How to create a poll for your blog

This lens will provide you with a full guide to creating a poll in your blog.

In this lens, I intend to explore the different web services available for bloggers who are interested in posting polls on their blogs, and walk you through the advantages and disadvantages of every such service.

Why polls? Polls are such a great way to interact with your audience. Polls are good for feedback, for questions you want to pose, and their results are like organic content that you create - so they actually generate original content for your blog.

How did I get into polls? I was looking for ways to make my blog more fun and friendly for the readers
so i thought about posting some interactive stuff like a poll, but the problem was that i couldn't find any information about how to do it on the web.
As someone who is quite new in this field it was important for me to find an ultimate and easiest way to do it.

From there I got sucked into the world of online polls, widgets, social polls, voters, results, stats, and opinions.

I hope you enjoy the lens - it's my first creation. Happy polling!

If you're still not sure you need a poll on your blog or website, here are some good reasons:

1. You need polls because polls enable a discussion, between your users and the topics discussed on your blog. Like comments, polls prove to be a great way to know what people who read you think about you, your writing, and the topics you cover.

2. If you're a geek like me, you love statistics. The stats generated by polls can really enhance your stories and take them to the next level. Later, poll results can be examined and analyzed by you, just like those Gallup people on TV.

3. Polls are means for readers to be part of your blog. You're practically converting readers into co-authors. This is invaluable for user experience.

4. The percentage of people who leave a comment on a blog is generally small in comparison to the total number of readers. A lot of people lurk around a blog and like to be anonymous (for a variety of reasons). A poll will normally get a much higher participation rate and as a result can be a truer reflection of your readers thoughts and opinion.

5. Polls can also be great for helping you to determine which direction to take your blog in. Getting a vote on what you should do with your blog can be quite effective - you better be willing to take the results seriously and follow through on them.

After some research in the fascinating world of online polls and social networks i came up with some general idea of how to create a poll in my blog.

First of all, i learned that not every site has a "poll widget", and not every site is easy and friendly for the users.

I know. Some of you are probably asking: "What's a widget?!" well, it was a new term for me too.

A widget is when you take a part of one site and place it somewhere else, like when you write a poll and then insert it in your blog. This lens is going to be mostly about poll widgets: those polls you can take from one site (a poll's site) and place on your blog, website or social network profile.

Photo polls are useful. People use them to poll between different photos, designs, screenshots, graphs, and artwork. It's a great way to get feedback about a visual element.

Here are a few ways to make a picture poll:

1. Using Polls Boutique:

When you create a poll you have the option to click on a photo poll tab, which simply creates under the question and answer options a "Browse" button where you can add photos of up to 250 kb. The photos themselves load quickly, and that's all it takes.

2. Using Vizu:

You have 4 steps to creating a poll. Step 1 includes placing the question and answers, Step 2, in the settings category, requires you to mark relevant categories that relate to your poll, as well keywords that help users search for the poll. Finally in step 3 you can add pictures by clicking the "add picture" link under the poll question and answers. When I loaded them it took a while, since they automatically size and format the picture.

3. Using Soda Head:

I found Soda Head to be very user friendly, although also having steps for posting a poll, it was much easier than Vizu. In step 1 you write down your question, then in step 2 you add your answer options. Next to each answer you have a link titled "add media" when you click it, 3 options drag down with 2 of them being picture relevant. The first one is "Upload picture", the second one is "Picture URL" which when you click on, takes you straight to google images and by using the key word(s) you added for the answer finds the relevant picture%u2026pretty cool. The loading of the picture was very quick as well. Pretty robust.

Polls Boutique is a great site to use for polls.

First of all, their blog poll widget supports videos, audio and pictures, which is cool if you want to poll your readers on screenshots, videos or some new songs you composed. As far as I know, it's the only service around that allows you to do that.

Another really great service Polls Boutique gives you is the ability to see really in depth statistical results for you polls (see example).

And as a bonus, there's a pretty big voter community on the site all the time. I uploaded a poll and within a few minutes people started voting on it. I could also see who voted, since they show users' buddy icons next to the results.

To create a poll for your blog on Polls Boutique, you need to create a poll, then click on the "share" button on the bottom left corner and get you widget. I recommend choosing the "customize" option that allows you to pick a color (or making your poll transparent), fonts, or choose an image as the poll's background.

I've decided to start with a site called Vizu. The first thing you do is to sign up, then you can start creating your polls.

The one bad thing I have to say about Vizu is that if you don't have a popular blog, nobody will vote on your poll: they don't really have a voting community. And so, a few hours after I posted the poll, nobody even bothered to vote on it and I felt kind of ignored).

After you're done creating, click on "export poll" and choose your poll's color and size (it's really great that you can sort of choose your poll's size. Not many other services let you do that).

I had some difficulties copying the embed code here: first i clicked the text box and tried to paste it to my blog, but it kept saying that the code is invalid, then i just clicked the "copy" button and it worked magically.

You also have the option to post it automatically by clicking on the name of blogging platform such as blogger or myspace, but that didn't work for me either. I wonder.

I found poll daddy quite friendly and easy to use.

After signing up, you can start with entering your poll's questions and answers, select a style and language (nice option), then press save and continue, and copy the code and paste it wherever you want.

I tried the wildfire method, copied the code to my blog on blogger. Didn't have any real technical problems.

There's something I've noticed on both Vizu and Poll Daddy: You don't really interact with other users. I mean, you can create polls, you do with them everything you want, but that's it. You get the feeling that you're the only one who's online at the moment.

Of course, one can say that if you need a social utility you can always go on Facebook or something like that, but i thought creating a poll could be more fun... Sure, you can click on the "answers" button, and there you can see the popular polls and the most recent, but still you feel really lonely.

I like Sodahead better than Polldaddy and vizu, because you can actually see some activity, meet people, read some blogs, join different groups, and it took me about 2 minutes to create a poll and insert it in my blog.

More than anything, Sodahead reminds me of Myspace, which is funny because I think one of the founders of Myspace is the guy behind this site.

The only thing I wasn't crazy about on Sodahead was the busy graphic design of the site, and the overall atmosphere that seemed very young, like a site for teenagers.

When you start making your poll on Sodahead you have 2 options: to share it with the Sodahead community, like on Polls Boutique or publish it in your blog or website, the second option makes it invisible for the Sodahead users, which isn't exactly what I would want: I'm more interested in polls that will be published both on my blogs and on the polling site.

I liked Toluna because it's not young and crazy teenager site and also not as serios as

After checking some of the sites i've noticed a "Surveys" options, and i didn't really know what's the difference between a survey and a poll, so that's what i found out:
A poll is as one-time, simple and quick question where users can usually respond with one mouse click. Sports and news sites are good examples that displays polls on their main pages. Surveys or questionnaires are more comprehensive forms that may include many types of questions and format types that are designed to extract information from the user in the most efficient way possible. The survey may have conditional or branching logic embedded where answering a question a certain way may lead to another set of questions specific to that answer. Surveys can be one or two questions, or as many as 100 questions, it is entirely up to the discretion of the administrator/creator.
So it's up to you what to choose.