Make money from Chitika - CPM analysis.

Chitika provides a combination of CPC, CPM and CPA ads and you are paid accordingly. However, I personally wanted to earn only through the CPM advertising since the clicks these adverts generated on my blog was not so considerable due to my blog niche. So, I asked chitika about how I can limit the ads to only pay-per-impression rather than the combination of all these ads and they told me how-to do it. You have to send a minimum of thousand impressions before they will start showing pay per impressions ads on your blog. They will till then analyze your blog for proper categories and the traffic quality.

 

Make money from Chitika - on CPM basis.

The rich media ads served from Chitika on your blog pays on impression basis. By default, Chitika shows a combination of the normal ads + rich media ads depending upon the availability and according to their some sort of algorithm. The good part is you can limit the ads displayed on your blog to only "rich media ads" show that each time an ad is shown, you are paid.

Enable Rich Media Ads

Navigate to Ads > Settings.

You will find that "Rich Media Ads" are by default preferred as Mixed. Change it to Always and save.

From now onwards, only CPM ads will be displayed on your blog. 

Important points regarding Rich Media Text. 

1. The fill rate may not be 100%. You might see some of your impressions counting out without any ads. However, gradually you will see a better fill rate.
2. Chitika will ask you to send a minimum of thousand raw impressions before they can server the Rich Media Ads on your blog. So you won't earn for the first thousand impressions.
3. Switching to only Rich Media Ads is not advisable if you have low traffic. Making money from CPM ads require a good amount of traffic.
4. If your blog is engaging and adverts receives good click through rate, then perhaps you should not switch.

Final Words: Do you use any money making CPM advertising networks? With Chitika, the rates are somewhat between $ 0.10 - 0. 18 per thousand impressions. How much your advertising network paying to you.

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How to drive [huge] traffic through Disqus Comment System

Lately these days, most of the blogs have shifted to Disqus comment system from the conventional or CommentLuv. Disqus commenting system is very efficient in handling conversational comments and is free from spamming. The person has to login through Google, Facebook or enter his details before being able to comment. So, any blog owner only wishing healthy and non-spammy comments are going for Disqus these days. 

For one of my blog, I was trying some comments over various websites/blogs and found that almost all were having Disqus and in the process, also noticed that Disqus can drive huge traffic to your blog if used correctly. So, in this article I will show you how to drive huge traffic through Disqus Comment System to your blog. 

First thing which you want to do is make a list of the blogs that are famous and have Disqus comment system. It's better to choose highly popular websites rather than an average one. If you are going for it, go for big. 

Next, once you have compiled the list in the process of driving traffic to your blog through Disqus Comment System, find articles on that blog that are recent and is somewhat related to article which you want to promote. 

Now, Disqus Comment system allows you to put links in it through anchor tag. Write a short about 100 words comment in such a way that linking your blog in it through the anchor tag looks natural. Once done, submit the comment, and you are done. 

Important things to remember while commenting

• In process of driving traffic to your blog through Disqus comment system, you must follow some of the commenting etiquette.

• Make sure you comment at the earliest on any post. Try to be the first one to comment. Being the first one will bring much more traffic than ending up later in the list. However, if you missed it do not worry, these blogs are highly engaging and will still drive traffic to your blog. 

• Be genuine. Do not comment just for the sake of a back link or traffic. For each Disqus comment, the blog owner receives a notification and there are high chances he notices the link. So, be contextual and yes, be genuine. 

• Anchor tags can be used in this way.

      <a href="link">Anchor tag</a>

• Choose only very high traffic sites, and prefer news sites. Stick to your niche. 

Some websites requires moderation. If you are commenting in a contextual way, there are very low chances of your comment being deleted. So, don't worry. 

And the last thing, do not forget to upvote your own comment. Also, if you maintain more than one Disqus account, up vote from the other one too. You can even ask your friends to do the same. It will keep you on top in the discussion. 

Here's a screenshot of a day of traffic to one of my niche blog, where I just commented on 3-4 blogs of my niche.

You can drive huge traffic to your blog if you do it right and for long. There is a huge potential in using Disqus Comment System to reach to readers. Also, the traffic coming through it is highly targeted. 

