: Articles should be organized with the suitable number of paragraphs and points for easy navigation. Use word processing software for avoiding grammatical or spelling mistakes. Write on a comparatively new subject, providing  proper assistance trough screenshots and images.  Keeping the quality and authenticity of the article is the key factor for driving search engine traffic to a blog.

2. Increase post count: More Number articles normally bring more traffic. And be consistent in your post rate .

3. Organize your blog: Categorize blog archives and provide easy navigation to all parts. Using read more tag and related posts widget can improve your internal blog traffic and page views to a great extend.

4. Provide email subscription: Provide email subscription of your feed by Feedbrner, Feedblitz or related services. They are a good source of returning traffic. Place the subscription form in such a way that your visitors end up their session with subscribing email updates.

6. Know your readers: Pay attention to user comments and try to respond to their questions and suggestions. Let your visitors know you by providing author and contact information’s.

5. Participate in forums: Active participation in top notch webmaster and related forums is yet another traffic building method. These forums provide a signature link option that drives real webmasters into your blog. Forum users are interested in self-education and connecting with like-minded people, seeking help, advice, opinions etc. Apart from traffic, they provide a number backlinks, reputation and chances of link bait.

6. Submit to Technorati and blog directories: Submit your blog to Technorati blog search engine and other major blog directories. Technorati authority determines your popularity in blogosphere.

7. Socialize through web 2.0: Google for a list social networking and bookmarking websites. Create profiles and invite your online friends. Submit your content, rate and comment on others submissions. This method can bring a large amount of blog traffic if you are smart enough to touch the top pages.

8. Blog Commenting: Blog commenting is a free and quite effective method to bring a huge amount visitors to your website. Your comments should be on related blogs, for quality traffic and advantage in search engines. Be the top commentator or first one to comment on new post s, which even gets attention from blog author.

9. Turn on dofollow: Turn your comments dofollow and submit to any dofollow search engine. This technique can bring lot of traffic and comments on your blog. But keep in mind to enable comment moderation to avoid spammers.

10 .Periodic blog contests: Run periodic blog contests and promote them through your network of online friends and social sites. Depending on your contest, you will get traffic, backlinks and Technorati authority.

11. Power up with videos: Assist your blog posts with videos and submit them to YouTube, MetaCafe and other video sharing websites. Remember to tag tour videos correctly and to promote them.

12. Traffic from widgets: Use traffic sharing blog widgets those displays related content over the web.

13. Advertising campaign: PPC advertisement will bring targeted quality traffic you your blog. Conversion rate is very high with Google and Yahoo advertising networks. But this method is expensive and it is recommended only when you have some products to promote.

14. Build products and build traffic: This is a method is for you if you’re creative. Build your online application widgets, themes, templates etc.  and place a link to your homepage. Products on long term run would bring more traffic, backlinks and authority among other bloggers.

15. Focus on search engine optimization: As most of today’s web traffic comes from search engines, blogs should be well formatted to match the guidelines provided by them. Search engine optimization (seo) can be called as collection of methods for making our page popular and friendly with these search engines.  Features include link building, post page formatting, template code optimization etc.

16. Guest blogging: Find out related blogs in your niche, offering guest blogging. Selection of blogs should be done on the basis of Google PageRank, traffic and subscriber count.  Get know more about their style of writing and submit an article on the prescribed format. Accepted articles could bring you enormous traffic and probably an increase in subscriber count.

17. Article writing: Write articles on article directories and services like Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com.  Some of them follow revenue sharing among members. So apart from being a source traffic and backlinks, they are also an alternate stream of Internet income.

18. Check out trends: Look out for the most searched topics in Google trends, in accordance with your niche and be the first one to post an article based on a hot topic.

19. Analyze your traffic: Finally, analyze your site traffic on all perspectives. The user demographics, page views, time spend and most viewed pages etc. can be calculated using online tools like Google analytics, Alexa, Sitemeter, Compete etc. Outcome of these analyzes’ could be used for further development of blog traffic.

Do you have any other tips improve blog traffic ??  Please share them here.

Alexa is a web company analyzing websites based on its traffic. Traffic means the number of users in a web page and the page views generated by them. Traffic can be from various sources. It can be social media sites, search engines, directories and others. Alexa monitors all these sources using their special algorithm and generates a traffic report. Each website in the internet has an Alexa traffic rank page. The page shows keywords targeted to the site, type of users, page views, bounce rate, links, etc.  Advertising agencies and online marketing firms consider Alexa ranking as an important factor for deciding the potential of a website.

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Plagiarism is one big issue when it comes to online business. No matter what you do, it’s a trait of some people who couldn’t control themselves from copying others work. They use manual copy-paste methods and auto-blogging to build spam sites. Here in this article, I’m going to explain a trick that could help you preventing plagiarism from your blogs/site by disabling the copy-paste functionality. This script has some disadvantages too. It blocks every action of copying from a website- so in effect your loyal readers may find it difficult to use the site content properly.

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