Accessorize Your Blog: Social Bookmarking Chincklet Stubs

DO YOUR BLOG A FAVOUR

Are you thinking that your blogsite could do with a bit of a makeover? Want to do something to it that will make it stand out more from the increasingly crowded blogosphere? Perhaps add a few bells and whistles?

...well read on.

To standout in the blogosphere today you need to give some visual 'oomph' to your site. Luckily there's a lot out there for the discerning blogger.

I've compiled a list of various third party widgets that should be part of any blogger's armoury. I'll show you how within a few minutes you can have polls running on your blog, create RSS feeds, get mailling lists subscriptions, and collect statistics on visitors to your blog or website.

Best of all everything on this site is COMPLETELY FREE! Better than free, I'll show you how you can use that extra traffic to generate money

If you feel I've missed any goodies off this list - why not drop me a comment at the bottom of this page?

Scripts & Widgets

Sitemeter & HiStats (view the statistics of visitors to this site)
Clustermaps
Notify list (join my mailout)
Monitize your site with ADSENSE or AFFILIATE WINDOW
FeedBurner (subscribe to further updates on blog widgets)
Poll Daddy (use a poll here of the different widgets...people can vote their fave)
Site Snap (implement site snap on this site..put url below for example)
Flickr Badges (display a Flickr photo gallery)
YouTube movies on your blog
Photobox galleries
Soundbox
Javascript Kit (insert some javascript examples)
My Blog Log
Traffic Boosting simple ways to direct traffic to your site

Website Services

Palette Generator get the most appropriate color schemes for your site

Tools

GoodKeywordsGenerate Good Keywords

Review this site on StumbleUpon

Add this to your Technorati favourites

Digg this blog?

Make Money From Your Website Traffic

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to earn an income from or through their blogging.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to earn an income from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do with many many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the ways that bloggers are currently making money through blogs.

The key things to know are what best use you can put your advertising space to, i.e. which Affiliate systems will pull in the most money.

Adsense and Affiliate Window are some key players in the site based monetization

Affiliate Window

Affiliate Window you get paid when someone clicks through on a advert with earnings per click going up to $10, it's clear to see a clever blogger can generate a significant income stream

You can join the AffiliateWindow for free through the link below, they then take around 24hrs to vet your site and you are off and running

Google Adsense

Googles contextual advert system is called Adsense. With Adsense you get paid much smaller amounts for each click, however you can join the referral scheme which allows you to earn a much larger earnings for each lead you give for a select number of products

You can join the Google Adsense free, click on the button below and follow the instructions.

Create A "Flickr Badge" Photo Gallery

Method 1 (Badgr customisable Flickr Badges)

Go to the badgr constructor site.
Select the parameters for the Frame, Mode, and Tag. The real advantage here is you can customise the number of columns and rows and size of the image's in the badge.
Then go to the Generator tab where the code will be built for you. The easy method is to copy the code in the field below the "myspace code" which is all in an embed tag (this is easier for blogs or quick stuff). If you are going to use the SWFObject code you'll need the SWFobject javascript flash player detection and embed script see.

Method 2 (A Flicker Badge - either flash or HTML)

Login your to www.flicker.com
Go to the "Tools" (the link is hard to find but it is at the bottom of the "your photos" page).
On the right hand side of the 'Tools' screen click on "build a Badge" (due to lots of complaints Flickr may make put this tool in a more prominent position in the future).
Follow the instructions to create the Badge (more detailed instructions can be found here)

Method 3 (A Flicker Badge - Flash)

This is effectively the same as the Method 2 except you will select the flash version a the start rather than HTML.

Method 1

Method 2

Method 3

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from Flickr tagged with new zealand. Make your own badge here.

Other Flickr Tools

A Flickr Slideshow

Embedded Flickr Slideshows

Dig those flash Flickr slideshows? All that’s needed is a bit of code to embed them within your website to give your readers something dynamic.

 <iframe align=center 
src=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=653214@N00&tags=foo
 frameBorder=0 width=500 scrolling=no 
height=500></iframe>

Place this somewhere on your website or within a blog post. Change user_id from 12345678@N00 to your flickr id, which you can find out with this idgettr. Also replace foo with the tags of the photos you wish to display.

Other parameters include the following:

contacts=
text=
tag_mode=
favorites=
group_id=
frifam=

nsid=
single=
firstIndex=
set_id=
firstId=

Here's one I made earlier!

