September 4th, 2010 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

If you’ve read many of my blog posts you’ll have probably gotten the idea that I like to keep things as simple as possible when it comes to making money online. You’d be right. Original content and backlinks is a mantra I live by and it’s certainly worked well for me. There is a 3rd part of the story out there though and whilst it is connected with backlinks it is treated slightly differently by Google. I’m talking about the worlds of social bookmarking and social sharing, this is how I handle them.

I’m guessing that most people are like me, whenever they create a new blog they likely use either their favourite bookmarking plugin or go with whatever their new theme has built in. I did this for years and the result was just about every website I owned had a different way of “sharing”. That was until one day something triggered in my brain, whenever I was wanting to bookmark something I was looking for that little familiar icon, the AddThis icon. Subconsciously I’d begun to associate it with social sharing. I figured if I’d done this then so might some others? It’s a little bit like blue underlined text for hyperlinks, our brains seem programmed to look out for what is familiar.

I have multiple AddThis accounts and I try to use them for all my social sharing and bookmarking functionality. The first advantage to doing this is AddThis Analytics – a nice easy way of seeing just how much your content is being bookmarked and shared. I feel this is really important because I think we are at the stage now where the major search engines are starting to take some of this information into account. How often is a page mentioned on Facebook? Are people bookmarking it with Google? Has it been tweeted?

These services not only create backlinks but more importantly they show that content is being talking about. I have seen marked improvements over the past 12 months in the rankings of my content that gets the most social mentions. I’d even throw the idea out there that it “might” even be getting taken into account when Google calculates page rank?

The other advantage to using AddThis is the sheer number of services they include. I’ve used blog plugins in the past that have 30-40 services but they never appear to be able keep things in a nice browser friendly compact way. AddThis on the other hand has only one purpose in life and they’ve done it very well.

The final advantage comes with my none blog websites. I still have some websites that aren’t run of WordPress or any other CMS for that matter and social bookmarking from them was always a manual job. It meant cherry picking a few services to offer your visitors. Now with AddThis it’s just a case of adding some very simple JavaScript. If you look below you’ll see my last weeks Addthis shares from one account. How many of those services are you supporting? How many shares could you be missing out on?

Like all the best things online AddThis is free to use, I’d strongly recommend that you give it a go on your websites. You might just be surprised by how much/little people are sharing your content.

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