Tag Archives: WordPress.com

Widgets and Plug-ins Drive Traffic to Your Site and Enhance your Social Media Reputation and Prominence: Lesson #6

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A widget provides a visual interaction point for manipulation of data. Adding widgets to your site will drive traffic to your site and enhance your Social Media efforts and Digital Reputation. “Sharing” widgets that I have added to my posts include: Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon. This activity allows readers to share my posts with their digital network. This is a great way to engage learners, promote a business and enhance your digital reputation.

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Here are some widgets. You can find the code for specific widgets by doing a Goole Search: For example type in “Follow Friday Widget”

Here’s a FollowFriday widget:

http://www.followfriday.com/widgets/vino_con_vista/4

Here’s a Twitter Badge:

Twitter Badge A Twitter Badge will help you get more followers.

Add these features to the side bar of your blog’s main column. This content will allow your readers to get your latest Twitter updates or your RSS Feed from other websites. I like to send followers to my Pinterest Boards.

Groupon uses widgets to help merchants design customized online offers. Payscale provides a library of widgets that help website builders add salary calculators and cost of living indexes.

Follow these directions from WordPress to enhance your WordPress site with widgets:

1. To activate a widget, go to Appearance > Widgets in your dashboard. Drag the desired widget over to the Sidebar module on the right. Be sure to hit save and close when you’re done editing a widget’s settings.

2. First, write a title for the post in the space at the top. Think of your post title as a headline for a news article — the more detailed and captivating it is, the more readers it’s going to attract. Since this is just a test post, keep it short and sweet.

3. Add Facebook send and like buttons so people can easily share your content to their Facebook page

4. Optimize your business-related “LinkedIn” Contacts by adding the LinkedIn button to your WordPress sidebar.

5. Here are some of the extra widgets that you can drop and drag into your dashboard and add to your posts:

• Delicious

• Sphinn

• Reddit

• Digg

• Stumbleupon

• FriendFeed

Add the Zemanta Plug-in to your site for pictures and related articles. Go to Plug-ins in your dashboard.

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Embed Google Docs into WordPress: Social Media Lesson #7

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We will use Google Docs to manage our group projects online. It is easy to embed your Google Docs: spreadsheets, documents, forms, and presentations into your WordPress.com blog by copying and pasting the “iframe” embed code.

To embed Google Docs into Wordrpress and publish any of your docs, follow these guidelines:

1. Open the document you want to like to publish.

2. Click the Share drop-down menu on the top right of the page and select Publish to the Web….

3. Click the Start publishing button. A link to the published doc appears in the publishing dialog.

4. Send this link to anyone you’d like to access your doc.

Create a post for your company’s mission and business description using the library databases in your Google Doc. Use these instructions to embed the information into your blog post.

 

Spreadsheets

To add a spreadsheet from Google Docs, open it and click on the share button at the top right corner of your screen. Click on the “Publish as a web page” link.

Click on the “Start publishing” button:

From the second dropdown menu select the “HTML to embed in a page” option:

The last step is to copy/paste the iframe code into a Post, Page or Text Widget in your WordPress.com blog.

To share a form click on “More Actions” and select “Embed”:

Copy/paste the iframe code into your blog:

Presentations

To share a presentation set the privacy settings then click “Share”:

Click on “Publish document”:

And then copy/paste the iframe code into your blog but change to toolbar to HTML instead of Visual:

Google Docs Documents

To share a document, click “Share” then select “Publish to the Web…”:

Click on “Start publishing”:

And then copy/paste the iframe code into your blog. Watch this video for instructions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvEWDbPK10M

There are many useful templates in Google Docs. You can find them at the “Create” drop down menu.

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