Next, your words. What do you think, will it work for you? Give it a try, return back here and tell me yes, it worked.

Note: I didn't see any SEO benefit by building backlinks through Disqus. So, use it for the purpose of driving traffic only.

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How to add Featured Post Widget in Blogger

If you have this tendency of updating your blog very frequently, you might have this problem that some of the best articles which brings you traffic slips into archives and your readers visiting your homepage have to reach to Page 10 in order to see it. So, is their any way to keep some of your articles on the homepage for permanent? 

Yes. Blogger has finally introduced Featured Post gadgets, where you can choose posts you have shared on your blog and highlight them on the homepage. 

How to add Featured Post Widget in Blogger

In order to add featured post widget in Blogger, visit the Dashboard > Layout > Add a Gadget.

You will see a "Featured Post" widget. Click on the + sign in front of it. You will see the various options for Featured post. 

It will ask the Gadget Title, by default it is Featured post. If you want to show the post title and image, check the boxes.

Next step is to select a featured post. You must select a featured post from already posted articles. Like in the above example, you can see Blogger is displaying a list published articles from which I can select. If what something else, search it. Once you have set up and done, your Featured Post Widget will look something like this:

In this way, you can easily add a featured post widget in Blogger without any need of coding skills or any third party widget. Blogger has updated something after a very long time and we expect it does improve its dashboard which is years behind. 

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How to get more comments on your blog

Do you have a blog with enough comment and you are still not seeing user interaction in the comments? Comments are a great way to read your audience mind and to build up a positive conversation that results into a genuinity of a blog/website. If you are not happy with the number of comments on your blog, perhaps you should start paying attention to it. There are some general practice/points which you can follow to get more comments on your blog. In this article, I am discussing some of the points.

Why comments are a positive things (if it is)?

The answer is simple. You must have sometimes landed on a blog and read the complete article, and then hover down to read the comments to see if what's been written is accepted/declined by the readers. Comments are the best way through which your readers share their opinions and show their respect/acceptance/denial to the words you have put in the article. In addition, comments can sometime be a motivational factor for you to work harder on your blog. People in the blogosphere do tends to praise something that clear their doubts.

How to get more comments on your blog. 

So, the question if how you can get more comments on your blog. Well, it's not in your hand. You can ask your readers directly to post a comment and I'm very much sure anyone will hardly give any attention to it. Its the way of writing and the way you ask your readers to continue the article you have written in the comments that can lead to more comments on your blog. Lets discuss the points on by one to get more comments on your blog.

1. Write an awesome article

Yes, if your reader is not satisfied with what he has just read, you won't get any comment. Even if someone writes it, there are more chances of a negative one. Do you wish to have a negative comment on your blog for which you have devoted your your time? Certainly not. So, try to ending up writing a good quality article that solves the query of your reader.

2. Ask your readers / engage with them.

You can always ask small things in your article from your readers and ask them to put their responses in the comments. Like, ending an article on smartphone review with "do you think this phone will serve your purpose", or "if you have got one, how is it performing for you". These questions lead to more comments on your blog.

3. Use a good comments system

Do not be satisfied with the Blogger's commenting system if you want more comments on your blog. Blogger has evolved a lot over the years, but the commenting system is still 100 years old. You can use intense debate / commentLuv / Disquss commenting system and there are numerous tutorials over the web that can easily guild you to integrate in your blogger blog. WordPress has got a better default commenting system along with the options I just  mentioned.

4. Create some positive controversies

People just love to contradict. Yes, you read it right. Creating a controversy over the blog will help you getting more comments. However, be sure not to over do that and have a mix opinion while putting a controversial things. Let your readers discuss and be aggressive. You mustn't yourself.

5. Reply to the comments

Be responsive to the comments you receive. This will give a positive indication to your readers that you pay attention to the comments and their voice will reach to you.

Final Words: These 5 points are the basic practices you can follow to engage your readers and to receive more comments on your blog. Do you have any other points that I missed? You got it write, I am asking you to put them in the comments. 

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How to Change a Blogger Post URL.

Sometimes after publishing a post, many bloggers realize that they should have changed the Permalink of their post. Manu Jamwal's question in a Blogger forum on one of the social networking sites (to be specific, Facebook) made me to create this post.

