Market and Investment

All bloggers want the world to see their blog. Regardless of how many visitors and subscribers you have, you will always want more. One of the most popular (and productive) ways for bloggers to market their blog is with social media.

There are many different ways you can market your website with social media (content development, joining groups for exchanging votes, etc.) but one that has been proven to work when used properly is placing social media icons and voting buttons on your blog.

By placing a voting button on your site you are encouraging visitors to vote for you (think of it as a friendly reminder) and you’re making it quick and easy for them to vote. Simply reminding visitors that they can vote for you will help to increase the number of votes that you get.

Common Mistakes When Using Social Media Icons/Buttons

Because voting buttons, widgets and icons can encourage votes and lead to more visitors through social media, many bloggers tend to overdo them. You will see blogs with voting buttons for every possible social media site you can image.

In almost every case, this strategy will backfire. Adding too many buttons will create a cluttered blog that distracts the reader and just plain looks bad. Just as important, having too many buttons can spread out the votes that you get to the point that they have no impact.

Say you are using 30 different buttons or icons on your site, and each one of them gets one vote from a reader. If this is the case, you will see very little traffic from those social media sites, because it takes more votes to make a difference. But if you were to have 5 buttons/icons and you got 30 total votes, that would be an average of 6 votes per button, which might be enough to get some traffic.

By using fewer icons/buttons you can indicate to visitors which social media sites are the most important ones for you. If you’re using too many buttons it can be confusing and they have no idea where you would most like to receive the votes.

How to Use Social Media Voting Buttons

Place only a small number of social media voting buttons on your blog, I recommend 2 or 3. Carefully chose the social media sites based on fit with your audience, as well as their potential to send traffic to your site.

For most blogs, especially those with smaller audiences, it is not a good idea to only target the major social media sites like Digg and Reddit. You’re more likely to have success with smaller social media sites, so try to find a niche site that you can target in addition to a major site.

Some blogs will have audience that consist largely of people that do not use social media. If this is the case for you, consider using your blog to inform your readers about a particular social media site, how they can use it, and how they can vote for you.