Posted by Courtney, AdSense North America team

AdSense is a great way to get paid for doing what you love to do: blogging! AdSense allows you to show targeted ads on your blog and earn revenue from your traffic. It also helps your visitors find things they may be interested in, based on the content of your blog posts. Best of all, AdSense is free and you have the option to remove the ads at any time.

The AdSense system shows ads relevant to the content of your blog and you can easily customize the look and feel of the ads to match your blog. If your blog is about fashion, you may show ads for shoe designers or clothing stores. If your blog is about cars, you may see ads for car dealerships or auto shops. Using filters, you can have control over the content of the ads you display by choosing to block categories of ads or even specific advertisers.

With the free suite of powerful AdSense reporting tools, you can pull detailed reports that will help you track your revenue and identify opportunities to earn more money. You can see earnings by day, page, domain or specific ad unit and can also use Google Analytics to see the source of your traffic and earnings.

Adding AdSense to your blog is easy. Just follow these steps:

1. Log in to Blogger, choose your blog, and go to the “Monetize | Set up AdSense” tab.
2. Choose where you want to show your ads on your blog and hit “Next.”
3. If you’re new to AdSense, follow the easy online steps to sign up for a new AdSense account. If you already use AdSense, you can log in to AdSense and link your Blog to your AdSense account.

If you’re using a Classic template, you can add AdSense to your blog by following the steps outlined here.

To learn even more, come take a tour with Google AdSense.

Posted by Jiho Han, Software Engineer

Sharing is an important feature for bloggers. When your readers find an interesting post, they probably want to share it with other people; this in turn brings more traffic back to your blog.

Blogger now offers new share buttons. The new buttons can be placed under each post and let your blog readers easily share your post via email, Blogger, and popular social networks—we now support Google Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook, and we plan to add more services in the future.

Blogger also has a Share link in the navbar, but for improved convenience you can now have share buttons below the post (we also gave them nice rollover icons). For Twitter, we’ve also integrated the goo.gl URL shortener to give you the maximum space in the Tweet to add your own remarks.

You can start having the new share buttons show up under your posts by editing the Blog Posts widget and enabling Show Share Buttons in Design | Page Elements. Go ahead and turn the new sharing buttons on, and let some fun sharing begin!

You might have already noticed that in addition to the Blogger Template Designer, we added some other new features in our recent release.

First, the accurate post preview, a feature that’s been available on Blogger in Draft, is now available to everyone. Before you publish a post, you may want to preview your post to see how it will actually look to your readers, in the same format and style of your current Blogger theme. To try it, click the Preview button on the New Post page. You will see a new window open with the accurate preview of the post.




We also introduced a new video player that’s based on the YouTube player. The new Blogger video player allows full-screen viewing -- now visitors can watch videos that you published on your blog in full-screen mode. The new player also features a better user interface, such as animated seekbar (the red bar along the bottom of the video) and bigger buttons. You can also right-click on the player to see more information about the video, such as playback performance (“Show Video Info”) or network speed (“Take Speed Test”). Note that despite the new video player, the videos you upload to Blogger are still only visible on your blog, not on YouTube.



As always, please send your suggestions and feedback through the Blogger User Forum. Thanks for using Blogger!

When we launched the Blogger Template Designer to Blogger in Draft in March, you gave us a lot of feedback and suggestions. Our blog post received nearly 1,000 comments and many of you shared your blog’s new looks on Twitter using #newbloggertemplate. Since the launch, we fixed many bugs and added even more themes and background images. But the Blogger Template Designer has only been available on Blogger in Draft, which is why we’re excited to announce that the Blogger Template Designer is now available to everyone.




Highlights

How you look online is important, and everybody wants to look unique. With the Blogger Template Designer, you can create your own blog designs through:

• Beautiful new templates. We’ve designed 19 brand-new templates, with more on the way. You can quickly give your blog a great new style by selecting one of the new templates.[1]
• Separating design from layout. Designs are completely defined in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), meaning that any design can be applied to any blog layout, making templates more flexible and unique.
• Hundreds of free, professional background images. We've paired up with iStockphoto to offer you hundreds of gorgeous background images at no cost.
• A single control to change all your design's colors. With other platforms, users have to define every color in their blog separately, making changing the color theme of your blog a tedious task. The Blogger Template Designer lets you change all the colors in your blog at once, by changing the Main color theme.
• Pixel-perfect layout manipulation via smooth resizing. You can define your layout down to the pixel via sliders that update the blog's preview in real time.
• A real-time preview sits below the design control panel. Watch your blog update as you create your template design.
• Keeping it simple. Throughout the Template Designer we use hierarchy to hide complexity from you.
• Complete control. Under the advanced tab, you can override a design's CSS and enter your own CSS in the editor and see your blog's preview updated in real time.
• Cross-browser support. Blogger handles cross browser support for you, so you don’t have to. Want a design with rounded corners? We give it to you in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.

