Blogger's Most Useful Gadgets

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Blogger has steadily developed several featured gadgets, fun gadgets,  gadgets to increase page views  and gadgets that monetize your blog. Hundreds of gadgets are available merely by clicking on buttons from your blog's design page. Some are quite random and others downright impractical, but  I've found the following the most useful of all.



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. 

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Amazon Payments

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Blogger has made it pretty easy for every blogger to become an Amazon affiliate. From your dashboard, just click on Monetize, Amazon Associates, copy the code onto your blog's template and away you go!



But this is the easy part. Most of my friends, and indeed Bloggers I visit regularly are now proudly advertising all sorts of Amazon products on their blogs. It's so easy, right? This means that Amazon has got millions of us advertising for them, free of charge. We pay nothing to join - and this is the way it should be. However, do we ever get paid? Ever?



I've got an immensely popular article (Top Pop Songs To Sing With Your Kids) which comes at the top of Google's searches in the UK. There are 23,900,000  results for this particular search, so you can see the relative popularity of this post. (This piece also comes up in the first page of searches on Yahoo, Bing and Ask).

Now, my Google Analytics tells me that half of the people who land on this page leave via the Amazon links with which I've monetized the article. You see, when I realised how popular this piece had become, I went back to it and embedded links (with my unique code) to the appropriate Amazon pages. I linked to each song on the list with the phrase, 'download this in MP3'. There is no ambiguity. Visitors are told that the link goes to a page from which the track(s) can be downloaded.



Reason tells me that if viewers are voluntarily leaving to go to the Amazon pages, they're doing so to buy copies of the song(s). This particular articular was posted in April. So far, there are no sales recorded in my Amazon reports. Go figure!



I've been thinking about removing Amazon ads from my blogs. Of course, I'll still be keeping an eye out for great book sales etc. My readers won't be very happy if I didn't. Besides, A Blogger's Books is known for finding fantastic deals where books, writings and jobs are concerned. What I'm saying is that Amazon ads take up quite a lot of space on my sites. I could be using this space for programmes that actually properly monetize my blog. I have one such programme in mind. I want to gauge what you all think about Amazon Associates while I make up my mind.

• Are you an Amazon Associate?


• Have you ever been paid?


• Do you think you may have unrecorded clicks/purchases on your Amazon reports?

Please leave your answers below. Thank you. I will update this post in the near future and tell you about another programme which may be worth your while. 

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Barnes and Noble Halloween Book Sale!

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Barnes and Noble have always been one of the best places to shop when it comes to getting great deals on books.  They're  running a splendid 50% Halloween discount off kids costumes and books at the moment. If Halloween is a holiday you celebrate, this is a deal you won't be able to miss. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. This 50% discount doesn't end at just books. Browse a fantastic array of scary movies and games for the eerie season. Then look up the following:

• Halloween favourite books for adults and teens.


• DVDs and music for kids


• Halloween crafts for the family


• Horror DVDs and scary movies galore!


• Video games


• Featured paranormal and fantasy books, games, DVDs and CDs 

Make this a Barnes and Noble sale you grab with both hands because who knows when we'll see one like it again.  Click here for more details.