Add You Tube Video To Your Blog

Collect A Readership Mailing List With "Notify List"

Collect Information on visitors to your site

Here are two services that will collect information on the visitors to your site, both are good however HiStats is completely free and has a nicer interface while Sitemeter has a free version and a trial version. Hey you don't even have to choose - use both..

Histats

I personally prefer HiStats - reasons

Better Interface
You can manage multiple sites from a single account

Click on the counter below to view the statistics form this site

Sitemeter

However Sitemeter does have one or two good things going..

Excellent visitor location information
Stores better referral detail on which links your visitors used to visit your site

Click on the sitemeter below to view this page's stats

How To Set-up "SNAP Preview" On Your Website Or Blog!

To see an example of the Snap preview, hover the mouse icon over this LINk and Snap will show you a image of what that link will take you to. Cool...eh!

Try it on some of the other links on this site..

Note SNAP may not show preveiws of same-page-pointing-links and some links generated by scripts

Go to the Snap website.
Select a color scheme & logo (optional) for the Snap preview floating callout window.
Enter your URL etc.
Copy the HTML/JAVASCRIPT into your blog or website...
The first time a link is hovered over Snap will get the image which usually takes a few seconds, after that this information will be cached at the snap server so subsequent previews will be instantaneous

Traffic Boosting

I'll complete this section soon

StumbleUppon

Squidoo

Del.ici.ous

Digg

Get your Digg Icon onto your site for extra exposure

Here is the code you need

 <script>
digg_url ='POST_URL';
</script>
<script src="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.js"></script>

Here is the results for my Digg... If you've found this useful - let everyone know and give me a Digg!

Thursday, 15 March 2007

Social Bookmarking Chincklet Stubs

Other

Alexea: Alexa URL check Blog ranking and information.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=<$BlogURL$>

del.icio.us: See who bookmarked at del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us/url?v=2&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>

FeedWipe: Subscribe to this page!

http://feedwhip.com/feed/whip/?url= <$BlogItemTitle$>&name=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>

IceRocket: Track with IceRocket

http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q= <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>

Sphere: Sphere it!

http://www.sphere.com/search?q= sphereit:<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>

TalkDigger: Find conversations with TalkDigger

http://www.talkdigger.com/index.php? surl=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>

Technorati: Add this post to Technorati Favorites
(Or the hole blog using <$BlogURL$>)

http://technorati.com/faves?add=<$BlogURL$>

Technorati: show posts that link here

http://www.technorati.com/search/ <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>

Forret Ping: You can put this between conditional tags so it'll be only visible to you. Ping

http://www.forret.com/tools/trackback.asp? title=<$BlogItemTitle$>&blog_name=<$BlogTitle$>

Whonu: Track with Whonu will generate a list to different services like Alexea, PubSub and much more.

http://www.whonu.com/url_results.php?q=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>

Zaptxt: Alert me! (filtered notification)

http://zaptxt.com/alert/discover?feed=<$BlogSiteFeedUrl$>

BlogSiteFeedUrl should be replaced with your RSS feed link
Please remove the line breaks and add the tooltips (ex: title="This will bookmark this post at...")

Note: If your going to use javascript(location.href, document.title), have a look at their bookmarklets which can do more, like integrate selected text, but remember that it has browser compatibility issues and that the user requires to have javascript enabled. See links below.

Is your bookmark service not listed? Not all the services have the possibility to make a button, but still try leaving a comment. Between the readers help and me we might be able to do something(?)

You may also want to see:

Alltagz Blog buttons: German SBM, has many choices.
Law Favorites: For blogs related to law and legal issues. (You can use their bookmarklet as a blog button.)
Social Bookmarking Buttons you can Hotlink
Social Bookmark Tools: There are more buttons and button code generators here.
zerbit.de has listed the code the german Social Bookmarks.
Which Social Bookmark Button To Add?
ALL Social that CAN bookmark: A list showing pagerank and more.
WordPress Templates Code reference
Movable Type Template Tag Reference

3spots logo Category: Add-ons Blogger Blog Social bookmarks Tools
Tags: Blogging, Bookmarks Bookmarking Buttons Code digg del.icio.us Footer Social

Labels: blogger beta, blogging, button, code, list, social bookmarks

1 comment:

sandy said...: Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.
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Sandy
Social Bookmarking; 6 November 2008 at 23:20