Try it now!

Anyone can try out the template designer here. If you like your design, you can apply it to a new blog or to an existing blog. You can also try the Template Designer on your blog (Design > Template Designer).

Feel free to spread the word with the #newbloggertemplate hashtag on Google Buzz or Twitter. If you are a template designer, you are also welcome to join the Blogger Template Design Group.  If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know on the forums.

As always, thanks for using Blogger!


[1] Note: Selecting a new template will erase all of your customizations on the existing template, so if you have customized your template be sure to first save the current template at Design > Edit HTML.

We're working hard to make Blogger better and need your help. Sign up for a usability study and give us feedback on some exciting new ideas currently in development. These study results will help us better understand your needs and refine our features before they launch.

Interested? Sign up here.

Update: We have now closed the sign-up. We really appreciate your great interest! 

Posted by Caroline Vanderlip, CEO SharedBook


Since we announced the Blog2Print/Blogger program last Fall, we at Blog2Print have been busy enhancing Blog2Print in response to user feedback and requests. Our goal is to maintain the integrity and ease of the blog–to-book creation process while providing you with more editing power and control over your blog books.

I’m pleased to tell you we now offer two different layout options for your blog books: Compact and Snapshot. Compact, the original page layout, arranges your blog posts, captions, and photos into a page that makes the best use of space and minimizes the number of total pages. The new layout, Snapshot, keeps the positioning of captions, photos, and text as it appeared in your posts online.

Meanwhile, we understand that some posts just aren't meant to be preserved, and you should be able to decide which posts you put in your book. Now you can, as individual posts can easily be deleted from your blog book. Especially when given as a gift – sometimes a little editing is needed here or there before a blog book is gift ready. And speaking of gifts, you can now buy a Gift Card for Blog2Print.

A few more changes: we’ve raised the maximum number of photos to 1500 in one book, added Safari support, and modified the User Agreement to clarify that bloggers continue to own all of their content and can resell their books if they choose – just make sure you own all relevant copyrights.

With your invaluable feedback, Blog2Print continues to evolve and improve. Please – keep asking! We’ll keep delivering.

by Jiho Han, Software Engineer, Blogger

When Google Buzz launched in February, many wondered how they could share cool posts to their Buzz stream. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Blogger has made it easy to share to Google Buzz via the Share button in the Blogger navigation bar. Just click “Share”, choose Google Buzz, and you’ll be able to customize your message before posting to Buzz.





Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. Better yet, all comments to your Buzz post get sent right to your Gmail inbox so it's easy to keep the conversation going. Just go to the Google Buzz homepage and give it a try! We know you write interesting stuff, so sharing to Buzz is a great way to spread the word about your blog.

Building your audience is important, and sharing to social networks is a great way to promote your site. We are committed to make the sharing experience better on Blogger: more updates are on their way, so please stay tuned.

by Noah Fiedel, Blogger Tech Lead

Five weeks ago we rolled out Auto Pagination, a major milestone in our efforts to make Blogger faster for you and your readers. We are very happy to report a ten percent overall decrease in page loading latency across all Blogger blogs and a twenty-seven percent decrease on archive pages.

Just how significant is a ten percent latency reduction? It's not often that software engineers get to save lives, yet in just the past five weeks we’ve saved eight human lifetimes spent waiting for pages to load! Every week saves an additional:

• 1 Million Hours
• 114 Years
• 1.6 Human Lifetimes

Some of you have expressed concern over the change in how Blogger displays your blogs. Without addressing each individual case, the vast majority of blogs negatively impacted were not actually blogs, but were using Blogger as a kind of free web host. As today’s post makes clear, Auto Pagination has had an extraordinarily positive impact on how blogs are consumed — blog readers are spending less time waiting for pages to load and more time reading the posts you work so hard to write. (By the way: if your pages show fewer posts than you would like, we recommend using After the Jump to ensure that your readers can see more posts per page.)

If a ten percent improvement has such a major impact, what else can be done to speed up your blog? One area we’re looking at is third-party JavaScript. We remain one of the few blogging services to allow users unlimited ability to add JavaScript to their pages — but that flexibility comes at a cost. These JavaScript widgets often add several seconds to page loads — even on fast Internet connections. We’ll talk more about this in a future post; in the mean time, you can try out Google’s Page Speed to identify what might be causing a page to load slowly.

As always, thanks for using Blogger!

by Siobhan Quinn, Blogger Product Manager​






In the Template Designer, you’ll find:

• 15 new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of professional background images from iStockphoto
• Customizable colors, fonts, and more!

That being said, today’s launch is just the beginning. We’ll add more of our own designs over the coming weeks and months and, through the new Template Design Group, we’ll be working with members of the Blogger design community to bring their templates into the new Template Designer.



Help test drive the Blogger Template Designer by logging into Blogger In Draft, and learn more about the new features in more detail on the Blogger In Draft blog.