As the next step in promoting three sites:

The Designer Diva
The Bikini Body Diet
The Discount Diva

I have actively been visiting and posting in forums. Trying to increase my visibility.

Last night, after visiting a forum, it was becoming very clear that there are a lot of "blind" leading the "blind" out there. Questions about re-designing skins, ad optimization, monetizing your blog are answered by other bloggers who have no practical knowledge of the application and process.

Question: How do I change the width of my column in Blogger?
Answer: Try Wordpress
My comment: Lem did you do this??

Tip: Optimize your ads and have your content wrap around it.
Moderator Comment: You are violating your TOS and you could lose it.

I guess I've been just so spoiled rotten. I have had all the help I need from day one and great examples to follow. I also am very quick to learn new things and change when it is not working.

So, I have compiled just a few blogging tips:

1. Your Blogger pre-made template is designed in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It is designed that way to load faster than standard html. It does not behave like your regular html. Dont attempt to redesign it until you have researched the web for CSS tuturials.

Here is a good place to start - http://www.ablewebeditor.com/Program/CSS%20SiteMap.html. After reading this, and everything still seems foreign to you, dont try to fix what's not broken. Just find a template that works for you. Go to www.blogskins.com and pick up a new template. They have 11,306 royalty free templates to chose from. One challenge, though, is they obsoleted their categories. You now have to go to tags, click the tag of your choice, and the templates will show up.

2. If you want to go ahead and make simple changes on your blog such as colors, backgrounds, pictures. Here are a couple of references you might want to keep as favourites.

COLOR CHARTS
http://gotomy.com/color.html
http://web.njit.edu/~kevin/rgb.txt.html
http://www.december.com/html/spec/color.html

BACKGROUNDS
http://www.feedfinder.net/webground/main.shtml
http://www.eskimo.com/~physmith/pldndots.html
http://www.mediabuilder.com/tile3.html

PICTURES
http://www.clipartcastle.com/cgi-bin/imageFolio.cgi?direct=photos&img=12

2. If you want to be adventurous and make all these cool things appear on your blog - slideshows, collapsible headers, stylized links, etc, you can pick up javascripts to add to the of your blog. These scripts are pre-made and it's just a matter of click and paste.

http://www.javascriptkit.com/
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/

3. If you want to monitize your blog and see results, I suggest you visit X and learn from the expert. Like I said, I've been spoiled rotten.