Widget Wizardry - Part 1

    Continuing my series on company blogs, I’m now going to describe for you the myriad benefits that come from what MTV might call "Pimping Your Blog". These nifty techniques have nothing to do with the words you write, but rather how people see, interact, and (most importantly) broadcast them around the web.

    The first, and most ubiquitous, tool is the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. Essentially taking each of your blog posts and condensing it into an excerpt, an RSS widget allows readers to “subscribe” to your blog so that any time you post something new, they’ll be told about it. In other words, it makes it easy for them to return without the frustration of finding old news. With plenty of free options out there, this is a simple tool that everyone expects you to have. Get it.

    Of course, with everybody and their grandmother on Twitter these days (your company has an account, right?), you should probably broadcast updates into the Twitterverse. To do this, use that RSS and go to twitterfeed to set up your free forwarding system. Presto, now you have an entirely hands-off way to send your company’s news to all of your rabid Twitter fans.

    Alright, now that we’ve made it easy for your customers to keep tabs on you, let’s spice up your organization a little bit. Most blog software, whether from Blogger, Wordpress, or that guy down the street, includes the option to add tags to your posts. These tags are like jackets on a book, or sections of a phone directory. They tell readers at a quick glance what your post is going to be about. This doesn’t do much good if your visitors have already opened the post, so that’s why we’re going to put together a tag cloud.

    When you walk into a book store, each section is clearly labeled with a sign (hopefully). The more important the section, the bigger the sign (Fiction > Horror > Stephen King). Tag clouds work in the same way, with the most common and important subjects of your company becoming larger as you “tag” more of your blog posts with that word. In our fictional welding company’s tag cloud, for instance, the tags “Welding” or “Blowtorches” might be large because many blog posts deal with those subjects. “Interpretive Dance”, if it existed at all, would be tiny, as our welding company would (likely) not mention it much. Thus, it’s easy for your visitors to see and find the topics they want, as well as discerning whether your company deals with their interest.

    Creating a tag cloud is largely a matter of checking the right box under the settings tab in your blog software. Then, all you have to do is be sure you’re tagging your blog posts in the right way. Giving your readers every tool to find your content is an easy way to make sure they come back for more. We’re going to discuss some other ways to do that in the next post.