Its Spring, How Clean Is Your Blog?
Over the weekend, one of our favorite Lijit users, Fred Wilson, posted his desire to do a blog spring cleaning.
Of course, the first thing I did was rush over to Fred’s blog and see if Lijit had made the cut. Luckily, it appears that we are one of the chosen few.
Thinking that Fred made a good point about keeping a blog clean, I headed over to my blog at Learn To Duck and started whacking widgets.
Last.fm? Gone. Instant Message widget? Outta there.
After the third whacked widget, I began to think about 1) why people should keep Lijit on their blogs (other than its the coolest widget ever!) and 2) what value do widgets bring to a blog.
Widgets, by design, should provide three things:
- No apparent slow down of the blog page itself;
- Real utility to the readers of the blog;
- Real utility to the publishers themselves.
So, how does Lijit stack up?
Page Load Speed:
I asked one of our developers what specifically do we do that ensures that Lijit doesn’t slow down a blog’s load. Andy explained that we cache the javascript for a two hour period, making the javascript call (which is the main culprit in page load slow down - watch the lower left of your browser, you can watch how long it takes widgets to load) much shorter. In addition, we will always display the latest widget to a user, and then cache the javascript in the background for the next user.
Not being technical, I am guessing that means we load more quickly because the site doesn’t have to go get the widget every single time someone comes to the page.
Reader Utility:
Why is Lijit better than standard site search or Google custom search? Two specific reasons:
- We search the publisher’s entire social graph and trusted sources.
- While Google tries to index everything, Lijit just indexes everything that is important to you.
So the likelihood a relevant result is returned through Lijit search should be higher than if the same search was done on any standard search engine.
Also, unlike most widgets, Lijit is built to keep users on your site. Most widgets are connected to a destination site and their sole purpose is to drive traffic to the destination site. Lijit just wants to search your stuff.
Publisher Value:
For a widget to earn the right to live on my blog, it must make me a better blogger. The stats that Lijit provides is a direct example of this. One stat that I use a lot is “Results that returned zero results.” If people are searching for topics, but not finding them, then I need to write about them.
Also, because Lijit is trusted network-based search, relevant content from my blog is surfaced on other blogs that include me in their network. Basically, I get more traffic the more people trust my content, because it appears more often in the network’s search results.
Finally, because more of my social content is exposed through Lijit search, readers are more engaged and consume more content across my site and my social graph.
I certainly can understand Fred’s desire to clean up his blog, and have echoed his efforts on my own blog. Frankly, I wish more people would periodically do a widget clean up and when the time comes to determine which widgets stay and which are round filed, ask yourself three questions:
- Does this widget slow down my blog page load?
- Does this widget provide real value to my readers?
- Does the widget provide real value to me as a publisher?
Hopefully, the answer in Lijit’s case is a clear yes to all three.
