Seven great ways to pimp your blog from Karl Schneider

This week I went to Pimp my Blog: an event held at City University about ways to use social media, widgets and apps to get your blog noticed (much more effective than a t-shirt, that’s for sure)…

The panel – including FT journalist Martin Stabe, TheMediaBriefing.com editor Patrick Smith and Tim Glanfield (editor of Beehive City) – all agreed that the trick was publishing good content on a regular basis whilst having the mindset that it is a public and professional site not a ‘blog’ about your cat or other such trivialities.

Karl Schneider – another panellist and the Editorial Development Director of RBI – came up with a nice little list of widgets and apps that are free to use and which make the experience of visiting your blog a bit more exciting. So, in no particular order, here are seven greatways to soup-up your blog:

1. Dipity – A timeline tool that allows you to track a story over a long period of time. For example,  the reporting of violence at the 2010 tuition fee  student demonstrations or the major ‘Get Glazer out’  protests at Manchester United over the past three seasons.

2. LinkWithin – A widget which shows related content on your blog under your current post. So, if you’ve blogged about a good recipe, LinkWithin will show other recipe posts that the reader might find interesting. Good for keeping traffic within your site.

3. Cover It Live – People love live events. CoverItLive allows you to cover anything, including breaking news about something happening at your college/university, question and answer sessions with a friend who has an interesting job or even create big forums for all your friend to coo over Robert Pattinson.

4. Lightbox – A great little tool to put images on your site in a neatly-formatted way. Showcase your own photography or do an Ashes All-Time cricket XI. It’s very useful for breaking up a blog, which can become text heavy.

5. Scribd – Another visual tool and a smart way of putting documents and images onto the web. A great way to publish your notebook notes or a map you drew of how to get from the train station to your house.

6. Quibblo– Probably the pick of the bunch for me: Quibblo does polls, quizzes and surveys. Can be used for serious means (what to do when someone falls unconscious) or for rather more comedic ends.

7.  Slideshare – You might have a Flickr widget or similar in your sidebar but Slideshare puts the photos directly into a post. Track advertising campaigns over the years, all the rugby union strips and kits being unveiled or just stick you holiday snaps in there.

We plan to use some of these on Wannabe Hacks in the future and will feed back as to how easy they are to install and use.

In the meantime, get in touch via email (hacks@wannabehacks.co.uk) or tweet us (@wannabehacks) if you’ve used any of the above or have any other suggestions for pimping up your blog.