To set your blog or website apart from the mass-produced herd, you need a custom logo, great graphics, maybe a custom background, too.

But who can afford that for every site, especially if you have a lot of niche blogs to build? Well, now we all can, at a new website called Quick Web Creations!

These logos and graphics are nifty, too. Here’s the first logo I made. It took just a couple of minutes.

This site makes it easy to create Web 2.0 style letters and graphics, with reflections, shiny, glossy effects, and other trendy looks that would be a major pain to create in Photoshop. People will be impressed. Here’s another logo I found there.

It’s a lot easier than you would think.

For one thing, there are thousands of logos you can copy and change the words. For another, there are easy controls.

There’s also a short instructional video. It’s fun and easy to learn.

Need logos? Join the coolest automated logo-design and graphics service where you just pick your colors and fonts and type in whatever you want to. Anytime. As many as you need. Change them whenever you want to.

How about a custom background? You can easily and quickly created it yourself with this new service. You don’t have to own or know how to use Photoshop or any other graphics program.

You pay only $6.97 to join for life, and you can make as many gorgeous logos and graphics as you want to—whenever you want them.

Pay just once. Cheap, easy. Stunning graphics and logos. Change them whenever. That’s my kind of graphics plan. And as we say in Texas, it’s too cheap to be without. Why not take a look and see if it works for you?

HOLIDAY HINT: A membership to this site could also be a useful, fun, and inexpensive gift for children and adults.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

This is advance notice of a great new audio ad system that will go online February 1. The time to sign up is now. Because you also get paid for everyone who signs up through you!

Pay Per Play Net Audio pays you to put a snippet of javascript on a page of your blog (or website). A 5-second audio ad then plays whenever that page is displayed. And you get paid every time it does!

The ads are context-sensitive, so they match the content of the page. You can put them on as many pages as you want to (one per page). And you get paid for every visitor who views a page.

We are assured that the company has signed up the top broadcast advertisers, plus companies like Harley-Davidson. But your site is eligible no matter how small or how little traffic you get.

They promise that the ads will not violate the Google Adsense terms of service. They swear to have one of the top search engines as a partner, but they won’t announce which one till February 1. I think we can guess which one it is, though.

As much as I hate the idea of automatic audio commercials—even if they are only 5 seconds long—I have signed up. This is an easy way to monetize blogs and websites without compromising the design. This is going to be huge!

So go right now to the PayPerPlay site, try out the demo, and sign up. Then tell get your friends to sign up through you. Make your blog pay its own way!

I’m currently trying out a service called Real Traffic Exchange. It puts text ads on your site with links to other sites. Your ad for your site, in turn, is shown on other sites in the Real Traffic system. These do not compete with Google Adsense, so you can have both on the same page without violating the Adsense terms of service.

To see how the ads will appear, scroll down and look below the tag cloud on the right-hand side of this page. Nice, eh? The ads can be customized to some extent, and I like them.

And there is no cost to join or use the service. You can buy extra ads if you want to. That could be a good way to launch a new blog.

I have not analyzed the results yet, and I’ll let you know when I do. Meanwhile, you may want to give Real Traffic a try for promoting your blogs and other websites.

I use Blog Design Journal as a sort of blog design laboratory. I constantly try out new widgets, plug-ins, ads and what-not.

So far, experimenting here has worked out well. It keeps me from piddling with my other blogs too much and annoying the readers any more than necessary.

Trying out Widgets

You really do need to try out widgets on your blogs. Great new ones come out all the time, while old ones quit working. Sadly some cool-sounding widgets just don’t work out. You can’t know for sure till you try them.

Page-Loading Slowed to a Crawl

Recently I joined a beta-testing group for Jonathan Leger’s new project, Real Traffic Exchange. I was thrilled.

Then I installed the widget on my blog, and it slowed to a crawl, maybe even a backstroke. Also, it seemed as though the scrollbars were not working right. I want to give Real Traffic Exchange a fair trial. I have great hopes for it! (As soon as I have the results, I’ll post them here.)

Removing Widgets

So I started removing other widgets, hoping that would speed up page loading. The first thing to go was my newest fun toy, The Gaping Void cartoon widget. It is, frankly, the hardest to justify of all the widgets. I just love it, that’s all.

Sometimes you have to give up widgets you enjoy, for various reasons. I removed the Digg widget, for example, because it was killing my productivity. It was just too tempting to click the links and then spend too much time reading news stories and the comments on them.

But removing The Gaping Void didn’t help. I was trying to figure out what else do part with, when it dawned on me that I had installed two or three toolbars in Firefox that were just taking up real estate. I never used them.

Firefox Toolbar Troubles

Then the real trouble started. Firefox slowed nearly to a stop and almost would not let me disable those toolbars. I turned of the Google bar, the StumbledUpon Bar, the Smart Toolbar (whatever that is), and low and behold, I can use Firefox again.

The Real Traffic Exchange widget was not the culprit. It was Firefox and those pesky toolbars.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you want 2000 links to your blog for free? Yeah, I thought so.

In case you are new to blogging and/or search engine optimization, let me explain. A big part of how Google determines the Page Rank (PR) of your site is by how many backlinks (one-way links to your site from other sites) you have. The higher PR the sites that link to you have have, the more they help raise the ranking of your site. (That is search engine optimization (SEO) in a nutshell.)

Brad Callen offers a program called Directory Submitter that you can download from his site at no charge. It allows you to select which directories to submit to (for example, only PR 4 or above). Then it automates directory submission, saving you hours and hours—or days and days—or time.

All you do is provide your email address and register the program. It’s that simple. You can download Directory Submitter here.

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Go, now! Sorry I didn’t mention it before.

By the way, Brad’s other programs are excellent, too. Not all of them are free, but they are great.

Are you a serial blogger? Do you have more than one blog?

Do you create blogs and often find that there are not enough people interested in your topic to make it worthwhile to post? Traffic is light? Few people comment? Do you gradually lose enthusiasm for posting, and move on to create yet another blog?

If so, maybe your blogs are not well enough targeted to a niche, a group of readers who are intensely interested in your topic. If you are blogging just for personal expression, that may be OK with you, but it can also be discouraging. You feel you are alone in the wilderness, talking to the trees.

Thousands of blogs are abandoned every day, because bloggers become discouraged when they have no audience. Sadly many people start a blog in hopes of making a little income from it and then are bitterly disappointed. There seems on reason to carry on if no one is reading.

If you hope to make an income from your blog, the best design in the world (see, there is a tie-in with the topic of this blog, sort of) will not make up for not having an audience.

The best blog design begins before you ever build your blog, before you ever select a design, before you even buy a domain name. The first step is research. Yes, that dirty word: research.

You may be writing a great blog that is focused on the wrong group of people. Maybe a slightly different target niche would reward you with lots of readers.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just reread the message that appears in the blog category area of the BlogRush dashboard. What they are saying seems to be that if they don’t think your post fits into the subcategory you selected, they move it to the General category.

That’s better than not displaying it in the widget at all, but it still leaves the problem of not having enough subcategories. And, of course, there is still the problem of some blogs either not fitting in any category or fitting a little bit in several but not well enough in any. How to choose?

And why won’t they allow us to just select a main category to begin with instead of making us choose from their few, often inappropriate subcategories?

Hopefully they will keep expanding and revising the blog category scheme till they get it right. Until then, what is your strategy if you have blogs that do not fit?