Hi there, I am pretty new to blackhat; I have read many posts saying that the key is to focus on one area, and then move on, rather than doing a little here and there.

I have decided to focus on blogging (using blo*gger.c0m initially since its free, and have been creating 20 blogs per account.

Was wondering if fallow balckhat members had any recommended themes that will maximize ads/affiliate income? Personally, I have found this template pretty decent: http://btemplates.com/2008/04/10/ads-themes/

which is pretty clean and decent.

Also if you have and advice on monetizing this method, that will be great; currently I am manually using g00gl*etra*slate.c0m to quickly rewrite articles specific to the blogs and posting them that way. Somewhat timecosuming.

any advice will be greatly appreciated.

thanks

That kind of blogger template is an overused template my amigo every tom, dick and harry uses that kind of template. If you still insist to to have that template for your flagship project then go ahead but be sure to have a customized header and logo just to be different from the other garden-variety blogs out there. In terms of its neatness, I agree with you, it's sleek and most of all it's a decent template.

I use this theme on all my blogger blogs, it have a good ad placement.
(not only good for adsense)

Thanks for the input guys, that 3 column blogger looks pretty sweet too.

Yeah, I was going for a template that requires minimum changes; many of the templates do have ad(s)ense spots integrated already; all you need to do is switch it over to your account and blend the color scheme.

The template I suggested has square corners and stuff and is pretty easy to change bgcolor, image and header's and stuff without messing up too much of the design (as opposed to fixed image centered designs, round corners, overlapping images, etc)

I've been using acosmin.com themes for wordpress those are pretty good

If you're a Photoshop Ninja, you can utilize Photoshop to customize your header. If you just want a basic graphic ware you can use Banner Maker Pro because it's pretty easy to use. On the other hand, if you have plenty of scratch to spend you can outsource the job to the experts.

that acrosmin.com theme looks pretty sweet and clean. Yeah, when I get to that point, I would sure like to spend on a designer to create a custome sweet looking blog.

For starters who want to test out the water, I found some of the blogg*er templates to be pretty good ... keeping in mind here that the main focus is the ease of setup and maximizing the click through.

Simple changing the background to a related repeated gif can sometimes easily make the site look better.

Here's one such example
hxxp://cupcoffeemak*er.blogs*pot.c0m/

Hmmm' I smelled the freshly brewed coffee. One cup of brewed coffee please. Anway, happy blogging Bro.

here is my blog with blogger theme, its really beautiful theme :

www.samsvojboss.com ( its on bosnian )

Wow its awesome, I like it very much. Just one question why is it you didn't place a favicon above?

I never bothered with favicons

Which ever template that you choose, should be checked for foot prints.

Take out the links that are already there, as well as any references to other sites that you can.....

Look at the words on the template and change up as much as you can....

This really helps and is worth your time.

Nice Bosnian blog....

Niche1 is right you should yank out any affiliate links which are not yours and any embedded links in the template which ushers you anywhere. Usually these links drive you to the author's/coder's joined affiliates programs.

Thanks for the feedback guys, appreciate it.

samsvojboss, Nice cusotmization there ... I like how you have the language options. Would be nice if I can move to a wordpress blog where I have access to the source code and use goog*le tran*slatio*n API to actually create static pages for each language; heard it helps a bit for seo.

As for the affiliate links, I'll look into the html source more to edit these links out of the default templates. Also, another advice I have is that many of these templates use <div> css for the header text; not the best for seo.

Its pretty simple to edit the html on blogg*er to change these to <h1> and <h2> tags, so that your blog is more optimized for your target keyword (which should be the name/title/subdomain of your blogg*er's blog as well).