WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

Getting feedback from your visitors is critical – it helps guide the development of your blog as it points out the posts and content that your readers found useful (or useless). Find out what your readers like, give them more of it, increase your traffic, drive more clicks to your advertising, and make money from your blog. How do you find out what your readers like to read? Stats, page loads, unique visitors – that’s great. But why not just ask them with a poll?

We wanted to find out which recipes were the most popular on our Gohanyo.ca Japanese Recipe site. Sure we could look at the logs to see which ones users visited most often, but maybe they didn’t like the recipe after they tried it.

After searching for quite some time, we’ve found 2 useful WordPress Plugins to help make our life as a blogger easier. And, they’re both by the same guy: WP-PostRatings, WP-Polls. (Curiously, it’s the same guy who produced WP-DB Manager which didn’t work for us, so we held our breath when we activated these two plug-ins… and they worked! Hold your breath, kids)

Polls are useful and fun. My friend is currently traveling the world with his girlfriend. He has a poll on his travel blog asking whether people think the happy couple will pass the final test (before marraige) and survive a year of travel. I don’t think he was using IP addresses or cookies to block multiple ballots because his friends (or at least one in particular) would go in and vote multiple times, skewing the results.

Blogger has a poll feature that we used on our own travel blog. We placed a poll widget in our right side bar asking people where they thought we should go next. It was a nice little widget that prevented people from voting multiple times. But once the first person cast their ballot, you couldn’t edit the Blogger Poll widget, changing the wording of the text, etc. Nice, but very limited in functionality.

Rate My Stuff is a WordPress plugin that, well, lets you rate your stuff. It shows a nice 5 star rating, but, it’s meant for people giving their own opinion about stuff. Like your own personal review of a movie or book. Nice stars, but we’re looking for something that will let visitors rate our posts, giving us feedback.

WP-Polls is cool. It allows you to conduct surveys on your blog and post the results in the sidebar as well as on a Polls Archive page. The plug-in installed without any problem and comes with a Polls-widget plug in that lets you add drag-and-drop functionality to your layout. It took us a few minutes to figure out what the options allowed us to do. When we first when to Lester’s demo page, we were blown away. There were polls on every post and you could simply float your mouse over a post and give it your rating out of 5. Then we installed it, and realized that the plug-in meant the little widget on the side asking us which version of Word Press we were on. It’s still a nice plug-in that we’re using on our Gohanyo.ca recipe webpage, but then we found what we were really looking for…

WP-PostRatings is the bomb. It’s exactly what we were looking for. We’ve installed it on our Gohanyo recipe site to find out which recipes are the most popular. This little WordPress plugin lets you add a 5 star rating system at the bottom of every post. Visitors simply glide their mouse over and rate your post. (Once they’ve rated it, though, their vote appears to be locked in.) The best part of this plug-in is that it comes with an additonal PostRatings-Widget plugin that allows you to add a little widget to your sidebar. You can display the highest rated and most often rated posts in the sidebar – which means that users can get to what they want.

When we first installed the sidebar widget, we thought it was nice, but that it was too bad that the rating stars came at the end of the post title. (They got split into two parts because they were at the end of the line.) We spent a good chunk of time going through the code, trying to see if we could tweak it. (The code is published under a GNU General Public License). Sadly, we didn’t have the skills required to fix the problem and decided we liked it just fine. Then, by accident, we discovered a whole slew of options, including options to change the images (everything from stars, hearts, thumbs up, etc) to changing the template. The plugin is incredibly customizable – everything from CSS stylesheets to the HTML used to output the results.

Of all the plug-ins we’re using, WP-PostRatings is one of the best. By allowing visitors to rate your posts, and to have a dynamic sidebar that shows the results of their poll, you provide a way for visitors to easily reach your best work (in their opinion). WP-Polls allows you to adjust tamper with the results, but WP-PostRatings doesn’t.

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