Buttons and Chicklets and Badges Oh My!
My most recent client is looking to upgrade the blog portion of their site by adding features to increase readership and create an online community. It’s something that’s fairly easily done via the web, but it’s the kind of task that requires a few simple tips to make sure your site makes the right connections with your readers.
Step 1: Take a survey of sites you find useful. These days, with everyone and their dog on seemingly every social networking site known to mankind, it’s a good idea to come up with some simple coping mechanisms to combat the information overload that can result from joining YASNS. Take a few sites that you visit frequently and gather a list of the social networking tools they employ. Basically, the whole broad topic of Web 2.0 sevices can be broken down into three basic categories:
Bookmarking Tools: Those little badges for services like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us make it easy for your readers to save a link to your content and then share their links on their profiles.
RSS Tools: These buttons allow a reader to add a feed from your site to a feed-reader service. While most blogs and feed-enabled sites already offer this via that little orange button you see in your browser’s address bar, there are plenty of services out there such as Netvibes and Google that make it easy to track your favorite blogs via a personalized feeds display. Feedburner, recently acquired by Google, is a good tool for maintaining your feed(s) and the service gives you a feed url to use as well as some button generating tools.
Social Networking Tools: Join a site like Facebook or Twitter and you can get the code to display a badge on your site that links to your profile. Other services such as Google’s Friend Connect and MyBlogLog allow blog owners to build an online network with other bloggers.
Step 2: Once you have a sense of the types of services you want to offer and info you want to display, create a way to keep track of everything. When I sign up for a site or service, I make sure I keep a record on paper of the username, password, screen name and url of my profile page if necessary. And, since a lot of these services like t send you a confirmation/activation email, I have a folder in my webmail just for membership-related emails. (I draw the line at subfolders though. There’s only so much OCD I can take.)
Step 3: Now that you have a way to keep track of your various memberships, go create them! Here’s a list of popular services, separated by category of service:
Bookmarking Tools:
Del.icio.us
Digg
Stumble
Reddit
Slashdot
RSS Tools:
Feedburner (if you only join one rss service, make it this one!)
Google
Newsgator
BlogRovr
MyBlogLog
My Yahoo
Netvibes
Amazon Kindle
Viigo
Bloglines
Windows Live
Wikio
Blog Networks
Social Networks:
Facebook
MySpace
LinkedIn
Twitter
Flickr
YouTube
Step 4: Now that you’ve joined everything, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a lot of interconnectivity out there between services. You can post your Twitter Tweets to your Facebook Wall, your Flickr Feed to your Myspace page and put your LinkedIn badge all over creation. Don’t stress that yet. For now, you want to make sure your loyal readers know how to make the most of your site. It’s time to add some buttons to your site. Sign into your Feedburner account and burn a feed for your website.
Step 5: Once you’ve burned your Feedburner feed for your site, go to their “Publicize” page. Now you can do some “one stop shopping” for some feed chicklets! Click on the “Chicklets” tab and then simply choose the feed aggregator services you want from their 24 item menu. You can also head over to Top Rank’s blog and get even more chicklets. Tip: save the code generated by these services in a plain text file for easy access. You can then copy and paste the code to display these badges wherever you’d like on your site. For example, if you are using a Wordpress site with widgetized sidebars, then you would go to your Widgets page on your dashboard, select the sidebar you want and then add a text widget. Then, simply paste in the code and save your changes.
Step 6: Now that you’ve added a way for your readers to get updates about your blog, you should add ways for them to bookmark and share your content. Addtoany.com is a great service that lets you grab a selection of bookmarking icons to add to the post template of your blog. Addthis is another site that lets you get one button that contains all the code for your bookmarking services.
Step 7: Once you’ve placed some feed chicklets and bookmarking buttons on your blog, you can get to work on your badges. Log into your account at Facebook. Then, underneath the left sidebar of your Wall, you should see a link that says: “Create a profile badge”. Simple enough. Twitter has a couple of ways to make your badge. If you go to your Twitter page, on the bottom there’s a link that says “Apps”. Go there if you want to have a badge on oyour site that displays all your latest “tweets”. If you want a button that says something like “Follow me on Twitter” then here’s a site that has an easy to use interface for creating your personal Twitter button. Extra Credit Project: since I can be a bit of what’s politely termed, “A Control Freak”, I created my own Twitter button, uploaded it to my images file and then linked to it in the sidebar with a surrounding hypertext link to a Twitter profile.
Step 8: If you want your readers to join a network of other bloggers and blog readers, then you can also insert a service for that. I’ve used MyBlogLog which offers an free trial period and then charges $25 for a “Professional Account” and they are pretty cagey about what the benefits are. Therefore, I recommend Google’s Friend Connect, a free service which is more user (and wallet) friendly. All you need is a Google account.
#Jenn Tip: I was able to fully customize the code in the Friend Connect badge to fit into a narrow sidebar and also switched out the hexcodes for ones that specifically matched a client’s logo colors.
Tags: badges, Facebook, social networking, Twitter