▌ How to change a Blogger Post URL. 

Step 1:

To change a blogger post URL after publishing, go to your Blogger Dashboard > Posts > Edit the post of which you want to change the URL.

Step 2:

Before changing the Blogger post URL, you have to un publish it. To do that, Revert to Draft your article.

Revert to draft.

Step 3: 


Now, in the right sidebar, click on Permalink and select Custom Permalink. Enter your new custom URL for the post and publish it.

Add your Custom Permalink.

Note that you cannot use special characters except ( _ ) underscores and ( - ) hyphens. No spaces are allowed. Until you give a correct URL, it won't allow you to publish it.

In this way, you can change the URL of your blog post without loosing the date and time of publishing.

However, it is advisable not to change blogger post URL once published since after it is indexed, if you change the URL of your blog post, search engines will still try to search the old URL and return a 404 error since the original link no more exists. You can see errors like that in your Google Webmaster dashboard. These errors may affect your search engine optimization practices.

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How to Increase Your Email Subscriber List.

Email subscribers

Email subscription is the best way of engagement to your blogger. If you drop a link on any social media be it Facebook or Google+, the ratio of visitors to the reach of link is no where near the visitors you get from your email list. When your article lands up in someone's inbox, most likely it would be read and you will get one visitor.

Most of the bloggers who are new to the Blogging concentrate in dropping links to every place and ignore the importance of Increasing email subscription list. Email subscription is the highest form of engagement to your readers and you must give importance to build up your email subscription list. Email subscription can be a primary source of source of traffic to your blog if you have a large pool of subscribers.

▌ How to increase your email subscription list.

There are various practices to increase your email subscription list.

♦ Place your subscription box.

No one will subscribe your blog until they "see" a subscription box. Putting your subscription box above the fold is very important. Most of the blogs (even Problogger), put their subscription box in right sidebar above the fold. That's the best place to catch readers eye and increase your email subscription list.

♦ What about a pop-up?

Pop-ups are a great way of catching user's attention, since they either have to close it or to subscribe it and they simply cannot ignore it.

However, you may have to limit the pop-ups to once/day/visitors or something like that. If I visit a blog which opens up a pop up every time I open an article to read is annoying and I will in most cases leave. 

♦ Provide unique and fresh content.

If you are giving your readers a great content, then they will naturally subscribe to your articles. People with thousands of people in their Email subscription list achieved this only through unique, fresh and highly informative contents.

♦ Ask people to subscribe.

mbBlogging subscriber box.

At the end of each post, you may ask people to subscribe to your blog. If they find your article useful for them, your chances of getting a email subscriber is more.

♦ Publish series of articles.

You may publish a series of articles and asking your readers to subscribe to your blog to receive the next parts in their mail box.

♦ Give them something free.

Give your readers who subscribe to your blog some incentives like free ebooks. If you don't have one such ebook, you may even start with giving a notepad text document with the list of CommentLuv enabled blogs to increase backlinks. You may put your creativity in this part.

       Last word. You may increase your email subscription list by following these practices. Email subscribers are often loyal readers to your blog who always will come to your blog if there is something updated.

However, while building your email subscriber list, keep in mind these points.

Do not annoy people by pop-ups too much. Limit the pop ups frequency. It may decrease your no. of page views / visitors.

Do not spam Inbox. People like me are very conscious about mail box. If at any stage any one feels you are spamming their mailboxes, they will unsubscribe or put you in the filter list. Be careful.

This was all I can suggest you to Increase your email subscription list. And I humbly request you to subscribe to my blog.
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How to Become A Good Commenter.

Do you want to spam others comment section with your personalized comments? Do you want your comment to end up in spams? I bet you don't.

Commenting is a great way of building backlinks along with increasing traffic to your blog. If done in right way, it may bring a good amount of traffic to your blog and increase your earnings.



There are some points which you must keep in mind while commenting on other blogs.

▌ How to become a good commenter. 

♦ Read the article first. To become a good commenter, you must read the article. Reading will ensure that you will put up a comment relevant to the article. A good commenter always ensures that what he writes is in accordance to the post.

