MyBlogLog is a popular social networking site for bloggers, owned by Yahoo!. MyBlogLog’s success is based on its “Recent Readers” widget, a blog sidebar widget that shows the pictures or avatars of other MyBlogLog members that have visited your site.
The widget can be personalized to blend with your site (you can choose colors and number of pictures to display), and can be added to your blog by pasting a snippet of javascript code to your sidebar template. Here’ how the widget looks:
You can also see it live on our right side bar.
The success of this widget lies in the fact that it shows you who your readers are, beyond cold statistics like the number of visitors and where they came from. The actual pictures let you connect to your readers on a more personal basis.
When you click on a picture you are transported to that person’s MyBlogLog profile (see our profile here), where you can:
- Read how they describe themselves and what tags do they use
- See what blogs do they author
- Find out who belongs to the communities around their blogs
- Learn who their friends and contacts are
- Find links to their profiles in other popular social networking sites.
You can also click to their blogs’ page and see a list of recent readers and members of that blog’s community, as well as links to the most recent blog posts (see our blog’s page).
Since the pictures in the “Recent Readers” widget have been prooved to significantly draw readers’ attention, the more blogs of other members that have installed the widget you visit, the more your picture will be displayed, and the more clicks to your profile page you will get.
Through MyBlogLog, you can also personally contact your readers (or other people with similar interests) to start building your network. As you add people to your contact list and join their blog communities, they may feel more inclined to add you as a friend and join your blog’s community.
You can always email members directly, and ask them to add you to their contact list or join your community, although I prefer a softer approach: just join as many relevant communities you can an hope for reciprocity. Once somebody joins your community or adds you as a contact, I suggest to send them a quick message thanking them for doing so.
I just started using MyBlogLog a few days ago so I still can’t really tell how effective it is in generating significant traffic. However, I still recommend it to new bloggers (as oppossed to, for example, using that space to slap on Adsense ads), since developing a network is a new site’s number one priority.
By clicking to my readers’ profiles, I’ve also found many interesting sites that complement nicely with my blog’s niche, where it may be worth it to invest some time visiting and leaving relevant comments.
As I develop more feedback on MyBlogLog and the “Recent Readers” widget I will be appending this information or writing follow up posts, so come back often or, even better, subscribe to our feed. In the meantime, you can read this interesting post about MyBlogLog in Lee Odden’s Toprank blog.
Thanks for the write-up!
Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog
Great break down, it has surely been helpful. I have used my widget too meet some great people so far.
Great write up! I will be adding a link to it from our post you mentioned at the end.
Cool Post. I love having the MyBlogLog Widget on my blog…. it truly does make knowing who my visitors are by face more personal.
Shana
Hi. Where can I get the code widget? I used it 4 months before but I lost the code. The only widget available on mybloglog’s site now is the ABOUT ME WIDGET. Thanks
MJL:
You have to add your blog to your profile first. Then, you go to your profile page and next to the screen shot of your blog you will find a button that says “get widgets”. Click it and you’ll get to the instructions page. Hope it helps.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce