When it comes to personal blogging, I've done a lot of experimenting, and at the end of the day I'm convinced of one thing. Every blog should offer these five ways for their followers to follow along. Facebook, Twitter, Email, RSS Feed, and Blogger. Less than that, you're losing potential followers. More than that is simply unnecessary with the exception of YouTube if you also have a YouTube channel.
I've had a lot of followers write in and ask me how to put the buttons that I use on Single Dad Laughing and Will Work 4 Followers onto their own blogs. And until now, you couldn't because they were buttons that I made custom for my blog. They are by far the most effective subscriber grabbers I've tried (and I've experimented with many methods). And, since I'm not a button hog, I've put together several variations that you can easily put onto your own blog. Doing so is as easy as 1, 2, 3.
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Follow Buttons: Facebook, Twitter, Email, RSS, Blogger
How to remove the top navigation bar in Blogger
When you start any Blogger blog, it automatically installs a navigation bar or banner running across the top of the screen with the links: "Follow," "Share," "Report Abuse," and "Next Blog." This is called the "navbar" and is a real eye sore to most visitors. The good news is, removing the navigation bar in Blogger is easy.
"But, wait? Don't I want those links?" you may ask... Not generally. The only two links that are really useful to you are first the "Follow" link, but you took care of that in a much sexier way when you installed your classy and sexy follow buttons, right? And the "Share" link, but there are much better ways to setup sharing on your blog (which I'll discuss soon).
The "Next Blog" link takes visitors away from your blog. The "Report Abuse" button let's people report your blog to Google which could lead to Google taking action against you (and, subsequently also leaves internet trolls the easy opportunity to try and sabotage you, though this isn't generally a problem).
But more than anything, it's amateurish and ugly. It screams "I have an out-of-the-box Blogger blog!" So, my advice is to ditch it. Here's how you do it (please note that this doesn't work in the old version of blogger, but you can still do it. Check out this page for more info on that. Be sure to scroll down to the section about Classic Blogger templates).
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