♦ Do not do it for link building. If you think commenting as a link building, you will end up writing Hi!! Hello!! comments on other blogs. Instead, treat it as a way of building relationship with the author of that blog. Do not write one liners comments like "Nice post, keep up the good work!!". The chances are that the author will not even notice your comment.

I personally delete all those one liners comment that says "nice post buddy". I know the article is nice for me otherwise, I would have not published it. 

♦ Are you CommentLuv enabled blog lover? Perhaps you search for ComemntLuv enabled blogs for building backlinks. However, most of the blogs are no-follow, that means they do not pass any juice to your link. Hence, its not a good strategy to search only for CommentLuv enabled blogs. Instead, you can comment on any blog with WordPress, ComLuv, Disqus commenting system where they allow links to your blog.

♦ Stay focused to your niche. You run a blog on body building and end up writing a comment for backlinks on a technology niche, then perhaps you are doing it wrong. Google asks for relevance of links to your blog, and how is that technology niche link is relevant to your body building blog? So, commenting on blogs having that same niche as yours is a must.

♦ Do not put links in your comments. (unless its Wikipedia). There is no need of putting one or more links in the comments unless you have reference of some highly reputed blog. Moreover, you might end up in spam. I have noticed that the default Blogger commenting system puts up a comment in spam folder if there is a link in it. Almost all other commenting system does the same. So, be careful. You may select blogs that generates a backlink automatically from your blog feed to not to waste your time.

♦ End up asking for suggestions. Its a great idea to end up your comments with queries or suggestions. This improves your credibility as a blogger and will compel the author to reply to your comments.

♦ Be the first. The first comment will always stay on the top. If there's 100 comments on a post, I am gonna read the first one and the last one. The last one will keep on changing, so you have to be the first. You can do so by subscribing to the feed of various blogs of your niche and then when there's a new articles published, be the first one to comment on it.

♦ Do not criticize. Constructive criticism is always welcomed by all bloggers. If the author missed some points, you can add them in comments. If you want to suggest something you can. However, you should not criticize the author directly. No one keep a comment of his criticism. It will be deleted or not approved. Trust me.

       Commenting is a great way link building and building reputation in the blogging world. Writing up a good comment will ensure traffic to your blog and stay away from the myth of commenting on CommentLuv enabled blogs only. These points are the basics of commenting. If you want to add some more points to "how to become a good commenter", please use the comment section below.

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Increase Traffic to Your Blog: Link Building

traffic to your blog

Link Building is a part of Search Engine Optimization. However, it was not possible to completely describe it in previous post

Increase Traffic to Your Blog: Search Engine Optimization.

The first part of Increasing traffic to your blog was about social media optimization and you can read it here.

Increase Traffic to Your Blog : Social Media

Link building is way of creating links over the web that points to your domain. Link building has been an important factor in Search Engine Optimization and although its relevance has been lowered by Google, its still is one of the 200+ factors that affect search engine rankings.

Link building has its own benefits apart from increasing traffic to your blog.

♦ It helps in getting your articles indexed in search engine easily.
♦ It helps in improving your PageRank, Domain Authority metrics.

▌ Link building strategies. 

♦ Commenting on other blog. There are many high PR blogs which allow backlinks in comments. These are the blogs which have their own comment system or have implemented ComLuv in their blog.

link building strategies

♦ Guest Posting. Guest posting is a great way of both link building and bringing traffic to your blog. Most of the blogs that accepts guest post allow some back links either in texts or in bio or both. You can utilize them to link to your blog. However, it is always advisable to guest post on higher authority blogs than your own.

♦ Directory submission. Submitting your blog to directories is also a great way of free link building to your blog.

♦ Forums. There are several forums like DigitalPoint that allow do-follow backlinks in signatures. You can use them to build quality backlinks to your blog.

♦ Social Bookmarking websites. There are several social bookmarking sites that will generate high quality backlinks to your blog .Setting up your account there and adopting a strategy to link building can build you higher DA and increase traffic to your blog.

♦ Yahoo answers or technorati can also be used as a link building source.

      Link building is a great way of bringing traffic to your blog. However, proper precautions have to be taken in order to select the link source. Since Google has algorithms running for penalizing low quality backlinks, do not just select any blog / forums to link building. In simple terms, anything which has higher Domain Authority than your blog is a good place for link building.

