How to pimp out your blog’s social sharing
If you’ve spent hours agonizing over the right wording and keyword placement, you know the importance of getting your blog read. Logging long hours of time and effort means nothing if no one gets to read it. While the occasional bloggie will spend a few moments examining the page, it’s your job to get it out to the masses.
“You see, sharing your content on sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter, and more gives you not only credibility with people (and thus more traffic) but also inbound links which can increase your PageRank as well as provide other very positive signals to search engines that you’re a legitimate blog creating worthwhile content.”
—The Importance of Using Social Media, Social Sharing for SEO, Tentblogging.com
In-Blog Sharing
The first step in sharing your content is to get sharing buttons on your blog itself. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the most important piece is making them visible to your readers. Whether you choose to get a customized set of sharing buttons, or stick with the standard icons, they need to be visible and understandable.
- Placement: It is highly recommended to place your sharing buttons at the top of your page. This gives even the casual reader a chance to shout their praises to audiences that would normally be out of your reach.
- Customize: While the standard social icons will be just fine, getting a customized set might blend them a bit better with your overall theme. Addthis.com is a great resource for simple sharing icons. You can also get find free custom icons online, and place them in the standard share code. Webdesignledger.com provides some great free options.
Add StumbleUpon
With over 20 million users, StumbleUpon is another great source for increasing traffic to your blog. What sets this social site apart from the rest is how its users interact. Because the act of stumbling involves clicking the button that says “stumble” over and over, it’s safe to assume those using the site have time to explore. Take advantage of these curious readers and get involved.
- Sharing button: The standard sharing buttons usually include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. However, adding StumbleUpon will allow readers to submit your article into the mix. Then, as people read it they can “like it” with the thumbs up. The more popular the higher spikes in traffic you’ll see.
- Submit yourself: As a StumbleUpon user, you can submit your own articles. In this case, it’s important that you are connected with a significant amount of other users. When that happens they can then view your favorites and hopefully thumbs up your articles, giving you greater traffic and credibility.
The prodigy of 2012 social networks, Pinterest, has been growing at exponential rates. Many businesses have taken to the new site as another outlet to increase traffic and connect with customers. As a blogger, this site will become important for you as well. Pinterest offers a unique way to connect your blog with important images, reaching an audience of 10 million and growing.
- Customize your boards: When creating your boards, you can name each one based on various topics. If using this as a supplement to your blog, you can create boards based on your different blog subjects, pages, etc.
- Captions: This is what will drive the most traffic to your site. Include a relevant link to your blog within the caption. Interested can then click through.
Social media should already be an integral part of your blog. Whether it’s your main source of traffic or a way to garner a larger readership, social sharing is the most beneficial way to get your blog read, ranked, and loved. By employing different techniques, you can make the most of what social media outlets have to offer and see the results.
Image by RambergMediaImages
Jessica Sanders is an avid small business writer touching on topics from social media to payroll services. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including medical billing software for b2b lead generation resource, Resource Nation.
Great post. I think a lot of people underestimate the value of Stumbleupon still. At least for me, it still drives pretty steady traffic to my sites.
I personally think people are more likely to use the official sharing widgets over custom alternatives for a few reasons; they are easier to use, they are easier to recognize and they provide social proof. If a reader sees a post has 100 shares they might be more inclined to share that post because everyone else did.
We use the socialize plugin here at my company to add a call to action below our posts with share buttons. I think it’s important to provide the share buttons at the top AND bottom of your posts. I also think it’s important to actually ask your readers to act so they might comment and share.
Definitely agree, Jon.
StumbleUpon has turned out to be one of the most valuable resources for my work over at the wearabl blog, and I’m writing a post for the creative crowd over at creativeblogger on how to get 60+ clicks from stumble upon every time you post.
I wonder if in addition to the top and bottom of a post, it might be effective to introduce a pop-over lightbox focused on getting the reader to share the content. I know pop ups are generally super-crazy-effective despite their distaste, but maybe it could be the next step?
Christopher, perhaps I’ll get in touch with you about doing a post about StumbleUpon?
Definitely! I just wrote a post about the su.pr URL shortener called How to Get 60+ more visitors to your latest post over at CreativeBlogger, but I’d love to explore it more here at Fuel as well. It’s too powerful of a tool not to!
Jon, You know what, I really think the lack of use of Stumble Upon is simply not knowing how to use it, or how the content gets shared. I know I’ve spoken to people who want to get their work shared on the site but aren’t sure how to get it there, how it works upon getting onto the website, etc. Perhaps that is something worth exploring for a new guest post?? We shall see. Thanks for your information and thanks for reading! :)