Doesn’t matter if you are creating micro-niche sites or you blog on a daily basis the one thing that fuels the growth of our sites is referrals and sharing of your posts. So why not make it easy on your visitors and give them all the tools to do so. With wordpress its so easy with plugins, no messy coding to deal with. For the start of my WordPress series Im going to start with a couple of my favorite sharing plug-ins that I use on almost all my sites.
Sexy Bookmarks
Just the name should make you want it. It will make your site sexy 🙂 Ok all kidding aside this is one of my all time favorite plugins and have been using it for quite awhile. When configured it will give you little icons for various social media sites that all your visitors have to do is click on one to share your post. It will also give a count by each icon. On the back end you have many many social sites to choose from, just click each one you want then you can click and drag to order them the way you wish them to appear. I keep it just to the main ones, dont want to overwhelm your visitors. It also the option to add a Facebook like button and a google +1 button as well. You can also choose the location, before or after your post as well as left or right (like buttons can be located independently from the sexy bookmarks), Most of the settings are self explanatory and you can just activate and away you go.
Change the twitter username in Sexy Bookmarks
Thats the plugin on the bottom of this post, ya you can go ahead and test it out, maybe tweet this post?
Share Bar for WordPress
Sharebar
Share bar is another great share plugin. Instead of at the end of the post it puts the share bar on the side of your post, and it slides with it as your visitor scrolls down the length of your long winded rants. Thats what I like most of this plugin is that it puts the share buttons always there in the visitors face saying ‘please share me’.
It comes with a few basic buttons already set up but you are able to add others if you wish. That is how I got the new Google +1 button on mine. Another cool feature is if the visitors window is less than 1000px wide it will automatically stick smaller buttons under your post title (this can be turned off and min width adjusted). You can also adjust position of the bar as well as border and background colors to blend in with your site.
I only use 3 or 4 of the big ones in this plug in (facebook, twitter, stumble and google +) and use sexy for all of them at the bottom.
Others?
Im know there are many others and one of them may be your favorite. I have used many of them and have found these two to be the best in my humble opinion. If you do use another, just like these be sure to change the twitter id from the plugins to your own so you dont lose out on the self promotion. If it dosent allow you to then thats a reason right there to try another.
If you need help with these or anything hosting or wordpress related let me know. I do wordpress installs and hosting and Im pretty damn cheap 🙂
What plugin do you use to help your visitors share your posts?
Like this article? please share! yes use the thing down there that you just learned about.
I had sexy bookmarks, but it really slowed down my site. May be due to some conflict. I would like to get the share bar though…
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I love me some Sexy Bookmarks! Your post reminds me that I still haven’t set up a twitter account yet. Maybe one day… Thanks for sharing your favorite plug-ins, it’s always nice to know what other bloggers think of these. 🙂
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No time like the present 🙂
Changing the via @shareaholic to my handle doesn’t work. It still stays on “via @shareaholic”. Any idea how to fix this?
thnx!!