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How to Change Blogger Template.

If you are a Blogger platform user, you must be feeling bad for the default templates that Blogger provides. The template section is on the weaker side with very less options and these templates have not been updated for a while. However, there are many webmasters who have developed templates for Blogger users and distributing it for free. This post tells you step by step procedure of how to change Blogger template with these third party templates and improve your blog's look.

There are templates available in the market which have beautiful interfaces along with better tabs and menus. You need to change the default Blogger template.

▌ How to change blogger template

♦ Go to Blogger Dashboard > Templates.

How to change your blogger template

♦ Click on the BackUp / Restore button.

 Make a back up of your default template so that in case anything goes wrong, you can switch back to it anytime. (a precautionary measure).

♦ Now browse to third party template file (with xml format) and Upload it to Blogger.

If everything goes write, enjoy the new template :)

Having a professional theme for your blog is a great way of increasing traffic to your blog. People are attracted more towards professional looking blogs and a blog will lame look and hierarchy will disappoints its user.

Many third party templates are ads-ready, so if you are an AdSense user and making money from your blog through AdSense, these templates can provide an easy way o putting your ads at the desired places. E.g. some templates do not allow to place HTML/Javascripts at the top right corner of your blog, while many third party templates will allow you to put an ad there.

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How to Speed up Your Blog.

Blog's loading time is also an important part of Search Engine Optimization. There are various reasons that affect the site's loading time and hence the performance. If your site's speed is on the slower site, then perhaps you need to improve your site's loading time.

Improve your blog's Loading speed

There are a number of factors that affects a blog's loading time. You can work on these factors to speed up your blog.

▌ Number of posts.

The number of posts you display on your homepage directly affects your blog load time. You can easily restrict the number of posts that are shown on the homepage of your blog.

Open your Blogger dashboard > Layout > Edit post.

 Click on the Edit option. A pop up windows will appear with various options.

Now, choose the desired number of posts you want to display on the home page. Its recommended to limit the number of posts to a maximum of 10 on home page to speed up your blog.

▌ Optimize your images.

If you have images in your articles, then it is going to slow down your blog. However, Image is an integral part of your articles which you cannot omit. So you need to optimize them. You can reduce your image size by converting it to a .jpg formats which takes much lesser space. You can crop your image to a smaller size or even decrease its resolution in order to enhance your loading time and speed up your blog.

▌ Javascripts and ad-on.

The more you use javascripts in your blog, the slower your blog will be. Try to avoid third party javascripts and even if you use them, use it at the bottom of your blog. If you intend to use one in the sidebar, it may be at the bottom part of your sidebar. 

▌ Avoid popups. 

Pop ups will considerably slow down you site's loading time.

▌ Ad services.

Ads on your blog also affect your site's loading time. Whether it be AdSense or any other money making program, they are going to affect to some extent. Infolinks has a very bad impression of slowing down the blog's loading time to a great extent. Avoid if you can.

AD services like Qadabra will slow down too.

      You can put these minds in your mind to improve your site's performance by reducing its load time.

Bonus: You can measure your blog's speed by using a stop watch.

Go to Stopwatch website: Enter your blogs address and the time will show up. The elements of your blog which is loaded at the end are the one which is taking the maximum time and reducing your site's speed. 

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List of 8 Best Ping Services.

Pinging is a service by which the search engine servers are notified of any content updation. Pinging make sure that search engines know that you have any new article published. This results in a faster indexing of your site.

There are various methods of submitting your content to search engines like submitting your sitemap to each of them. But then, if you write an article you have to wait for the search engine crawlers to discover your updated content. You may have to wait for till then. Pinging again has this benefit of notifying search engines about it.

There are various pinging services available. These best ping services does the work in seconds.

▌ Ways to Ping your blog in seconds

Here's a list of 8 best ping services.

♦ Pingomatic

♦ Ping.in

♦ Pingler

♦ Pingates

♦ Kping

♦ GooglePing

♦ Feedshark

♦ Pingfarm

All these ping services work more or less in same manner and asks for your blog URL along with the feeds (optional for some of them).

I have always used Pingomatic as my best ping service. And have not really tried all. You may give all a try and select the best one.

