Blogger's Most Useful Gadgets
To access any of the gadgets, just go to your dashboard, click on design, then add a gadget. After you've added them, just drag and drop them where you'd like them to be. Remember to save the new changes when finished or they won't show up when you click on 'view blog'.
A few of these have appeared in a previous post called, Gadgets to Monetize Your Blog.
Get Answers
This is becoming a very popular gadget on blogs large and small. It not only encourages your visitors to hang around for a while (increasing your bounce rate) but it also persuades them to ask and answer questions of your other readers. This gadget allows your fans to browse questions, submit answers, and vote on answers they think are the best. Soon you could have a regular community on your blog!
Recent Posts (advanced)
Use this to show your Blog's Recent Posts. You can opt to show, thumbnails, summaries and other information like date, number of comments etc. This gadget can be edited to suit your needs. If you’re stuck for space you can merely show clickable links to the names of your posts. Also show as many or as few posts as you like. In addition, you can choose to display your recent posts as a drop down menu if space is a problem. I have both of these on this blog.
Share This
This makes it easy for your readers to share your posts to their favourite social networking sites. I recently found out that my ‘Share this’ icons don’t work. They can be pretty temperamental. However, this Blogger gadget keeps on doing the job. It may not be as attractive as the popular ones on bigger sites, but it gets the job done. It’s also very useful for new bloggers who’ve got limited html knowledge. Just click and add. I'm going to replace the ones I have now with this.
Popular Posts
I've just added this gadget to this blog. I've always wanted to have it, but it was only previously available through a complicated set of html editing. Now you can get it with one click from your Blogger gadgets' page. People like to be a part of a crowd, so if you have popular posts displayed on your page, readers want to see 'what all the fuss is about'. They usually click on it, making your popular posts stay popular. You can choose to display a thumbnail, summary, and other information about the popular posts, or opt for a simply link to the headlines. Make sure your popular posts are all fully monetized. Remember that your regular visitors have already read and commented on them so you don't have to worry about offending them with ads.
Get the definitive list of free, useful Blogger gadgets at my Blogger Gadgets page. Don't forget to check out our very helpful, How Do I Blog page for more helpful blogging tutorials.
8 comments:
I like the improvement on blogger, and these are great tips Anne!
I really like the Blogger gadgets. Makes putting together a great blog site simple. My HTML isn't the best so I rely on Blogger making life easy for me. And thanks for stopping by today!
Stephen Tremp
as always, you have such helpful information
for the rest of us!
obrigada!
-lea
Hi Anne, Another great and informative blogger tool. I like the popular posts too. I will try it and see how it goes with SS. Thanks for the info.
These are reasons why I stick with blogger..it develops with me. I learn as I go and it's good to seem them doing improvements.
Thank you for sharing this. I'm taking notes to use later.
Thanks for the visit, guys. I've always stuck with Blogger for the same reasons. Wordpress had been above Blogger in some respects, but it's catching up fast.
thanks a lot.
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