Weekly Challenge 6: Poll Your Readers

[Cammy Bean]

Us bloggers sure do love it when people actually come to our blogs, read our content, and make comments. It's why we do what we do, right?

This week's challenge is more of a fun exercise, a way to draw your readers in and get them interacting with both you and your blog's content. How? By adding a poll to your blog.

I've been playing with polls over the last few weeks and have tried a few different tools and approaches. I've written blog posts with a poll embedded right into the blog entry. And I've added a couple of polls to my blog's sidebar. I'm not convinced which is the best, but I did get a LOT of comments and conversation going through blog posts with polls. It seems that people like explaining their answers...

Our own Soha El-Borno wrote a detailed post about polling tools, which was my inspiration. She lists a whole bunch of polling tools.

I'll mention a few polling tools here, check out her post for even more.

Poll Daddy -- This is what I started with. Really easy to use and very sleek design, but you're limited to 5 responses.

Blogger -- now has a built in polling tool that you can add to your sidebar. For Blogger bloggers only. It doesn't look as cool as Poll Daddy, but it does the job.

Vizu

Easy Poll


Suggestions on poll content:

* Make the question relevant to your blog
* A topic about which you really want to know more about from your readers
* A question that you think readers will want to answer -- that will incite their curiosity
* Something you think others might want to know more about as well
* Invite readers to explain their answers in more depth in the comments

Have fun!

And be sure to post a link here in comments to your poll if you want BB folks to check it out and vote.

[Robin]

I've never tried anything like this before and am having funny trying to wrap my project around the poll concept. The Poll Daddy website looks cool. Thanks for a great suggestion.

[Cammy Bean]

Excellent. I'm glad you're enthused by this one, Robin! Let us know when you get something up. And have funny....:)

[Cammy Bean]

I saw that you were checking things out. I do think I had better luck when the poll was part of a blog post. Let us know when you've got one up if you want any feedback!

[alex miller]

I found WuFoo.com quite good for polls and forms. You only get three on the free account, but the reports it spits out are stunning... Here's a poll I've done.

Here's an example of a WuFoo report.

Here's some more info on WuFoo.

The free WuFoo option isn't great for polls, as you can only run three at a time on your WuFoo account, but it is worth exploring.

Thanks for the links to these tools Cammy. I'm off to explore. I'll have a poll on my blog ASAP!

Regards,
Alex

[Robin]

Well, in the spirit of better-late-than-never, I have finally posted a poll on one of my blogs. If you're a fan of The L Word ( lesbian tv drama on Showtime) you can participate in the poll HERE.

I preferred the look and ease of Poll Daddy, but finally decided against it because as far as I can tell, you are limited to one question. I used Survey Gizmo instead. I did not find it easy to use, but I did like the fact that you can adjust the appearance of your "gizmo." It does not seem that I have set it up so that people can only respond once. Is there a way to control that? If you know please let me know. Thanks!

[Cammy Bean]

Robin,

I like the Survey Gizmo -- I didn't know you could embed it right in your blog page -- that's certainly got more power than Poll Daddy. I'll take that for a spin next go 'round. I know that the other polling tools provide some way to prevent people from responding more than once; I think it was a simple check box. If I get into Survey Gizmo, I'll see what I uncover. Michele Martin used Survey Gizmo last week -- perhaps she'll have some insight....

[Cammy Bean]

So, Robin...I just attempted using Survey Gizmo. Couldn't get it to embed without all the text getting cut off, so ended up just doing a link. How'd you get yours to look so darn good?

[Robin]

Hi Cammy, Sorry I was slow to respond. I've been out of town. In order to get it to fit correctly in my blog, I had to make about a dozen adjustments to the size until it looked right. It was not a simple solution, I'm afraid!

[Cammy Bean]

You have way more patience than me, it seems. Overall, I've found the Survey Gizmo tool to be not so user-friendly. I've been trying to mess around with the reporting feature and find it frustrating!

[Robin]

The set-up part of Survey Gizmo was frustrating to me too. The end of the 7 days of voting comes tonight, and I am very nervous about whether or not I will be able to understand the results! Will keep you posted!

[Robin]

Okay, my poll is completed and the results have been posted. I still should do an analysis, but I thought I'd let readers take a shot at it first and add my 2 cents in the comments field, if I thought of anything that hadn't already been said.

115 people participated. I didn't try to figure out how to make graphs out of the results on Survey Gizmo. I'm assuming that since it converts data into excel that I could have done it easily. The list format seemed best for my topic.

The coolest part of this experiment to me is the level of participation. I've never had 115 comments! If you have questions, lt me know.

[Cammy Bean]

Robin,

115 responses -- that's great! Seems like a great experiment for you that was a lot of fun for your readers and really pulled people in. You'll have to do more!

Cammy