To get exposure for your blog, it is really important nowadays to promote it via social media. One of the best ways of doing this is to get other people to promote it for you! You do this by giving them handy little buttons and links. My theme, the Headway theme provides social media buttons to go in the sidebar, but it is also nice to have some links for people to click when they finish reading your post.
When my web designer did my Landlord Law Blog for me, she sourced the add to any button which has links to practically every social media site you could possibly think of. However after a while I started to get annoyed at the way it kept popping up and getting in my way when I was using the site. Then I read about Nicholas Cardot’s plugin – Nicholas writes a very good blog called Site Sketch 101 and you can read about his plugin here.
I did try his plugin for a while, but it did not suit the style of my sites, so I decided to go looking for a few more. One recommended by a Site Sketch 101 reader was the sexybookmarks plugin, and I am using this (at the time of writing) for my Landlord Law Blog.
However there are others. One that I quite like is I love social bookmarking, and this is the one I am using here (at the time of writing this – I may change it later). The social media buttons appear if you hover hour mouse over the text at the end of the post. You can customise how they appear and the buttons that show.
So far as twitter is concerned (very important for promoting blog posts), many sites have the little green tweetmeme buttons at the top of their posts. I had this too for a while. However after reading the Site Sketch 15 best wordpress plugins post I decided to start using backtype tweetcount. This has two advantages (1) readers do not have to authorise the program to access their twitter account and (2) you can change the colour of the box to match your site style. I have made it orange on the Landlord Law blog and the ‘house blue’ colour here.
Have you used any of these? Which do you prefer? Can you click one of them please before you go on your way!!
Interesting stuff — but do such sort of add-ons actually help your blog — i.e. does they actually generate new traffic or help with search engine optimization?
That is a complex subject, but promoting your site through social media does work. For example I have a small site http://www.evictingsquatters.co.uk. As an experiement I asked some friends to recommend it on stumbleupon. Before they did this, the site was number 12 on google on a search on ‘Evicting Squatters’. Today (30/1/2010) it is number 5. Nothing else has changed, so it must have been the stumbleupon recomendations.
So it is important to make it easy for people to do this.
Hi
I have just set up my wordpress blog to gain feedback and to promote the legal service that I will be launching in September 2010.
As a victim of the credit crunch, I have been made redundant and am in the process of setting up as a sole practitioner providing legal outsourcing services in Conveyancing aimed at small to medium sized law firms.
I am interested in using the social networking sites for promoting my site but don’t know where to start. I was very interested to read your post on this – do you have any more tips? I would be grateful for any help as I am very much a newbie to these sites.
My website is http://www.jurisc.co.uk
many thanks
Ursula
Hi Ursuala
Have a look at the rest of this blog as I have quite a few posts on social media and blogging. You may also find this wiki helpful: http://www.uklawyerswiki.co.uk/index.php5?title=Main_Page. Good luck with the blog and service!