Free widgets and tools to enhance your blogging life and boost your traffic.

We all spend a fair amount of time with our crafty blogs either reading them or writing them. As a crafter I’m fascinated by blogging (you might already have figured that out for yourself). I find that crafting and blogging go hand in hand and the joy I get from sharing my work with others and them sharing it with me has improved my crafting life by leaps and bounds.

In this post I want to share some blogging tools and widgets that I have tried and tested to make my blogging life more fun, easier, and er… fruitful.  You don’t need to be a tecchy geek, and you don’t need to know any HTML, or any of that stuff (I’d like to be a tecchy geek, but alas it’s all beyond me) to try these out.

Widgets to help with the traffic

• Technorati – is an important place to have you blog listed on. This is what they do. I joined these folks from the beginning when I set up my bag making blog. Joining is easy and free. You create your own profile and you can get a profile badge to put your on your blog if you wish. To see my Technorati profile go to my bag blog and look on left hand menu toward the bottom.
• Feedblitz – this enables your readers to subscribe to your blog via email. Some folks just prefer updates by email and this subscriber widget makes it easier for them. This is what they do. If you have a Typepad or a Blogger blog join up for this free service.
• Feedburner - manages your RSS feeds. This is what they do. It’s free to join and the stats that they provide are in-depth.
• Pingoat - this cool little gadget pings (notifies an update has been made) loads of different services all in one go . So when you’ve just written a post that you are proud of go to this site and ping loads of services in one fell swoop.

Some Blogsessories

• Polldaddy – create very pretty polls/votes to put on your blog with this free service. I have used this in the past. The polls are easy to paste into your blog and they do indeed look nice with optional images, and coloured bars.
• Box - I first came across this cool service on Meg’s blog. This is a user friendly way of storing your files online and sharing them with others. You can share images, text, or music. I use Box to share music. You upload files (from your computer) to box and then you are given a link to that file so you can share it with any none else. You can also get a Box player widget to you on you blog if you wish.
• Sitemeter – this is a handy widget that tracks things like how many readers have visited you blog, where they came from, how long they visited etc.
• Big huge Labs – I first came across these image tools on Ali’s blog. If you have images in Flickr you can have lots of fun with your pics on this site…
• Babelfish – looking at my stats I can see that I am getting more and more readers from abroad so I have hopefully made it easier for them to read my content by adding a translator to my blog.
• IconBuffet – free dinky doo icons. I don’t have a use for them yet, but they are so cute I’m sure I’ll think of something.
• Qumana – my favorite blog editor. I wrote a post about Qumana on my other blog.

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Got widget fever? Then check out these mega lists by Problogger, and again by Problogger for Mac users.

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Widget mania! Pic credit: HardMacs Blog.

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