A good blog design is one of the important aspects that bind your visitors to your blog. Users prefer to surf a good design blog for a longer time than one with dull appearence or too reflective design. It can automatically create interest in your visitors to read your blog post. Visitors are the one which make your blog run so its neccessary that you keep them happy when they are at your place :).
You can design your own template too, and ofcourse you will be admired for that. I tried to design my own but it went in vain lol :P. Still im working on it so that one day i may come up with one.

Ive come accross many beautiful templates while surfing, wish i could have all of them installed. There are lots of beautiful templates for wordpress blogs available at their official site Wordpress themes
For blogger, there are typical themes available at their official site, so most of the bloggers prefer using external templates. You get thousands of results when you search for blogger templates. Im using theme designed by Jacky Supit a cool theme designer !

I have heared that some themes give problem relating SEO, that they conflict search engines due to stuff like css. I dont know much about this, but will write about this if i find anything.

If you are interested in working part time then you should go for freelancing jobs on net. Freelancing job is the one which is done on temporary basis. There are lots of such jobs available and most are short termed. These jobs include providing website design service, designing a logo for a website, programming and software designing, Database management, account management, etc. The amount you will be paid for such work will depend on the type of work.

You can find these freelancing jobs by just searching the web or if you are a member of a wellknown forum you will find many people who are in need of help and are ready to pay you for providing them service. Third source is online job search engines like monster.com, timesjobs, naukri.com. You subscribe to them and they will mail you loads of job u are interested in.

Firstly i would like to start with what blog and a normal website mean. A blog (weblog) actually a e-dairy, like your daily dairy, through which you can express your feelings and write your experiences. Blogs can be of 2 types : public or private. A public blog can be viewed by all the users on web but a private blog can be viewed just by its authors(just like a personal diary) . Today most of the blogs are used are public and used for information/knowledge sharing purpose. Blogs are used when the content is not static and needs to be added or modified on regular basis. The blog scripts are readily available for free and needs only to be installed on a webspace. You can download one from Wordpress. Or an alternative is getting a free preinstalled blog from Wordpress or Blogger

Talking about normal websites, it is used wherever the content is static, in other words the content is not changed regularly. I prefer blogs for the following reasons :
->various predesigned blog themes (templates) are easily available. U can choose required design for ur blog just at the click of a button(template chooser) . If ur using a website u need to edit ur files to change their appearance or use website editing software on your pc.
->There is no need for uploading an stuff (exept images). Inbuilt editor allows you to add content directly and saving it. Websites need their files to be edited and uploaded many times.
->Easy interaction with users using "comments" . Normally websites use communication through email (non server side execution scripts).

The first best thing a blog owner will wish is, to get his blog sponsored. If you have started a blog yesterday and come searching for sponsors, its very rare that some one will sponsor your blog because sponsors too want themselves to be promoted on reputed blogs. So this is a job of lil bit patience, experience and your networking capablity.

First thing you need to make sure is that your blog is fully "Ready". By the term "Ready" i mean is :
->Your blog should have enough posts.
->You should write quality posts.
->Older your blog better it is, Old is gold :).
->Good page rank, which depends mostly on your blog age, in other words i mean a blog will have better page rank if promoted for longer time. Also visitors build up as the blog is more older and is indexed efficiently by major search engines.

Where will you find the sponsors?
As i had mentioned before, your social network should be large enough (more friends on web). Be in touch with as many bloggers you find on blog communities like mybloglog.com and blogcatalog.com. Some will willingly tell you about the sponsors you need. Also you may come across sponsors directly, all you need to do is know what are their needs and are they related to your niche (topics you work or write on). Do not expect high paying sponsors in the begining, but as time prevails you can get good sponsors with your experience in this stream.

While surfing the web i came across a site that provided an interface between bloggers and sponsorers - Socialspark. Its a community where you can find not only sponsors for your blog but also find offers of writing a sponsored post on your blog.

Backlinks contributes a lot to your pagerank. More the sites linking to you (backlink) , more is your pagerank. And more famous the site linking to you,the more credit you get. Backlinks in other sense increases the
visibility of your site on web, which is the actual reason for higher
pagerank. So here are some points how you can increase your backlinking :

->Dont forget to comment on each and every blog you visit (Do not spam).
What i mean is, write some good things about that blog (not your blog),
and include your URL over there.

->Participate in forums, include your URL whenever you post an entry.

->Linking within your sites, for eg. if you have 3 pages on your blog/site, add a link to 2nd page from 1st page, add a link to 3rd page from 2nd page, and from 3rd to first. If you are using a blog then each post will act as a new page, so what you can do is link the main keywords of the site to the main page eg. for Make money online add <a href="http://www.cool-blogger.com">Make money online</a> to the blogpost.

->You can do what is "Link Exchange" with other blogs. This simply means
you put his URL on your blog and he puts your URL on his blog. If you
dont want it to appear to your visitors (anyways other person wont get
loads of visitors from your site to his through this link) just use the
link name as . (dot) eg.
<a href="http://www.cool-blogger.com">.</a> will look like
. . Human eyes wont read it, but search engine crawlers will!

->Whenever you join any community or a social bookmarking site dont forget to add your site in your profile.

->Submit your site to all free directories available on web.

Here are some tools which will help you to keep an eye on no of backlinks :

Seopro.com.au

Submitedge.com

Rankalert.net

Smartpagerank.com

Here is a link to submit your site to top search engines/directories :

Addme

Related Sites :
Link-building-bible