How to Make Lemon Curd

Lemon curd is a close cousin to the familiar lemon meringue pie filling and, in fact, could be used to fill pies or tarts. Curd is typically used to fill small tarts, served with scones or served on toast. One of the best known flavors of curd is lemon but other flavors are well known and include, orange, lime or raspberry. All make for yummy tea time treats.

Curd typically contains citrus juice, eggs, butter and sugar. The mixture is a custard base and requires gentle heating to prevent curdling.

Recipe makes about 1 1/2 cups.

EditIngredients

• Juice of 7-8 lemons nice and ripe (1/2 cup lemon juice)
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon lemon zest, grated
• 1/4 cup butter

EditSteps

1. 1
   

    Whisk eggs, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest and eggs.
   Whisk eggs, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest and eggs.
2. 2
   

    Stir in the butter with a spoon.
   Stir in the butter with a spoon.
3. 3
   

    Bring the mixture to a simmer, or a low boil.
   Bring the mixture to a simmer, or a low boil. Cook about 15 minutes.
4. 4
   

    Let cool.
   Let cool.
5. 5
   

    Store in the refrigerator in a small glass jar.
   Store in the refrigerator in a small glass jar.
6. 6
   

    Eat and enjoy your own lemon curd!.
   Eat and enjoy your own lemon curd!

EditVideo

EditTips

• Use a whisk to initially stir the ingredients together. When the curd starts to thicken, you will have to switch to a spoon to stir the mixture.
• Cook over low heat to prevent curdling.
• The mixture will just coat a spoon when the curd is cooked through.

EditThings You'll Need

• Measuring cups
• Measuring spoons
• Whisk
• Cooking spoon
• Small saucepan
• Glass jar to store curd

How To Get More Traffic On Your Blog

If you have started blogging, then the next thing that you want to do is to get more traffic in it. Then you ask how to get more traffic in your blog, if you don’t know what to do? Below are some tips to get more traffic on your blog.

These tips are proven and many blogs have sky-rocketed their traffic by just doing these tips.

1. SEO plus great content – Search engine optimization would always be the best thing that you should do to get organic traffic in your blog. If you do have a great content but have poor SEO then it would be hard to get traffic in your blog. Or it’ll take a lot of time before you win the traffic that you want.

But if you do SEO and don’t write great content or shall we say blogging for SEO, then Search Engines might penalize you by doing it. Therefore, you’ll never have the chance of having high organic traffic in your blog.

2. Get straight to the point – Once a visitor landed on your blog, make sure that you give them the thing that they need instantly. If you confuse them with a lot of text in your blog where he need to slowly scan your post for the answer that he’s finding, and then he might leave your blog and search for another blog instead.

3. Write guest posts on other blogs – This will make your blog sky rocket its traffic fast. Regardless of SEO and other stuff, if you are good in writing, then try offering guest posts to high traffic blogs. In this way, your blog will sky rocket its traffic without worrying on what to write next on your blog.

Guest posting is the fastest and most effective way on how to get traffic in your blog. It’s true. You don’t need to be SEO expert to get traffic on your blog. Just guest post on blogs and you’ll achieve the traffic that you dream of.

4. Giveaway gifts – Free Ebook would be a great gift to giveaway to your visitors. They’ll most likely share this gift or tell their social friends about it. This way they’ll be promoting your blog indirectly.

5. Keep your visitors – Once your visitors visited your blog, offer them what they want. Make them happy, give what they want and to get more in touch, offer them to sign up on your list.

In this way, you can communicate on your visitor regularly. You can keep in-contact with that visitor and keep him coming back on your blog.

6. Be Sociable – Social media buttons are great way to get traffic on your blog. Install them in your blog, so that your visitors could share your post to their friends.

Social media sites are very important today. They can give your blog free traffic and the chance to be known on the niche that you blog about.

Never ever give up!
There are times that you feel that you’re just wasting your time on blogging. Don’t think that way. Be a positive thinker. We all want to get a high traffic blog, so we should be determined on achieving it.

25 Tips That Will Increase Your Blog Traffic

These are some of the best tips that you can apply to your blog to increase its traffic.

