You probably noticed “Live Traffic Feed” widget that I have in the right sidebar and today I took a deeper look what else I can get from it… Turned out this little widget is quite more powerful than it looks from outside.

In the basic view FeedJit display visitors in real time with the link to the referring page so you can check who sending you traffic right from your front page. If you click on “Watch in real time” link on the bottom of the widget it will forward to the FeedJit website where you can see more extended results.

For example if visitor was referred by the search engine - there will be exact search term he used to find your site. Also it shows browser and operating system visitors are using and if they left your site by clicking on one of the links - you’ll see which link it was. Two more options - visitors map and statistics for most popular pages. (more…)

If someone doesn’t know - EntreCard is a social network for bloggers that supposed to help building traffic to your blog. The way it works - you “drop” your card into the EntreCard widget on any site you see it (look in the dark sidebar to the right on my blog) and get credit for it. The owner of the site where you dropped card will also get credit for it and your banner will appear on his EntreCard member dashboard. He may return the favor and visit your site.

After you generate some credits (you also have an option to purchase credits directly from EntreCard) you can use it to buy one-day banner ad on the website of your choice. The prices for these ads are determined by how many people are paid and waiting for theirs turn to display the banner. Also every website owner have an option to decline any ads.

Ideally this system should work and if used properly could generate quality targeted traffic. The problem is - not every one understands meaning of Targeted Quality Traffic…
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It is becoming more and more popular to include a lot of different widgets on websites, especially blogs to make it look better.

For starters - “Widget” usually is some kind of image, providing statistics or adding interactivity to your site. In most cases it’s powered by java script located on the server of the widget provider. On my site you can see four examples - PayPerPost direct and EntreCard widgets in the gray sidebar, FeedBurner subscribers in the right sidebar and MyBlogLog Latest Visitors in the bottom area of the page.

I don’t see anything wrong with using widgets but some people are taking it to the extreme - they use each and every widget they can find no matter if serves any purpose…

The main drawback with using widgets, like I stated above, it’s hosted on the remote server of widget provider and in many cases - very busy servers. If some of those servers are busy or experience some kind of problems - your own site may freeze or take forever to load.

My advise - before adding any new widgets to your website or blog ask yourself a simple question: is it worth loosing visitors??? Yes this is correct - if your site takes more than 10-20 seconds to load at least half of potential visitors will hit “back” button! (more…)