Adding Social Bookmarking Widgets to Blogger

'K, I've been looking for an easy way to add the social bookmarking widgets to my blogs and I think I've found it. Why is this important? If people find your blog which you've made useful and informative they may want to share it with others, so why not make it easier for them? Remember more visitors = more traffic = more AdSense clicks.

The site is here (Many thanks to Hans at BeautifulBeta!) but I'll give it the rundown here and try to clear up some parts I thought could have been a bit clearer (the purpose of this site, after all, is for you to learn from my trial and error!)

1. Go to your blog's template tab and click "edit HTML"

a. Download your template just in case you want to change it back or have problems. I didn't, but it's still a good idea.

b. Check "expand widgets" box.

2. Scroll down and find your .post img { } settings. It'll look something like this:

.post img {
padding:4px;
border:1px solid #cde;
}

You'll want to replace the border settings (between the colon and semicolon) to "0" or you'll have a border around each icon. Unfortunately, this also removes the borders from all your images in your post. (At the site they mention another way using a bookmarks css, but I have no idea how to do that yet. If I figure it out I'll update this post.)

Anyhoo, the .post img should now look like this:

.post img {
padding:4px;
border:0;
}

3. Place the following js within the head (I chose to place it just before the /head tag):

<script src='http://home.planet.nl/~hansoosting/downloads/beautifulbeta.js' type='text/javascript'/>

4. Continue to scroll down looking for:

<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'/>

(For some reason I had problems finding it when scrolling upwards from the bottom, and no problem at all when scrolling down, maybe just a perceptual quirk). Replace it with the code found here (Right click and save as .txt and open in notepad to cut and paste into your template).

That's it, you've just added social bookmarking widgets to all your posts!

Again, many cool-points to Hans at BeautifulBeta!

Dynamic Fresh Content on Your AdSense Sites

OK, so we've discussed how original quality content is what's going to get people to hopefully find your page and keep coming back. But, what if your page is like this one. I don't want to re-hash what everyone else says (remember that advice I read about social bookmarking and what happened?) and any changes I make will take time until I see results to share with ya'll.

So how do I provide relevant material for those who come back to my site before I've got something new to share? Simple! I've included RSS feeds from relevant sites high up on my page, so visitors will see the new links when they change. In this case the links are on the right-hand side and since this site is about my progress using AdSense, the feed is from the AdSense Blog I mentioned in my last post. Now, if I've got no new progress to report for awhile, his posts will provide changing (dynamic) links on my site and visitors (hopefully) won't think this an abandoned site.

Now I know what you're thinking: "More links out mean more lost visitors." This is something I've gone round and round about, but I think it boils down to your original content. If you've put the time into offering fresh quality content with no tricks to bait people in (How many times have you been looking for say, a theater listing, clicked a link and found yourself on a porn-site? Did you stick around or did you simply close the window and make a mental note to avoid that URL in the future?) then people will find your site. And if they find the content useful, they may bookmark it and hopefully return in the future. If they have a similar or related site, they may even post a link or your own RSS feed. Then you'll see a higher pagerank and higher listings in search results which in turn will give you more visitors. And more visitors will translate into more exposure to your AdSense Ads which will translate into more AdSense clicks! TA-DAAA!