1. Create content that your audience would likely share it.
2. Participate in blogging communities.
3. Customize your blog for SEO.
4. Use Facebook, Google+ and Twitter to share your fresh blog posts.
5. Use Google Analytics and examine what gives you the best traffic.
6. Use Images and illustrations.
7. Use keyword research tool before creating a blog post.
8. Link your posts.
9. Make use of the power of StumbleUpon.
10. Write guest posts on blogs.
11. Create simple but nice blog design.
12. Answer comments.
13. Participate in forums.
14. Make your readers subscribe to your blog using your feed.
15. Promote your blog offline.
16. Email your friends and connections but don't spam.
17. Create a survey in your blog.
18. Get an eye catching headline for your blog post title.
19. Link your old posts to your new post.
20. Invite readers to participate in your StumbleUpon community.
21. Link to popular posts in your blog.
22. Create a killer content. Save it and publish it once it's full in information.
23. Solve problems.
24. Guest post on a popular blog.
25. Answer questions of readers in your email.

35 Social Networking Sites For Blog Promotion

Below are the Social networking sites for blog promotion. These sites are not arranged according to their rankings. These sites would be helpful on promoting a blog, especially those blogs who just started. Take advantage of using these sites and see your stats grow!

1. Twitter
2. Sky Rock
3. Hi5
4. Google Plus
5. Youtube
6. Facebook
7. LinkedIn
8. Ning
9. StumbleUpon
10. Digg
11. Meetup
12. Orkut
13. Badoo
14. Netlog
15. Myspace
16. Flickr
17. Bebo
18. LiveJournal
19. Tagged
20. DeviantArt
21. Last.fm
22. BlackPlanet
23. Squidoo
24. Reddit
25. Delicious
26. Technorati
27. Pinterest
28. BuzzFeed
29. Tweetmeme
30. Fark
31. Slashdot
32. Friendfeed
33. Gather
34. Multiply
35. Yahoo Bookmarks

How To Drive Traffic to a Blog?

If you are a blogger I'm sure that you have asked this question before "How to drive traffic to a blog?" How? There are plenty of ways on how to increase traffic to blog. There are almost thousands of ways on how to promote a blog.

Earn your readers trust

In building readership to a blog you need to earn your readership's trust. You keep your blog posts real and honest. That's the first rule you need to implement in order to increase traffic in your blog. Don't write something that you don't really know. For example if you're writing on how to drive traffic to a blog and don't know how to, explain that you never have increased your traffic until you learn something from someone.

Build subscribers to your blog

It is one of the effective ways on how to increase blog traffic. But it is one of the most unimplemented things by bloggers. Some bloggers don't offers subscription options to their blog which will increase blog traffic. Returning visitors are part of your blog traffic and in order to make a first time visitor on your blog visit again, you need to make them subscribe on your blog.

Your blog should worth subscribing to

In order to your reader to subscribe on your blog, you should offer something on it. For example you're writing about how to increase traffic on blog, you should tell your readers that you're going to write more about that topic. Offer them subscription option to keep them updated on your latest posts.

That's what readers subscribe to. They are searching for something that they are interested with. It is not an obvious way on how to increase traffic on your blog. But it's one of the most effective ways. One of my blog before has a lot of subscribers before, and it does sometimes give few amounts of traffic but most of the time it give plenty.

Basically I asked visitors to subscribe on my blog to make them updated on my latest posts. I usually asked them at the ending part of a blog post. That's how to increase my blog traffic and one of the best ways that I did on how to increase traffic to my blog.

Spend money and save money

You can spend money to increase traffic on your blog. But you can also save your money and build traffic on your blog for free. To spend money, there are plenty of ways. StumbleUpon today offers "Paid Discovery" which will increase traffic on your blog depending on how you will do it.

Paid Discovery will make your blog visited by a visitor for as low as $0.1 per visitor. Therefore, you must create a very effective landing page for this Paid Discovery. A page that you think is the best of the best posts on your blog. A page that you think your visitors would share if they read it. In short a killer page.

If you don't want to spend money, there are also a lot of ways on how to increase blog traffic for free. The most common way on how to increase blog traffic for free is to use social networking sites. You'll need to be creative and effective on sharing your post of these sites. Think of ways on how to attract a social network user to visit your blog.

Social networking sites now allow you to share links, your latest updates post, etc. These are the things that you can use in promoting your blog in social networking sites and obviously the best way on how to increase blog traffic for free.

Image Courtesy of emails4all

Do the guest posting

Guest posting is one of the most effective ways on how to drive traffic to a blog. Blog with high authority or those blogs with thousands of traffic coming in should be your target. This technique is the most popular today that bloggers do to increase their blog traffic. They ask the author of the blog to publish their guest post on their blog and most of the authors accept it.

