Use Skribit On Your Blog to Get Reader Suggestions

As bloggers, it’s important for you to recognize your readers and be able to interact with them and take their suggestions. In fact, putting them in the spotlight helps you gain loyalty and fandom.

You should be able to receive suggestions for blog posts and questions on some issues from your blog’s readers. However, a new service from Paul Stamatiou called Skribit takes reader participation to a whole new level.

What does Skribit do?

Skribit helps you get suggestions from readers and then others can vote for them. For example, one reader could suggest that you video-blog and other readers who like the idea can vote for it. Readers have a chance to easily drop in their questions/interests, and you get benefit as a blogger too - yes, you can get ideas for posts! Skribit can aid in beating writer’s block.

How Skribit Works

Upon signing up for Skribit, you’ll be taken to a page from where you can add your blog by clicking on the ‘Add New Blog’ option on the right. You’ll then have to tell Skribit the name and URL of your blog, and then click ‘Add Blog’.

If you leave the ‘Allow Anonymous Suggestions’ checkbox checked, you’ll be able to receive suggestions from all readers - even readers who don’t want to register themselves at Skribit will be able to vote and contribute suggestions to you using the widget. I highly recommend allowing anonymous suggestions.

Once the blog has been added, you’ll have to place the Skribit widget on your page. To customize the widget, click on the ‘Customize Widget’ under the second section. You’ll be taken to a page where you can change the way the Skribit widget looks on your blog.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can change the text header, the colours and basically “skin” the widget and make it blend in with your blog’s template.

You now need to get the code for the widget and add it to your page. You can then click on the ‘Verify Blog’ link and confirm that you’ve put up the widget on the blog.

Readers who visit your blog can leave their suggestions using the Skribit widget. Clicking on the header on the Skribit widget, they’ll get a text box where they can type in their suggestions and click ‘Submit’. Once that’s done, the suggestion will appear on the widget. Other visitors will be able to vote for their favourite suggestions by clicking on the ‘Vote’ button next to each suggestion.

You’ll be able to see the suggestions left by readers from your Skribit management page after you’ve logged in. Furthermore, you can also see who’s left the suggestion (must be either a Skribit user or an anonymous reader) and also check how many votes each idea has got.

Skribit will also email you every week with a report of suggested reader topics and votes. You can now estimate reader participation and interest, and what kind of posts your readers would want - thanks to Skribit.

So, what are you waiting for? Follow this link to sign up for Skribit!

(By) Shankar Ganesh, a 16 year old Blogger and Freelance Writer from India. He writes about computers and software at Killer Tech Tips

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Filed Under: 'Cool Websites and Tools' series ¦ Mac

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