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Tips to Get On First Page of Google.

If you are a Blogger, you must be knowing the importance of Organic Traffic and the importance of ranking on first page of Google. 70% of the searchers do not even bother to see what's there on the second page of Google's search result. So, in order to get a decent traffic from search engine, Ranking in first page is of high importance.

There is no fixed and defined way of ranking higher in Google SERP. With Google updating its algorithm, the latest being Hummingbird update, there is always just guessing and hit and trials. However, there are certain parameters that has been and will always matter to rank higher in Google Search Results.

▌ How to Get on First Page of Google.

♦ Discover most popular phrases and words that are searched for, in your domain. There are different tools to find keywords and search phrases. You may use webmaster tool to discover the phrases for which your site is being discovered in Google Search.

♦ Put relevant information in Title and Meta tags. Title and Meta tags plays
an important role in your search engine rankings. Title is what is shown to a person who queries and putting your best keyword and phrase is very important. With meta-tags, always have different tags for each posts.

♦ Use a better URL structure. Use your keywords in URLs. Do not just put some numbers and random digits in your URL. Blogger gives you an option of customizing your URL.

Select custom Permalink in your right sidebar and enter your URL. Use hyphen (-) instead on under scores (_). Hyphen differentiate between words whereas underscores make it all a one word.

♦ Submit your website's sitemap to Google and other Search Engines. Al though, Google will crawl your website someday, why to wait. Submit manually your sitemap to search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing for faster indexing of your posts.

♦ Link building. PageRank is still an important factor among 200+ factors in determining your site's credibility. Make sure you have high quality backlinks from different high PageRanked websites and blogs. You can achieve this through Comments, Guest Post and by writing great content, so that people tag your articles genuinely.

♦ Write unique and good quality content. Content is the king. The basic aim of any search engine is to provide the best content according to a query. No matter what Google will do with its algorithm, it will always give importance to high quality contents.

♦ Social Media presence has been playing an important role in search engine ranking. Be active on Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and use them to create backlinks and generate traffic to your blog. The plus and likes and shares does improve your Search Engine Optimization processes.

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How to install CommentLuv to Blogger.

Blogger has been updating its dashboard with new auto-sharing features and template editing option. However, the commenting system on Blogger still remains the same.

The benefit with WordPress is that it has in-built better themes and comment system. The themes are highly professional there and the comment system has an in built backlink generation along with threaded comment options. This is missing in Blogger.

However, Web is all full of alternatives. There are third parties that are providing options to Install CommentLuv comment system in your Blogger blog.

CommentLuv is a very popular plugin and is used by a good number of Webmasters. The main benefit that prompts visitors to comment on your blog is its backlink generation. CommentLuv generate a backlink of the visitor's latest post who provide their website during commenting.

▌ How to Install CommentLuv to your Blog.

This is a tutorial for Bloggers users. This can be applied to even those who are not using custom domain.

Step 1: Go to http://intensedebate.com/ and sign up for an account. Don't forget to select "I want to install IntenseDebate on my blog or website" while signing up.

Step 2: You will be asked to verify your email address.

Step 3: IntenseDebate will ask for your blog's URL.

Step 4: The next step is to choose your platform.

 

Step 5: The installation option appears.

You can select your new commenting system for either all new posts or replace all your comments. Select the option as per your preference.

Now, Go to your Blogger Account and download a copy of your template. 

• Blogger > Templates > Backup/Restore.

• Download a copy of your template.

 

Download Full Template

Return to your IntenseDebate Installation process and upload the template you just downloaded from Blogger.

Step6: Now you will be redirected to last step.

Go to your Blogger dashboard > Templates > Edit HTML.
Now replace all the text in Edit HTML box with the one provided to you at IntenseDebate.

Save your template and you are DONE!!

▌ Install CommentLuv Plugin.

You have install InstenseDebate on your blog. Now, the next step is to enable CommentLuv Plugin for your blog.

Go to your dashboard of IntenseDebate. > Plugins.

And Activate CommentLuv. I have already activated CommentLuv for my blog along with smileys in the comments. There are a list of options there and you may activate according to your preference.

Enjoy your new Commenting system.

Chances are that you are going to receive more comments now !! :)

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