The social Web is certainly a big consideration when working with editorial content today. While search engines can trickle in visitors for a long period of time, hitting the front page of Digg will boost your statistics dramatically in the short term. If your content is technically oriented in particular, the social Web offers a number of services to submit the story to, but even if you’re not you should look around in your niche and see if there is one that suits your site. After all, you all want more visitors, right?
There’s a lot to be said about what content works where in the social Web, and every time it boils down to writing good, interesting, and easily accessible content, and submitting it to the right site. Then it’s up to the users to vote it up or neglect it completely, which may in fact be up to how many friends you’ve got that can give the story the head start it needs. So, yes, it is a popularity contest, and yes, you can easily participate by extending your site towards it.
The easiest way to make your site ready for the social Web is to use one of the numerous plugins available. These typically add links or buttons to the end of each post, where the visitor can vote up the story in question, or submit it to a service if it hasn’t been submitted yet. Adding a plugin to manage these things for you is easy and certainly tempting, but there are some things you should consider before jumping the gun:
Most plugins, unfortunately, add clutter in the form of buttons or icons that just won’t work with every site. Some are limited to a set number of services, while others tempt you by adding too many. Make it classy and don’t overdo the number of social bookmarking services; that won’t make it more appealing to vote. In fact, maybe just one or two “Please vote for my story” buttons will work better for you than filling the screen with them.
You don’t need to rely on plugins to add social bookmarking submit buttons. Most sites offer their own buttons that you can embed, but embedding them is something you need to do manually.
Personally, I’m a fan of adding simple submit links to the single post view, preferably in a way that isn’t overly obtrusive to the user and doesn’t clutter the design. Better to promote the stories that do look like they can go somewhere by themselves, with additional graphics and/or updated stories asking for help. A few sitting links, however, isn’t too much in most cases, as long as you keep them relevant.
The following is the code to add sitting links. What you do is submit the permalink of the post in question to the service, so when someone clicks the link they’ll go to the submit page.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Orlando F. at 05132010
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