Bling for the Blog
I often enjoy blong bling more than the blog posts themselves. I love all the sidebar, badges, maps, photo streams, everything. I love them but I usually find most useless (let me know if you do too - ironically - by voting with the polldady polling widget at the end of this post). I have a few on this blog, most notably me.dium (Spark is an investor in the company and I am the BOD member, so I am biased) and MyBlogLog widget (great idea). I occasionally may click on a flickr photo stream or do a lijit search but mostly I ignore and move on.
A click here, a click there though - if a widget company has enough distribution it may add up to a profitable business after all.
That sidebar is beach front real estate but can you make it work for you instead? OK, the blog roll, tag cloud, calendar, search bar etc. all point to your old posts and theoretically increase per user views but is that enough? My posts are boring and they will remain boring regardless how many times I point to them. As the budding media mogul that I am, I should only care about increasing my traffic.
There is a bunch of rudimentary stuff I should do to increase my traffic - like (1) posting regularly (duh), (2) having a consistent theme that appeals to a specific audience that might actually care about what I have to say (duh) - but then what?
I bring you Video News (sort of)! If you don’t like my blog posts, you can at least view what’s going on in the world.
I signed up with Voxant (a.k.a. The News Room) - you can see a bunch of news videos in 5 different categories under the Video News heading. You can select a video player with a bunch of videos or a single video and stick it anywhere in your web site. The Voxant widgets are content rich but very VERY rudimentary. I could not reformat the widget to fit my sidebar (for size, color, text only etc.) which is really what I wanted to do.
I also signed up with Mochila which looked similar but much more flexible. I got duped into thinking that it was good for anyone but I guess I did not qualify when I entered “less than 25,000” for my web traffic in their sign up screen and got booted to a “sales representative”. I am eagerly waiting to hear from them. After my experience wtih Mochila I did not even dare sign up with Vibrant Media (similar in concept but not in content).The presentation of videos in this blog is not exactly what I had in mind but I really like the idea of bringing real syndicated content to my blog that does not route my audience away. I suspect many web sites could use these types of features much like they are incorporating social media into the mix.
I tried various combinations of google keywords but it looks like those 2 companies buy up every possible related keyword. Mochila even buys the term “TheNewsRoom” and Voxan does “Mochilla”. If you know of any other free sources like the two, please let me know.
if Mochila signs me on as an affiliate or if I can figure out how to use Voxant’s XML stream directly in a KickApps widget, I am going to replace all my sidebar content with real news editorialized by me. I can’t wait to see what impact that would have on my traffic.
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