Both bloggers and authors benefit on guest posting. Authors will have automatic content on their blog with keywords that bloggers use, and on the other hand bloggers will attract visitors coming in the blog that they guest post to. It can also build link on the blogger's which is important in search engine optimization.

There are so many more ways on how to drive traffic to a blog. But these are tips for now. Subscribe to Blogspot Mastery to know more about how to increase blog traffic.

How To Add Facebook Social Buttons For Blogger

Q: I want to have the standard Facebook social media button for Blogger blog. I do have a blog about blogging, how will I add this button on my blog?

A: Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites in the whole world today. Everybody has an account of this; Young, old, teenager, baby, business and even pets. Most of Facebook users are non-bloggers. Most of them use Facebook as a medium to connect to their friends all over the world. But bloggers take advantage of this amazing website by adding social buttons for their Blogger blogs. These social buttons for Blogger blogs are one of the traffic pullers to their blog. With the help of these social buttons for Blogger blogs, bloggers gain exposure to their blog when someone uses it.

Blogs with media topic benefits more of the gadget. Just like what I said, most Facebook users are not bloggers. Most of the people who share a post to their Facebook page are non-bloggers. Most of them are just internet surfers who search something interesting that they can share to their friends on Facebook. That’s why non-blogging topic has the advantage to this.

Most of the blog topics that benefit on this gadget are movies, television programs, radio programs, podcasts, sports and more.

Below are the steps on adding the standard gadget for Facebook:
Log-in to your blogger account and go to template then Edit HTML then Proceed.
Click on the “Expand widget templates”
Search this code using CTRL+F on your keyboard. <data:post.body/>
After or before the code, paste the code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;static_page&quot;'>
<iframe allowTransparency='true' expr:src='&quot;http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=&quot; + data:post.canonicalUrl + &quot;&amp;send=false&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=35&quot;' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:35px;'/>
</b:if>

Then finally, save the template.

If done correctly, the widget should appear like this:

If you want to use a widget with like and count button in box, do the same step except for adding the long code above. Instead, add this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;static_page&quot;'>
<iframe allowTransparency='true' expr:src='&quot;http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=&quot; + data:post.canonicalUrl + &quot;&amp;send=false&amp;layout=box_count&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=55&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=65&quot;' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='border:none; overflow:hidden; width:55px; height:65px;'/>
</b:if>

If done correctly, a widget should appear like this on the post:

That’s it. With these social buttons for Blogger blog, you’re ready to skyrocket your blog traffic with shares of your friends in Facebook. Just a warning, if you’re not so good in editing html on your blog it is recommended that you back up your blog first before editing it. You don’t want any hassles on designing your blog, do you?

Share this Facebook social buttons for Blogger blogs to your blogger friends and start gaining shares from them. If you do like this social buttons for Blogger, you might want to share it to your Facebook friends. Go ahead and reward me with your shares!

How to Add an RSS Feed on Blogger

Blogger.com is a popular blogging site that provides not only the storage space and bandwidth for a blog, but also a number of tools that can make a blog more effective. One important blog capability is the ability to automatically display new entries from other blogs. Also called "Really Simple Syndication," or RSS. You can add this capability easily to a Blogger.com blog.

Instructions

1. • 1
     Log into your Blogger.com account. This will take you to your Blogger Dashboard, which is a list of all of your blogs on the site along with controls for customizing them.
   • 2
     Select "Layout" for your desired blog. The "Layout" tab will be displayed, providing a graphical representation of your blog, including the area where blog posts appear and areas where you can add customized elements.
   • 3
     Click on "Add a Page Element." Another window will open with a list of elements that you can add to your blog. Select "Add to Blog" underneath the "Feed" element, which opens a "Configure Feed" dialog box.
   • 4
     Copy the RSS link URL from the external blog. Most blogs place their RSS link as either text or an RSS icon somewhere on their blog. Clicking on this link will open a Web browser page with the feed URL, often a Feedburner.com address. Select this link and copy it to the clipboard.
   • 5
     Paste the RSS link URL into the "Feed URL" box of the Blogger "Configure Feed" dialog. Select "Continue." If you make a mistake, click "Cancel" and start again.
   • 6
     Save your changes. After clicking on "Continue," a dialog box will open showing the title of the blog feed you are publishing, an option to select how many items you wish to display, and check boxes to show "Item dates" and "Item sources/authors." Make your selections, review how the feed will look on your blog, and select "Save Changes" when satisfied.
   • 7
     Place your new feed. The feed you just added will show up as the top item in your list of side page elements. Left-click, hold, and drag the feed element to move it to a different slot on the side, or to the top or bottom section of your blog. When satisfied, click on "Save." Then click "Preview" to see how your new feed appears. Use "Clear Edits" to undo the changes and start over.

