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Social Bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit have turned the world of content aggregation around. While Digg and Reddit remain two of the most popular social networking sites, there are a lot of equally good sites. What these social bookmarking sites do is that they make YOU the king. They do not generate content but instead link to content and which content gets to bubble up to the top is determined by YOU the user.

Why do I need to add social bookmarking?

If you get an article on the front page of Digg, you will bring in an average of 50,000 new visitors atleast to your blog. Think about it, 50000 potential new subscribers … 50,000 new advertisers … 50,000 new means of increasing revenue to your website. Of those, many more will link to your blog, driving up your ranking on Technorati and Alexa.

So, one of your regular readers decides that your article is Social bookmarking worthy. The problem with these social bookmarking sites is that when your visitor goes to add your blog to these social bookmarking sites, the sites make them manually add some components such as the URL of the post they want to add, the title of that post and a description of the post and guess what, by the time your user goes to step 2, he gives up because it is taking way to much time. So, what you need is a WordPress plugin that does most of this grunt work for your blog visitor making it easy for him to submit your post to social bookmarking sites.

Plugin Name: WP Social Bookmarks

Plugin Author: James Pegram

Plugin Page: http://www.realitywired.com/2007/04/02/wordpress-plugin-wp-social-bookmarks/

Download WP Social Bookmarks Plugin

http://www.realitywired.com/downloads/wp-social-bookmarks.zip

 The WP Social Bookmarks plugin does not target every possible social bookmarking site out there but instead targets the most popular ones which are Digg, Reddit, Netscape, delicious and StumbleUpon.  It also pulls the Digg count and the del.ico.us bookmark count if you choose.

Installing the WP Social Bookmarks Plugin

Step # 1: Upload the plugin folder to your wp-content/plugins directory

Step # 2: Go to Plugins tab in your WordPress Admin Dashboard. Find Wp Social Bookmarks then click Activate

Step # 3: Add the following code snippet to where you want the links to appear. If you observe on TechCounter, I have it displayed directly below the category of this post at the top.

<?php if (function_exists(’wp_social_bookmarks’)) { wp_social_bookmarks(); } ?>

Step # 4: Under Options in your WP Admin Dashboard, go to WP Social Bookmarks. There you can choose the plugin options such as the Social Networking sites you want displayed, if you want to display the digg count and if you want to display the del.ico.us count

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