A Socially Good Way to Increase Money Potential and Interest in Your Site

If you are try­ing to make money by blog­ging, the num­ber one goal is to get more traf­fic to your site.  How do you get more traf­fic?   Make your­self vis­i­ble to search engines, get links from other pop­u­lar web­sites, etc…  You prob­a­bly know the drill.

In other words, you have to work dili­gently to get your site known to other peo­ple out there.  You have to make your­self and your site well-known and/or “sociable”.

Today, I checked off one of my goals of mak­ing my site more socia­ble by adding those cute lit­tle icons/links below all of my posts, thanks to a slick Word­press plu­gin called “Socia­ble”.   These icons enable your read­ers to:

• Print out your article
• Email it to some­one else
• Book­mark and/or share your arti­cle on a wide vari­ety of social sites

This is how you get Sociable:

• Log in to your Word­press blog
• Nav­i­gate to “Plugins->Add New”
• Type the search term: “Socia­ble” and ini­ti­ate the search.
• Click the “Install” link next to the Socia­ble plu­gin and it should be quickly installed on your Word­press blog

After suc­cess­ful instal­la­tion, click on “Settings->Sociable”.   There you will see ninety-nine dif­fer­ent icons that rep­re­sent­ing your choices of social sites that you can turn on/off accord­ing to your tastes.  You also have the abil­ity to con­trol where the icons will appear, such as on indi­vid­ual posts, on the front page of the blog, etc.

If you pre­fer, you can make the social links appear as text rather than icons or you can change the look of the icons.

As soon as you make your set­tings changes, the icons/links will appear as you con­fig­ured them.  I made them appear at the end of each post, which, to me, is the most intu­itive place to put them.  I’ve debated whether to make the icons into text links.  Expe­ri­enced read­ers will know what all the icons mean, but novices will prob­a­bly pre­fer the text links.  I am lean­ing toward using text links since both expe­ri­enced and novice users are more likely to under­stand the links’ mean­ing that way.

Here is a good video on Socia­ble that explains it visually:

This enhance­ment will make it eas­ier for your read­ers to share your arti­cle with the blo­gos­phere and the rest of the web.  And we know any­thing we can do to make things eas­ier for our read­ers to share our arti­cle will increase our traf­fic and ulti­mately increase the mon­e­ti­za­tion poten­tial of our blog!