Financial Jungle

My previous blog enhancements are paying off. Last week, Financial Jungle’s traffic improved from 47 hits/day to 52 hits/day. Not quite ground shaking, but respectable considering the lack of blogging tour participations. I hope the modest success is also feeding off to blogs on my Favorite Blog widget as well. As no blog is an island, the only way to thrive in the blogosphereis to connect and be connected. If you’re a financial blogger and believe Financial Jungle is worthy of a mention, please consider linking it through your blogroll. Conversely, I’m happy to reference financial blogs that bring in engaging and fresh ideas, so don’t be shy to ask.

For this week, I’ve installed several promising WordPress plugins to elicit reader interactions and retentions:

1. The Similar Posts plugin quickly finds and suggests related articles based on MYSQL’s fulltext search capability. This plugin saves readers’ time by leveraging the more sophistical search algorithm, instead of the rudimentary search box functionality. It also helps me because the plugin uncovers some of the older (brilliant?) articles buried too deep in the archives.
2. Readers participating in discussions are immediately recognized by having their names displayed on the Recent Comments widget. Moreover, new visitors can glance through the widget to find the most talked-about posts. (For the life of me, I can’t figure out where I got this widget from.)
3. Thanks to the NoFollow plugin, bloggers leaving comments at Financial Jungle are rewarded with link-backs to their own blogs. A link-back helps to advance your Google PageRank score, thus making your site more visible in Google searches. The plugin expires the link-backs after 2 weeks to encourage return visits.

I forgot to mention this earlier. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the ClustrMaps icon. Clicking at the icon brings you to a world map showing off where the loyal Financial Jungle readers are coming from.