Custom Blog Creation: Using Social Bookmarking Widgets To Drive Buzz (and Traffic!)

There are enough details and tricks involved in custom blog creation that it’s practically an art in and of itself. Today, we’re going to look at one small part of the process: social bookmarking.

What’s Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is something you’ve probably seen a dozen times — nearly every webpage today has some form of button on it that says “Submit”, “Digg”, or some other variation of “put a link to this webpage up on XYZ social bookmarking profile.” StumbleUpon. Google Buzz. Reddit. Even Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter are, in their own way, ways of social bookmarking (which is, in the end, simply “sharing a link with your friends”.)

How It Drives Buzz
Two things have to happen for social bookmarking widgets to do their job. First, you have to write an article that people will actually want to share. Whether it’s funny, awesome, evocative, or just downright useful, it has to have impact, or all the social buttons in the world won’t matter for crap. On the flipside, the most amazing article in the world might get a few visitors from people sending the link out via email — but if it’s that good, it’ll get thousands of times more links if it has a plethora of social bookmarking options right there waiting to be used.

The Most Popular Social Bookmarking Widgets
(For WordPress 3.0🙂

• • Sharebar: a vertical box to the left of each post that has buttons for social networking and bookmarking sites.
  • Follow Me: Displays links to all of your social media profiles in one large button.
  • KNXDT Bookmarks: A footer bar with links to a variety of social tagging, bookmarking, and media services.

Share And Follow: A comprehensive list of social bookmarking and media sites to put alongside your blog posts. Notably includes links to DeviantArt, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, and iTunes.

• GetSocial: A plugin that allows you to configure any number of social sharing buttons easily.
• Social Bookmarking ReLoaded: Adds a Social Bookmarking panel to your Admin section, which you can use to configure basically any social bookmarking button once and have it propagate to every post on your blog.