My Favorite RSS Widget. Click it to see it in action, along with other widgets mentioned on this post.

Depending on your niche, each and every widget can serve a great purpose. I have always been a widget guy, and I’m always looking for new ones to try. I have a bunch of blogs, and I’ve always felt that widgets can make a nice call to action. My niche is car dealers, and I’ve been looking for a good RSS to photo widget for months now. Last night I found one that’s perfect!

The problem with widgets is you have to figure out which ones to put above the page fold. Some will convert, and some won’t.

My Favorite WordPress Widgets:

BLVD Status Block Party Widget:

BLVD Status is a live stats program. I use this software more than any other program I have. On a weekly or monthly level I use Google Analytics, but the BLVD lets me know what’s happening on my website right now. For example, when I add vehicles to Craigslist I want to know when is the best time to do this. I’ve figured out that after 10:00PM is the best time for the Orlando Craigslist. How did I do this? Simple…the BLVD tells me where my visitors are coming from live. I not only use Craigslist as an advertising method, my main goal is to get the user off of Craiglsist and on to my website. This is why we make our miscrosites look like a third party website.

Not only does this software show me live stats, they also keep track of keyword rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo. It helps me identify what my hot keywords are, and it will let me know if I’m losing or gaining rank. For example, if my best keyword was “Ford Mustang” it would keep track of what position I’m in from all three search engine. If I lose my rankings it will tell me, even if I just drop one spot. If there is a keyword I am trying to rank on, I can set an alert where it will notify me when I do rank.

For my Orlando Dealer, this is how I learned the term “Used Cars Orlando” was not a good keyword to go after. The BLVD helped me identify better keywords that convert. Yes, the BLVD can track conversion as well.

Anyway, last week they launched a new widget called the BLVD Block Party. It shows what articles are being read now, and where the social media traffic came from.

There are many other widgets out there, but the problem is you don’t want to add too many. Simple observations will show you which ones work best. Last night, I found a widget I’ve been searching for:

Wowzio RSS Image Widget

According to the Wowzio Website, they currently have 3,556,195,800 live widgets. If you want a widget from them, you have to ask. I applied late last night and I had an invitation in my email inbox this morning. Why do they do that? They want to stay clean, and they don’t want their widgets showing up on porn sites and such. Here is what it looks like:

Anyway, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. It automatically reads my RSS Feed and displays the images in a widget. I use it for my microsite RSS Feed. It shows my 10 newest vehicles added to inventory, with photos. The great thing is the automation, when the new inventory feed rolls in this will update automatically. Each photo is clickable to the actual vehicle, and the design and layout is awesome! There are some other widgets out there, but none look professional. Even Feedburner offers something similar, and it’s called Buzzboost. The problem is it doesn’t look very well, and it ends up being too tall. The widget space above the pagefold is valuable real estate, and I don’t want one widget taking up all of the space. Wowzio displays a widget of 8 small photos. The photos are sized perfectly, and they allow the possibility of the next widget to show above the pagefold. I elected to have 8 photos show because I want to observe. I can always change it to 6 or 4 to allow the Facebook Widget to protrude more. Wowzio offers more widget styles than that, and you can see them all on their website at wowzio.com. I’m trying another one of their widgets on this blog. You can see it on the right up a little bit. I like where they’re going with this one. People love seeing and clicking photos, and this can be a great tool for car dealers. I’m really excited to see results from this widget.

Facebook Widget:

The Facebook Widget is a great call to action, but it depends on how you use your Fan Page. If you link to other websites on your Facebook Fan Page, you may send your visitors away. When a dealer put their inventory on their wall, that’s when it becomes a great call to action. People like to look at photos, and they can scroll down and see the newest inventory. I also like the potential of obtaining new fans.

Twitter Widget:

I used to have my Twitter Widget on the top. Looking at my stats, it does make a great call to action. Basically, it scrolls and shows a car dealer’s newest inventory tweets. Whenever a visitors clicked one of the bit.ly links it would bring them right to the vehicle’s page.

Regular RSS Feed Widget:

This is a must have for all blogs. If you are a car dealers and you have an RSS feed for your inventory, be sure to add this. It’s not a great call to action, but it’s a great way for your new inventory to get crawled and indexed quicker in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Normally it will just be text links, and the photos won’t show. Again, I do this only for search engines. The RSS Feed will change automatically every time your inventory is updated. This means Googebot and Yahoo Slurp will see fresh content when it visits your blog or website to look for changes, which will make them visit more often.

Funnel Traffic To Your Main Website Widget:

About 5 years ago I attended a Yahoo! seminar in Boston. One of the speakers was talking about traditional advertising verse internet advertising, and she mentioned using people in your ads is still the way to go. Think about it, the big corporations who market use people most of the time right?

Many car dealers have such a high turnaround in their internet department, so you won’t see them use this method. Last month I added Dani Lunsford’s Photo to Napleton Orlando’s blog. Since then I have observed a 50% increase in visitors clicking to their main dealer website.

This is why I think this widget is important. It’s a simple clickable image that even a novice can do. Just make a new text widget in your WordPress Blog and add you own code:

HTML Code for your Widget

The above code will make a clickable image just like this

If you don’t know simple HTML, you can use this Free Online HTML Editor to generate your code. When you create your clickable ad, be sure to size it accordingly so it will fit tight on your blog. If you’re a Firefox user, check out this free extension called Measureit. You must also upload your image somewhere, so the easiest way is to go to “Media” in your backend and upload it that way. Then click “view image” and copy and paste the url. That will be your image location. If you don’t have image editing software like Photoshop, try Gimp. It’s open source and FREE.

Recent Comment Widget

I use the recent comment widget to reward my readers who comment on my blog posts. This is a dofollow blog, and I have the widget so the commentor will be rewarded with a dofollow link to their website directly from my homepage. Obviously I won’t approve spam comments, but genuine comments will be rewarded. If you want more participation on your blog, I suggest you follow suit. I even go one step further and send each comment to Twitter and my Facebook FanPage.

Why Are My Blogs So White?

Remember, the main reason to have a blog is to drive traffic somewhere. You will not get a lead from somebody reading your blog, and if you do it will be a rare occurrence. I blog about a dealers inventory. Once a week I will look at their newest inventory and I’ll simply pick a car like this. I prefer more text than images, because this is how I get the traffic from searchers. The search engines love text, and they gobble it up like candy.

If you look at that post, you will see that I linked to the category page of the Dodge Challenger, plus I sent a deep link to an actual Dodge Challenger listing. It’s really simple. Did you know you can have a self hosted WordPress Blog for less than $100.00 per year?

This is a dofollow comment blog, and educated responses will be rewarded with a nice link from our homepage comment widget.