Creating links to social bookmarking sites

Adding links to social networking sites like Digg, Reddit, Bloglines, etc. is a useful method of popularing your blog and getting traffic back in return. Obviously, you need a regular inflow of readers and some good articles in the first place so that some of them can spread the word about your blog.

If you run a website which is powered by Wordpress, how do you add such links? The default installation of Wordpress does not have such links. Most of the themes too do not come with them integrated. Its actually quite simple to get it done. I’ll walk you through the steps:

Step 1: Use a link generator to simplify the task of creating links

Some of the useful link generators are:

• iFeedReaders
• TopRankBlog

You can also use a Wordpress plugin available at TwisterMc to get this done.

Step 2: Login in to the Wordpress Admin site and edit your Theme

The Theme Editor is located at Admin -> Presentation -> Theme Editor. Edit the single.php page and add the code generated in Step 1 after the following line in the code:

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>


Step 3: Store the images on your server

If you are more adventureous and want to make your site have good images for the links instead of just text, you can download the link images from the respective sites.

It is a good option to have the images stored on your server rather than having them fetched from the social bookmarking site’s server. You will have more predictability this way. Save the images to a directory on your server and update the code to have appropriate “img src” tags.

That’s it! You are all set to “digg this” article. :-)