successORnot.com

Theres a ton of cool things you can do when you have a Wordpress blog.  Many widgets have been created to accomplish certain goals, do tasks for you, keep track of specific data, and numerous other things.  But do blog widgets help or hinder you?  Don’t just put them in because you can.  They should have an actual purpose for being there.

The widgets I have (or will) install on this blog all have a useful meaning.

1.  all in one seo pack.  That’ll help with the search engine optimization for this site.

2.  addthis.  A popular button that people can bookmark this site with.  (helps retain/gain traffic).

3.  social marker.  Another bookmarking tool people use.  (helps retain/gain traffic).

4.  stats.  To keep track of what people are looking at, where they go, etc.

5.  PlugIM.  A specific widget for the internet marketing crowd.

6.  Mybloglog.  Might drive some traffic this way.

7.  Blogrush.  There’s been controversy over whether or not this one actually helps bring traffic to your blog.  For some, it will, for others, it won’t.  At this point in my own blog here, I figure anything, no matter how little, could possibly help, so I’m putting it on here.  Results given later.

8.  RSS feeds.  People want to read blogs.  This is how they do it.  Easy, no brainer traffic method.

Thats all the ones I have pre-planned for now.  There’s more research involved, depending on what your own blog is about, to determine what blog widgets that YOU should have installed.

Note that some widgets are easy to install and some require you to edit certain files.  If you’re not comfortable doing modification of your systems files, then either find a different widget, have someone else install it for you, or just don’t use it!  Another thing to be aware of, is what the widget does, or should I say, what does it access?  Some widgets may creep thru your system & reveal private things to others that you don’t want anyone else to be able to access.  Make sure you know what exactly the widget does!  Obtain them from reputable sources.  Check out what other peoples comments on the blog widget are.

If the blog widget slows down the sites loading time, thats not good.  Visitors will leave.  If it alters your html, codes, etc., in a bad way, that wouldn’t be a good thing.  Blog widgets can be great, you just need to decide whether they help or hinder you.

Tags: blog widgets, widgets

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 5:13 am and is filed under Site Implementation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.