Blog Your Heart Out - Part 3

Perhaps the silliest blog question I've been asked in recent days is, "Nelly, can you please help me pimp my blog?" And so, this post might also be delicately named, "Three Easy Ways to Pimp your Blog."

1. Use one or two widgets. They're free and make your blog more interactive. Stick them permanently in your sidebar panel, or in the occasional post. I use Beautiful Beta's widget for showing recent comments. I also sometimes use stuff from the vast assortment of widget-junk at Widgetbox. I also use Shelfari's book-displaying widget, and Majicwidget for the ever-wonderful blog poll.

Blogger has many pre-built widgets for you to arrange and use. Blogger users, just log in and click on the "Template" tab.

2. Use hyperlinks creatively in your posts. Make it easy for your readers to click around. Link to relevant things: your friends' excellent writing, other sassy blogs and news articles, your older posts that you'd wish people would uncover, etc.

(But try not to overuse the links like I just did in this hyper-linked post.)

3. Mix it up by using multi-media. Post a a homemade video or two, or post a short flick from YouTube. Posting from YouTube is very easy. Just find the white box that reads "embed" (likely to the right of your favorite video) and copy and paste that html into your post. Look, I'll do it for you here in 5 seconds. Trevor Borden's one minute hair-cut video is great:



Posting your own video on Blogger is even easier! When creating a new post, click on that little film icon on the far right of your editing bar, the one after the insert-image icon. Upload your flick. And there you go!

Who watches TV anymore, anyway?

(Pimp My Ride photo by Botogol)