Now, the next step is : Click “Design” tab from Blogger Dashboard and then click “Edit HTML” link. You will see your template codes, in order to see the detailed coding of the template you must click “Expand Widget Templates” link as shown in the screenshot given below.

After you expand the template, find [php]<data:post.body/>[/php] using CTRL+F combination and then paste the code you generated above the lines. Now in order to make it look better we will add some css styles to our button by adding div style. The code we are supposed to paste will look like this :

[php]

<div style=”float:left;”>
<script src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js’ type=’text/javascript”/>
<g:plusone/>
</div>

[/php]

If you want to make Google +1 button appear on the right simply change “left to “right”. Finally, it must look like this :

Save and refresh your home page.

Any questions?

In previous article, I have shared some tips for you to start business blog with Blogger. Today I’m going to tell how to choose the most suitable Blogger template for your business.

There’s some common requirements and consideration for you to choose your business Blogger template, study this post to get more tips and reference!

Common requirements for a business Blogger template

Blogger template for business blog is quite different with Blogger template for common blog, you need some special features to introduce your company, showcase your product and announce your recent move as well. Here are the common requirements for a business Blogger template:

Welcome Message or About section

Blog description is always not enough for your visitor to know about your business, you need to talk more about it. The Welcome Message or About section is useful for you to introduce your company with either its background or purpose, or any message you need to tell to your visitor and customer.

For the Welcome Message section, here are few Blogger templates for you to consider:

WP-Polaroid Blogger template by Eblog Templates

Business Talk Blogger template by Falcon Hive

Studio Press Blogger template by Girly Blogger

Featured Post section

To make customer purchases your product, you have to make it looks great at first sight. Featured post section comes with a purpose to make your product looks more professional and achieve the most attention on the first sight visitor arrived to your blog.

There are several types of featured post section available for you to showcase your featured product, which are Featured Content Glider, Featured Content Slider, Featured Video and Featured Photos section. Here are some Blogger templates with rich Featured Post section for you to consider:

SchemerMag Blogger template by Blogger Tricks

Zinmag Remedy Blogger template by Falcon Hive

Monezine Blogger template by CahayaBiru

Reminder: As most of the Featured Post section requires extension file like JavaScript, you need to find a free hosting site like FileAve to host your JavaScript file and setup the template with the JavaScript file link. You can find more information about finding and setup extension file for Blogger template in our previous JavaScript hosting  issue.

Ads section

Ads section is required according to the type of the business you own. In most time, business blog with topics about web design, online profit and web marketing relies heavily on ads section as their main source of income. However, if you are not going to make profit from your blog, you can probably ignore this section.

Types of ads section can be divided into Header ads, Post ads and Sidebar ads in most Blogger templates. Some Blogger templates like Magasin Seis has its ads section on unique position, which is right to the Featured Post section.

There are several Blogger templates with ads section installed on the right and clear position, and below are some Blogger templates for your good consideration:

Magasin Seis Blogger Template by Falcon Hive

Magasin Cuatro Blogger template by Falcon Hive

Revolution Church Blogger template by Bloganol

Navigation menu and search system

Navigation Menu is needed for your visitor to understand your site structure and access into some important page like ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Advertise with Us’ directly. Search section is critically required for reader to find the article or product information easier.

Extra Tips: If you are using a Blogger template with navigation menu installed, make sure every navigation link is configured. Leaving the empty link like ‘Sample Link’ would confuse your visitor to think your site is either under construction or incomplete, so your navigation link should be as many as you need but not as many as you can.

Basic browser compatibility

You have to know a truth- not every browser displays your chosen Blogger template properly. Unless you are using the official Blogger template by Blogger, you need to check the view of your chosen Blogger template on different browsers.

As there’s tons of browser available for the web surfing, we recommend you to check your chosen Blogger template on the Firefox RC3, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8, as these browsers are majorly used in current time. You can also use the Browsershot to check the view of your chosen Blogger template in almost all browser with some simple clicks.

Proper functionality and template support

Proper functionality is the must for every Blogger blog especially business blog. As you are running a business blog, misalignment of welcome message, navigation menu or featured post section can drop your professional image and even customer’s trust on your product.

Please always test your chosen Blogger template before apply it to your running business blog, and seek template support to the author site. I recommend Blogger template from sites like Blogger Tricks, Cahaya Biru and Theme Lib as they provide high quality Blogger templates with serious concern about template fix and support.

You can check out the post, ‘Choosing your most suitable Blogger template‘ in BloggerStyles to get more tips about template functionality and support. For additional template issue or customization, you can seek the answer at professional and reliable Blogger site, BloggerBuster.

Final part- using custom service to optimize your business blog

After choosing the most suitable Blogger template for your business blog, you can start setup and optimization to make your business running well on the blog. However, most business blogger prefer to do customization with other web service to improve their blog function.

In the final part of this Business blog series, I would talk about using other service like Kontactr or Google Docs to optimize your business blog while maintaining low cost or modal. Be sure to stay tuned on FalconHive by RSS or email to get more tips and Blogger templates for your business blog, thanks!

We all know that Blogger exists for better blogging, and as the template maker, FalconHive and other excellent sites has continually develop new feature for the Blogger template, professional business blogger can now start their business blog on the Blogger.

Let’s see what we should do before starting a business blog!

Before we share the tips, we need to define the term, ‘business blog’ as:

~A corporate tool for communicating with customers or employees to share knowledge and expertise. (About.com)

First of all- Decide your main purpose

Every great business starts with a purpose, and so is the business blog.

The purpose can be simply formed by an extremely easy question, ‘Why do I need to start this business blog’? You can take a paper to note down the all possible reason, and the advantage and disadvantage of starting this business blog.

You can consider the reason, advantage, disadvantage, targeted audience, expected growth and profit to form a strong purpose for your business blog. In often, this strong purpose would become your motivation to run the business blog for a long distance.

The beauty of the blogging is your purpose can be changed from time to time according to company’s need, but keep in mind that your purpose should be based on your business plan, not personal thoughts.

Extra tips- register and start your blog first

It’s ultimately important that a blog should exists for a long enough time, at least long enough for search engine like Google to index your site, and also the tracking site services to start register and track your website profile.

You would also need the site address to submit your site manually to the search engine like Google, and web information service like Alexa as well.

It’s an extra advantage, but noted that never try to put content that is unrelated to your future purpose and content, it would cause confusion and trouble for Search Engine and visitor to recognize your business website.

Step 2- Decide your template’s color scheme

Before you start any business blog, you should always have a draft in your mind that, how  your blog looks like, especially its color scheme.

We take the biggest company, Microsoft as the example. Microsoft has always used blue color as the main color in its branding, and even the newest software, Windows 7 has the blue circle behind its logo. In this case, Microsoft has implemented blue color scheme into its main website, which probably suits its identity and brand  to attract its million user group.

From the example we can know that, you can decide your template’s color scheme based on your logo design, company’s brand, or any color you think which suits your company’s identity very well, at least not your personal favorite color.

Step 3- Decide your audience

Most of the time, we start a  blog with no idea of our target audience, but the business blog must have a plan to decide and target the audience before its start. The main reason is, your audience decides your blog’s content.

Deciding your audience can be done by some questions like what do you expect from audience? Are they bring information, profit or just communication for you? Are they man or woman? Are they student or working class? You need to think as detail as possible, and create the content based on your targeted audience.

If you have successfully developed target audience, then keep publishing same content to attract more audience. You can then explore and try some new contents other than normal posts, probably some testimonials to build loyal user and customer.

In future post, we would discuss about how to choose suitable Blogger template for your business blog based on its compatibility, feature, support and so on. We would also provide a template list to help you find your preferred Blogger template, so be sure to subscribe our free RSS or subscribe through email, thanks!

Hubspot is going to organize a webinar, talking about how blogger can combine SEO (Search Engine Optimization), blogging and social media for better result than any technique alone

The webinar would be hold on Wednesday, December 17 2008, at 1PM EST (GTM- 5). As usual, it’s free and open for all registered people.

This time, Hubspot presenter would show how SEO, blogging and social media can work together for exponential results, and the way to spend your time on each internet marketing activity. Some real-life success implementations would also be provided for case studies.

You can now visit Webinar page for more info and get an immediate registration. If it’s impossible for you to attend the live event, you can just sign up and they would kindly email you a link to video and slideshow archives after the webinar.

Grab our latest stuff and Blogger templates!

You are deserved to be the fastest being to see our latest news. Just simply subscribe our ‘RSS‘ or subscribe it by email then you can relax and wait to grab out latest stuff and Blogger templates!

Blogger Buzz has recently introduced a cool music playlist gadget called iLike.

iLike enables your blog rocks with music by a self-setup playlist in its site. You can add music listed in the site, arrange and organize your tunes, and simply integrate it into your blog’s sidebar. I would share about my user-experience with this lovely gadget.

I have personally tested the gadget and it’s generally cool! I give the credit to its fast loading speed, which totally does not affect the entire webpage loading time. I also like the way it lists out the author and album’s info, which really helps me a lot to know more about the song and the related details.

The improvement of the gadget might be more music choices, playlist customization with font and colors and of course, make all songs play with full songs (I’m sure everybody would love to add this).

You can check out the Blogger Buzz for more info, or simply sign up iLike to create your own favorite playlist, and share with your lovely readers! If you feel like something needs to improve, you could fire out your thoughts in their survey page.

Grab our latest stuff and Blogger templates!

You are deserved to be the fastest being to get our latest stuff. Just simply subscribe our RSS or subscribe it by email then you can simply relax and wait to grab our latest stuff and Blogger templates!

This webinar would talk about how can we, the internet marketer, stretch our budget and employ effective marketing techniques to drive business in an economic downturn.

Included topics are strategy for marketing in recession, tips for getting the most out of a tight marketing budget and inbound marketing techniques to generate leads efficiently and inexpensively.

The webinar is now full but you can still sign up for archived webinar video and slideshow. For my experience, seeing archives is better than struggling with other high-speed broadband user to enter webinar in midnight, but the disadvantage is you can’t ask any question.

You can find out more information on the Webinar page.