19 Tips On How To Make Your Blog Better

Looking for ways on how to make your blog better? Do you want to make a better blog but don't know where to start to? This list will help you on how to make your blog improve.

1. Get a domain name

For better branding, you should get your own domain name. Stop relying on a sub domain, buy your own domain and start building your brand.

2. Use keywords in your domain name

Search engines will be glad to rank your blog if it has the keyword that you want to rank high in your domain name.

3. Install self-hosted blog

Wordpress.org is the most common blog that bloggers use. Install it and direct your domain name into it. This will also give you the access to use thousands of plug-ins that you want in your blog.

4. Think out of the box for your blog name and brand

There are so many blogs that has the same topic, brand and style. Think on how to be unique to them.

5. Focus on one topic

If you have a lot of topics on your blog, it will take a lot of time to build your blog brand. Be focused on a single or only one topic. This will attract more visitors to your blog and at the same time will make your blog better.

6. Publish only nice articles

Give all you can give on writing your articles. If you need to build a blog post that has rich information, save it and don't publish it right away. It will be a killer article that would make your readers shares it.

7. Create a catchy and attention grabber title

In each blog post, write attention grabber title for it like how-to and top-list. Readers love these kinds of articles. It's usual. Most readers are searching for this kind of articles.

8. Add related posts at the end of each of your blog posts

Readers will crave for more of your articles if they want what you write. Offer them related posts at the end of your articles. This will increase your page views and will make your readers satisfied.

9. Get rid of that comment spammers

If you're on Wordpress.org, activate Akismet. It will save a lot of your time and will protect your blog for comment spammers if you activate it. Be a spam hater!

10. Stay focused

Relax! It will take time. Don't blog too much. Just stay focused on what you are blogging about. Don't jump from one topic to another. This will confuse both search engine and your readers. Keep your topic still. This is an important thing on how to make your blog better.

11. Use strong username and password for your blog

Blogging takes time and sometimes it takes years before you earn on that blog. Therefore, use the strongest username and password for your blog to avoid it to be hacked. Your efforts will be void if your blog will be stolen so build a strong barrier. Build a strong password for it.

12. Use premium theme instead of a free one

Premium themes offer more options. This is another great way on how to make your blog better. There are thousands of free themes that you can use for your blog. Therefore, thousands of blogger are using it too. Be unique and use premium themes for your blog.

13. Be consistent on building your brand

There are thousands of blog that have been changing their blog from time to time. Stand out and don't be one of them. Build a better brand for your blog and be consistent on it. It is hard to be consistent on branding your blog, but it is possible. Be still!

14. Burn your feed and publicize it

Burning your feed alone will not build readership on your blog. You need to work on it. Offer RSS feed and email subscriptions on your blog to make your readers subscribe on it. This way, you're going to keep that first time visitor to a loyal reader of your blog.

15. Offer email subscription

Email is one of the most used in the internet today. Almost 9 of 10 has an active email account. Offer subscription on your blog using email. A lot of readers don't know what feed subscription is, so offer the best option for them, use email subscription on your blog.

16. Offer your readers blog comment subscription

When a reader comments on your blog, he might want to monitor who is going to reply on that comment. So offer your readers comment subscription so that they will be able to go back to your blog and leave a comment again.

17. Use Google Analytics

If you don't have a Google Analytics account yet, sign up now and take the advantage of monitoring your blog traffic. This will allow you to study the flow of your blog so that you're aware on how your traffic grows.

18. Create sitemap for your blog

A sitemap will allow search engines to crawl and find your blog archives more easily. Create a sitemap for your blog, it’s one of the best ways on how to make your blog better.

19. Make your blog easy to scan

Most of visitors on a website or blog only scan its content. Make it easier for them to scan your blog by using sub-headings, direct to the point paragraphs, numbered or lists in bullets.

Those are some of the best tips that you can implement to make your blog better. Subscribe for more updates.