Don’t Click This

I was just browsing Tech Crunch when I noticed that the outbound links now have a little snap icon next to them, and the Snap Preview box only shows up when the icon itself is rolled over and not the link. I think this is a much more user friendly way to have snap preveiw set up as although it is handy, I know some people found the preview popup annoying every time they roll over a link especially as links with long link text are often activated accidently.

On further investigation, I also discovered that Snap have added a few other features as well as the option to choose when the preview pops up, including changing the colour theme and even adding your own logo. I reckon these changes will go down pretty well with people who may have had a problem with snap being too intrusive before, as the website owner now has much more control over the design and use and visitors are much less likely to get annoyed by accidently activating the pop up.

Over the past month I’ve noticed at least a dozen blogs that I frequent, add various widgets; the most popular one being the My Blog Log recent readers widget. Bumpzee has also released a similar widget, along with a digg type plugin for posts (but I can’t seem to get these to work at the moment). It seems that widgets are clearly the way to ‘pimp your blog’ and to be honest it wouldn’t surprise me if Technorati release a recent readers widget pretty soon as well!

Anyways, I was thinking about how you could take advantage of this recent widget craze from a business perspective (not in any kind of spammy way, mind). It seems to me that now is a really good time to have a blog in conjunction with or as part of your website as it’s an excellent potential source of traffic. All these communites that are popping up all over the place make it easier to get your website noticed. Just by submitting your blog or site to My Blog Log can get you at least a few new visitors.

But think about this, when someone leaves a comment on your blog, nine times out of ten you’ll go and check out their site too. The same often applies to widgets (maybe not so much on high traffic blogs as recent readers change pretty quickly) when someone sees a new recent reader they’ll often have a look to see who it is (I know I do).

So essentially you could generate traffic and get some exposure simply by logging into My Blog Log (then you’re avatar shows up) and then browsing other blogs and sites with the widgets on them. Obviously, it’s not like readers click on the recent readers widget that much (I don’t think) but still, the author might and it’s free, so what have you got to lose?

Right. Finally got the internet connection sorted so I’m back!

I have been busy working though, I got a load of stuff done for my student site and the new design is nearly ready to go live now. Also, my MTB site has been ticking over, it’s getting around 20 uniques a day now which I know isn’t much but it’s steadily going up. To date it’s made me $1.77 which isn’t great but it’s something. I need to do some more linking for it and write some more articles as I’ve been focusing more on my student site.

Anywho, back to work…

I’ve had some serious issues with my ISP this week, I guess the main one would be that I haven’t been able to get on line at all! Luckily, I’ve been able to do a lot of work offline and upload it when I get the chance at a mates house.

Anyway, I’m waiting for them to sort the whole thing out, but in the mean time I’m now working in Starbucks using their hotspot thingy which is pretty expensive! Hopefully it’ll be sorted by next week and everything will be back to normal…

Following on from the 140 million dollar mansion, today I stumbled across this 8 Million Dollar car! Crazee!!

I’ve got so much going on at the moment, both with my sites and some offline stuff too that I’ve been strugling to find time to post to this blog, which is a shame because there’s a ton of stuff I wanted to write about. Anyway, hopefully next week stuff will have settled down a bit and I’ll be able to post more often.