I’ve just uploaded my free e-course ‘What and how to use widgets’ which explains what widgets are, what they are for and how to put them on your blog.
So what are widgets? Well, look at your sidebar and see all the various elements that are situated there. These are widgets, individual applications or programme processes that allow you to put up a picture, add in a subscription form, show which pages and posts I have written, list my comments, show feeds to my social media and many other things.
Usually you mention the word ‘widget’ and the uninitiated will wince and look worried, but really it is very easy to cope with widgets once you understand them, and that is exactly what my free widget e-course does.
I have seen many blogs, not even new ones, who have not fully taken on what their widgets can do for them. To me, to see an unpopulated sidebar missing vital elements that enhance a blog as regards search engine optimisation (SEO), allowing readers to find past posts and participate in comments, even to realise there are other pages to be read, is a wasted opportunity.
The widgets that are really needed are:
• a method for your reader to subscribe to your blog (either a sign up form for emails or chicklit logo to subscribe to a Google reader)
• show which posts you have written recently
• show the comments people have left
• show your categories (topics)
• show your tags (keywords)
• show your links to other websites or blogs you recommend reading
• how to access your blog
And then there are widgets to make your blog more usable for both your readers and the search engine spiders:
• access to other pages
• links to your social media profiles
• RSS feeds to your Twitter stream, other blogs, delicious or other social networks
• see who has visited recently
• pictures, either on their own or as links to elsewhere
• archive details
• search mechanisms
If you have a Wordpress.com blog, widgets are already available to you (dependent upon which theme you have chosen). If you’ve used Wordpress.org to create your blog then some widgets will need to be added via plug-ins, of which there are many thousands to choose from, including the option to retweet posts you want to recommend and share the post with other social networking sites.
Find out how to add widgets to your blog, or just brush up on the ones you haven’t used yet – the widget world is really worth exploring!
The next thing that should be noticeable is how your readers can subscribe to your blog. There are many methods of doing this, but the most prominent one should be a form for email notifications of your new posts. It’s much easier to receive emails than to regularly go to your Google Reader or glance through the cookies on your personal iGoogle homepage. Make sure the subscription invitations are placed high up on your sidebar.
RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is easily recognisable through the orange square icon found at the top of most blogs’ sidebars.
A search engine reader provides pages with links to newly available posts, or individual ‘cookies’ on the search engine homepage which lists the last three posts of that blog through headline links.
In Facebook the whole post is published in the Notes pages, and your Homepage or Status page shows the headline link (known as a permalink) with perhaps the first few lines of the post as a taster.
RSS is important if you wish to increase your readership or encourage more interest from search engines. It is a piece of software that encourages the search engine spiders to follow your blog, and automatically spreads your news throughout the web. Without it your blog would appear lifeless as only those who are invited would get a chance to read it, and only if they bothered to visit it regularly. RSS automatically delivers your messages without effort, saves time and encourages a new readership, especially through social media.
Blogging less can be effective too
Friday, July 3rd, 2009I would like to reprint a portion of a post How to get more time to blog by Michael Martine of Remarkablogger, Blog Consultant and Blog Coach. I hope he doesn’t mind, but it raised some points that I wanted to share with you and hope you would find interesting.
Blog Less
Despite the fact that nearly every blog-advice blogger on the planet says you should blog every day, quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to blogging (most people aren’t successful, so why is doing everything they do a good idea? Hmm?). I’ve seen this first hand for myself, ever since I dropped down from seven posts a week to 5, and now I’m down to a whopping single post per week. Did I kill my business? No! In fact, my subscriber count and my income are up, up, up! (Some of you are aware of FeedBurner recently adding FriendFeed subscribers in with feed counts, which raised everyone’s feed subscriber counts overnight — I’m talking about an increase I saw before FeedBurner made this change.)
It’s true that in some ways, posting every day or even more than once a day can grow your blog’s audience. Certainly it will help with blog SEO, but maybe not as much as you might think. In my own example, I’m writing bigger, meatier blog posts that are absolutely my best writing. The result is that each post gets more trackbacks and more traffic. The more backlinks a webpage gets, the more authority it has in Google’s eyes, which is ultimately better for SEO.
Having more posts indexed by Google but getting fewer trackbacks or less influence & reach is not an even trade. Quality is better than quantity. If you make people happy, you’ll also make Google happy. And if you make Google happy, Google will make you happy when you see your PageRank numbers and search engine rankings.
Blogging less leaves me more time to do important stuff like spend time with my granddaughter and really be there for her in her life as she grows up (I just got her her first kite, and now we’re waiting for a day with some breeze in it — I can’t wait!). Blogging less also allows me to make more money, because I have more time to create and promote information products or maintain my network.
You just don’t need to blog everyday (but you do need to be consistent). What you need is to blog about stuff your audience can’t live without. You need to blog about stuff they want to spread to their friends and link to in their own blogs and on social media.
Tags: blogging, blogs, business, comments, content, feedburner, posts, social media
Posted in blogs | 2 Comments »