Cool Wordpress Widgets And Dim Sum
May 9, 2007
I have a ton of new finds you are going to love today.
Wordpress Widgets
Wordpress Widgets Rock! We are in the process of upgrading ASC’s backend to incorporate “widgetized” templates and bring everyone up to spec on the widget craze.
I just added a couple of killer widgets tonight.
On the bottom right in the sidebar I added an archives drop down menu widget to free up prime real estate and clean up the place a bit. Now readers can pull down to the month and find archives without having a huge list in everyone’s face back to 2003!
EDIT: I took the plugin mentioned below down because it was acting silly. Might put it back up if they fix the problem. Found another plugin called Technorati Autorewards which shows other blogs linking into FTR automatically once Technorati sees your link.
The other widget is near and dear to my heart because it involves Power Linking. Who Linked Me is the widget above the drop down archives and it shows off the sites linking to yours.
Tip: Find sites running the Who Linked Me widget and link to them for an automatic link FROM them! Start with Friday Traffic Report please! 
It won’t do a thing for you in the engines as they can’t read it (it’s Javascript) but people will start seeing your link and clicking through from the sites that run this increasingly popular widget.
Has a little ad in the “what’s this?” link, but that’s super unobtrusive in my opinion.
That’s it for widgets for today…
—
Using StumbleUpon thoroughly to get more near-instant traffic!
Lars at the Bloggst forum has a killer article on getting the most traffic out of StubmleUpon. It’s more than you’ve read about here or anywhere before. Check it out for some excellent tips I wish I would have thought of.
—
Marketing Optimization 101 For Bloggers
I found this post from 2005 and it is as true today, even more so, than it was then. Get more RSS subscribers by designing your site around RSS instead of just tacking on a little RSS button and hoping for the best.
Getting sleepy. That should hold you over for today.
Don't
Miss Out On Free Traffic!
Subscribe to the FTR RSS feed
or our
email list so you don't miss out on real, traffic driving tips from Jack
Humphrey! Thanks for visiting!
Cool Wordpress Widgets And Dim Sum…
If you aren’t impressed with at least ONE of the links I found for you, I’ll give you your click back!…
Love your plugin reviews!
I guess you just got a link back to your site (Who Linked Me)
-Jonathan
Hey Jack,
Thanks for the mention of my article. I’m glad someone found it useful. And yes, Stumble can be a really valuable source of traffic, as long as your content is good. It doesn’t even take all that much effort, as I’ve described in the article.
And your suggested widgets seem nice. If only I could get around to making my blog’s theme widget-friendly
Make sure you use the widgets code that is used in K2 rather than the Automattic version that is going to be built into Wordpress.
It gives a lot more flexibility in what appears on each page.
Great post Jack and as of yesterday I found out they were now automatically created in sites we build using the great Authority Site Creator WPM! This is truly exciting stuff and will make building and managing sites a breeze! Thanks for bringing the widgets to our attention and even more for building them right into the ASC itself.
Harry
Thank you for the great review on cool Wordpress widgets. Since there are a lot of widgets out there it’s hard to determine what each one does and whether it will work for your blog needs.
The who linked me one really interests me.
Lisa
I like the technorati one the best - thats for sure.
THanks for the great tips Jack!
[...] 2. Technorati AutoRewards - This is a fairly new widget put out by Matt Huggins. “The concept is simple: reward bloggers who linked to your blog by providing a link to their most recent blog entry.” Thanks to Jack at FTR for sharing this find. [...]