New Blogger Features!

I just received a newsletter from Blogger formally announcing the handful of their recently released features. Although we have been able to see them in our Blogger dashboard and/or or Blogger In Drafts account for some time now, it's still great to see Blogger summarizing everything they have improved on since last update. I, myself, rarely log in on my Blogger In Draft account, so some of the features I am still unaware of. Anyways, here's part of the newsletter that I received, in case you haven't gotten yours in the mail already, or chose not to:

Template Designer

If you haven’t had a chance to check out our brand-new Template Designer, you’re really missing out. We laid out the full laundry list of new design features in a recent Buzz post, but we think the best way to find out what’s possible is to get your hands dirty and play around right now.

So go ahead and freshen up your template; your blog will thank you.

Blogger Stats

We’re very excited about the most recent creation from Blogger in Draft, Blogger Stats. Blogger stats makes it easier than ever to get all sorts of real-time traffic data for your blog, right from the comfort of your Blogger dashboard.

Accurate Post Preview

We understand how important it is for your blog posts to display exactly as you expect when published, so we’ve put a lot of time into improving our current preview page. The end result is an entirely revamped post preview, which now displays your drafts exactly as they will appear when published live on your blog.

New Sharing Buttons

We’re always thinking about ways to help you better promote and share your blog content with the world, and the new sharing buttons we’ve just released are great tools to help you get the word out. The buttons—which support sharing via email, Blogger, Google Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook — can be placed under each blog post where your readers will easily see them.

You can turn on the new sharing buttons right now by editing the Blog Posts widget and enabling Show Share Buttons in the Design | Page Elements tab.

Zemanta Post Gadget

Zemanta has been a partner with Blogger for over a year now, providing a browser plugin service that helps you easily add related content to your blog posts. We’ve seen so much positive feedback about the service that we recently released a gadget version of the service that easily integrates directly in your post editor.

Google Affiliate Network

With Google Affiliate Network you can access affiliate ads for top retailers. If the ad or text link you post on your blog results in a sale, you earn a commission.

Google Affiliate Network is featured in the Monetization tab in your Blogger account. You’ll need an AdSense ID to join, and once you have access to Google Affiliate Network you can apply to advertiser programs, promote ads, search for links to specific products, sign up to access product feeds, and utilize Link Subscriptions that deliver the latest links and promotions directly to you each day.

Quite a lot, huh? I'm excited to see future enhancements to Blogger as they are seriously lagging behind WordPress in terms of features. Don't get me wrong though. I still love Blogger for the simplicity that it offers to new bloggers! What do you think of the new improvements?