Postcards from the Funny Farm

Many bloggers think it’s important when you’re trying to get backlinks and traffic to have a way for your readers to send your blog url to a friend. There are some great plugins for Wordpress and some good scripts out there that can achieve this function on any blog or website. On my blog I have used Gamerz’s Wp-Email for quite some time. It works really well for posts and pages and can be incorporated through the addition of a simple line of php code.

Recently, I wanted to put a similar call in my sidebar so visitors could share it via email from the sidebar. I looked for about an hour for the right script until I found one that worked just right for my blog. If you’re looking for more readers, one way to help that along might be through “email to a friend” blog add-ons. Have you used these on your blog or site yet? If not, why not give ‘em a try. Is this a purely promotional item? Not totally. If this blog had promotional products like pens or fridge magnets, they’d be about you. I think everyone can achieve their dreams if she/he puts their mind to it and that’s what I try to spread through this blog. Hope the email a friend add-ons help you out.

Tonight I was going back through some of my posts in an extensive series I wrote about blogging tech and tips and I thought they ought to be brought back to the front page. If you are a beginner, this long series I wrote last year might be like gold for you. It’s the results of my blood sweat and tears teaching myself blogging and web-design over the course of a year. You’ll find the Table of Contents for this series linked above. The one that helped me especially tonight and inspired this linkage was: “Blog Writing, Look Before You Leap.” I had forgotten about a certain Google resource to help with getting popular blogging ideas that get traffic. Sweet resource.

Another new idea I tried today after reading my post on 41 recommended plugins was to add the “Popularity Contest” plugin and create a “top 50″ page linked in the sidebar menu. This allows my readers to scan a list of my 50 most popular posts of all time (as determined by a set of criteria such as comment count, hits, etc.) , assembled on a dedicated page. It’s nice after a year of writing so much content. The only problem is, some of it never gets to the forefront. For this reason, my blog might not get the chance it deserves to be read by millions and get a higher rating. A blog rating is like a hairstyle: everyone has one but only a few are happy with it. Anyway, maybe these posts of the past year will help somebody out there get a better hairstyle. I could use your tips too, after all I am bald.