Do you know who are viewing your blog? Most of the blogger is using some sort of hit counter or Google Analytic to track who was reading their blog, but do you really know who they are? One of the mistakes blogger often made is to “Ignore their viewers“. Social with you viewers is one of the efficient ways to attract your viewer coming back. How do you social with them? In many cases, you join the blog social network like BlogCatalog, BumpZee and MyBlogLog. You probably saw many blog with the widget on their sidebar. You see your own face on their blog. Regardless you like it or not, the blog owner knows who from those social networks is viewing their post.

The question is how do you use the widget to increase your readership?

20070730_widgetIf you ever read my post about “Is blog widget your friend? Someone is watching you.” You know that not many people like to be shown on other blog’s front page. So people like me will hide the widgets. So my viewers will not know that they have been watched. Oops! I don’t mean to watch their every move. I mean to protect their privacy and save some space on my blog.

So here you go! This is how the widgets look like on my blog’s hidden page. It shows three widgets from BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog and Bumpzee from left to the right.

Since they are all Javascript based widget, it sometimes loads slowly. As you can see I show a lot of faces from BlogCatalog, because it’s most active widget. MyBlogLog is the most searchable by search engine and bumpzee is the less important widget.

If you are my frequently viewers, you might already know that I react to my viewers comment pretty fast and sometimes just within few minutes after the comments were made or after they visit my blog. I sent message to them on one of the social network site. So they know I am actively response to my viewers.

How do I do that? Why do I like BlogCatalog the most?

Personally, I want to know who, where and when about my viewers. BlogCatalog provides one of the features that not many blogger pay attention to. The time of the visit. If you mouse over the faces on BlogCatalog widget, you see when they visited your blog. It’s between few seconds to few days or weeks. I have about 210 faces showing on my widget, which is the max I can display. I them match the time with my real-time hit counter from StatCounter.com and find out where they were from. I, sometimes, click on the faces and go to their BlogCatalog profile and leave message or visit their blog and leave comments. This is one way to send them my appreciation of visiting my blog. So who is watching my viewers?

Here is the comparison between three widgets, which I think are useful. In most of the case, my viewers are on all three widget, which help me understand my viewers reading habit.

BlogCatalog:

I like BlogCatalog. It’s a young blog community with many active members. Great features on discussion and social networking. It could potential drive traffic to your blog.

Pro: It allows you to show up to about 210 faces. Most importantly, it shows how long ago they visited your blog. BlogCatalog has been very active and almost catch MyBlogLog’s traffic. You can find a lot of helpful tips and tricks on the site.

Con: It doesn’t show me what page they visit.

MyBlogLog:

A blog community site that have most of the members, which is not best choice. Not my best choice.

Pro: A lot of members and the most active blog social networks. Many big blogger are list there.

Con: Not much information about your viewer. You have to be active to social with others. Not very good discussion features.

BumpZee:

It’s a blog social network that is built for more professional blogger. A great community to exchange thoughts. A great community site that can truly build your page ranking.

Pro: Give you a report about how many visitors were online now. Show you the page visit state and the top page. Great discussion features.

Con: The statistic is not correct. Not as popular as BlogCatalog.

So. Should you use those widgets to understand more about your viewers?

Popularity: 10% [?]

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