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Thursday, March 8, 2012
4 Widgets to Outfit Your Business Blog
We’ve come to love and recommend a few great widgets here at Compendium. In the video below, I cover the benefits of using ShareThis, Disqus, Gravatar and Outbrain. In case you don’t have time to watch the video, here is a quick breakdown of some of their benefits:
ShareThis
- Enables social sharing buttons to include counters that provide “social proof” for your readers. If your readers see that a post has been shared by others, they are likely to assume the post is worth their time to read.
- Integrates with Google Analytics. It takes some customization, but once you are set up, great information is at your fingertips. You can see which posts are getting shared the most and on which social networks. If you’re trying to measure engagement, this is incredibly helpful.
Disqus
- Allows sign-in via multiple other applications (Facebook and Twitter, most importantly).
- Pulls in corresponding social profile image.
- Provides easy-to-use moderation and email notifications for both admin and commenters.
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Allows you to see other sites that commenters have commented on—creating a commenting profile for each user.
Gravatar
- Humanizes your blog by incorporating an author image next to each post. At Compendium, we have replaced the need for Gravatar by adding Author Profiles. You can see an example here.
Outbrain
- Provides content recommendations at the end of your posts—should decrease bounce rate by keeping readers engaged with your content.
- Uses intelligence in recommendations and provides data regarding which content is being viewed.Provides nice thumbnail graphics to entice readers.
Integrating Compendium Is a Snap
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