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There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your blog(s): A steady flow of online traffic. If no one is aware that your blog(s) existed in the blogosphere which contains millions and millions of other blogs, then nobody will go to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating any income.

In the business world, it takes money to make more money. The same rules apply to making money online, it takes money to maintain an income generating site or blog.

But of course, with the versatility and huge resource the Internet offers, there are many ways you could find that could help optimize the potential of your site or blog in generating traffic Read the rest of this entry »

I’m glad to announce that my earlier post, Personalize Your Blog Posts - Add a Signature, had been selected in Nate Whitehill’s Powerful Posts of the week ending June 24, 2007.

I’m most honoured and very humbled by this nomination. I’m sure I’m in great companies.

Thank you Nate, for giving me a good start to another new blogging week!

My friend CK, aka miriguy, who owned the blog Dirty Little Secret had tagged me on this meme titled “5 Reasons Why I Blog” last week. It was a fun meme, making me think long and hard of the reasons Istarted this blog, before sitting down to writing this post.

The 5 Reasons I blog:
1. I started blogging out of curiosity, I wanted to find out for myself, first-hand, what all the buzz around me about this new media called blogging is all about!

2. As I grew out of the curiosity stage, I started to get the hang of blogging consistently and naturally want to take blogging for fun to the next stage and try to earn some money in this online adventure, while still having fun!

3. I blog because I can combine my love for the internet, technologies and gadgets (does that makes me a geek?)and my love for writing (in my offline life, I rather write then talk, whenever possible).

4. The idea of being able to influence people positively with my writings is an appealing challenge to me.

5. The idea of making friends, connecting, interacting with people all over the world appeals to me too! I can “travel and see the world” in the comfort of my room with just a few click of the mouse. On the other hand, I feel I can also offer and/or introduce to the world about my country, its rich cultural heritage and how we live in harmony in this multi-racial, multi-religions society.

OK, there goes my reason for starting and maintaining this humble blog. Next I’ll like to tag the following bloggers, as I’m curious to know the reasons why they blog.

Jean Chia - A Great Pleasure
Randall Cornett - Randlife.com
Bialliard Champ - Anitokid Chronikos
Adam - ah ok lah

Take it aways guys, and gal. The stage is all yours!

Yesterday I got a wonderful surprise when my 4-year old son brought back from nursery school his own hand-made Father’s Day card. I got my first Father’s Day gift, albeit belatedly, and I am damn proud of it!

Still on the topic of Dad, the above event was followed up by realization that I was nominated by BlogDad as

Thanks Rick! Although I’m a daddy blogger who don’t blog about fatherhood or about my 2 beautiful kids, any form of accolades or nominations are certainly welcome! Oh, and by the way, keep those votes coming in!

Whenever we write a letter, be it personal or official in nature, we would sign off with our signature at the end of the letter. I’ve been browsing many blogs and reading up on a lot of blog posts, but have yet to come across bloggers signing off their blog posts with their signature.

What is stopping bloggers from signing off their online writings when it is such a natural habit in our offline life? Is it the lack of online tools available to create that digital signature which will surely take the ‘coldness’ out your blog posts and make it more personalized?

If that’s the case, then help is on hand. I found this website MyLiveSignature.com which offers free web-base tool and templates to help you easily create your own personal signature! You don’t even have to register and set-up an account to use this free service. A paid service is also available(charges from $19.95) where experienced animators will analyze the calligraphic nuances of your signature to create an animated signature full of life energy!

In this post, I think it would be fun and useful for you, that I focus on the free service and step-by-step process of creating and installing your personalized signature on your blog posts.

Go to MyLiveSignature.com and click on Proceed button. Next, click on the Create Signature button to create your new signature using the signature creation wizard.

Step 1. Enter your name

Step 2. Select the font. 120 different fonts are available for selection.Here, I’ve selected font #14 for my signature.

Step 3. Select the font size, from #1(smallest) - #10(biggest)

Step 4. Select the Color
Step 5. Set the Slope (#1 being straight - #10 being steepest slant)

Five easy steps and you are done with the creation process and will be given your unique signature ID. You should copy the ID and save it for future use.

Next, click on the “want to use this signature?” link which will bring you to the generating signature code page. Click on the Generate HTML code link, you will be provided with 2 options. You can either generate a code for just the signature only, or generate a combine code of your signature with additional information (optional) like your comapny name, contact #, email address, website url, just to name a few. My take is that the second option with added information is more suitable for email messages.

Once the HTML code of the signature is generated, you can insert it into your blog posts and/or your email template.

How to add your signature to individual Blogger blog post(manual).

Copy the signature HTML code. At the Blogger editor window, click on “Edit HTML”, and paste the code at the end of your post.

How to add your signature to every one of your Blogger blog posts(past, present and future posts).

At the Layout page, click on “Edit HTML” to edit the template. Before editing your template, you may want to save a copy of it by downloading the full template. Then check the box to expand widget templates. Scroll down or CTRL F to find the code , paste the signature code right after this piece of code. Then save the template and you are done!
You can add the signature to blogs(Blogger, LiveJournal and Wordpress), your posts on forums, to email messages(Outlook Express, Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, Apple Mail, Entourage MacMail) and on websites.

**Update (June 25, 2007): This post was selected in Nate Whitehill’s Powerful Posts of the week ending 24 June, 2007.