Online Marketing Blog

Social sharing buttons have evolved a lot over the past few years. We went from basic text links to images, and now we have interactive buttons. That’s all great except it can be a pain to add them all to your blog and get them to display nicely.

That’s where ShareDaddy comes in. Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, has created a single plugin that integrates all the major sharing buttons. There is no need to install multiple plugins, mess with template code, or worry about the buttons not lining up right in your theme.

ShareDaddy Supports:

• Faecbook
• Twitter
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Email
• Print

It’s configurable to so you can:

• Show only the buttons you want.
• Drag and drop the order of the buttons.

Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was WordPress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Everybody loves the social media site Digg, or they think they do. It happens to be the social news site that everyone wants to get on because of it’s history, possible traffic and exposure that can come from it. However, Digg is not good for a lot of industries. Instead, look for a Pligg site that is a better match for your news.

What’s Pligg? Pligg is an open source social news & voting software. Basically Digg. Anyone can download it for free and install it on their servers. Sites are popping up all over the internet that are like Digg, only targeted to different topics. This means that their users may be a better match for your stories and you may have better success with a Pligg powered site than Digg.

You can now add a Sphinn button to your site to let visitors quickly submit your post to Sphinn, the SEO Digg clone from Search Engine Land.

Here is the button:

Feel free to download it and host it yourself. It also does measure up to Danny Sullivan’s button standards.

WordPress Code:
<a href="http://sphinn.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>"><img src="http://www.toprankblog.com/downloads/sphinn.png" border="0" alt="Sphinn" title="Add to Sphinn"></a>

JavaScript Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var URL = window.location.href;
document.write("<a href='http://sphinn.com/submit?url="+URL+"'><img src='http://www.toprankblog.com/downloads/sphinn.png' border='0' alt='Sphinn' title='Add to Sphinn'></a>")
</script>

I’ll be working on getting the Sphinn button into the social bookmark tool too in the upcoming week or so.

[tags]sphinn,search-engine-land,social-bookmark,digg[/tags]

FeedBurner is the only service (that I know of) that will re-publish a blogs feed in order to get feed stats. Being such a great service, many users use it only to figure out how many readers their blogs have. However, FeedFlare is a great addition to any FeedBurner feed as it builds interaction and social media links into each post.

FeedFlare allows publishers to easily build “interactivity” into the content they create, making it simple for subscribers to tag, email or share their content with others. Publishers can include a variety of services including a live display of the number of comments to each post, the ability to email the author directly and show the number of blogs that link to their item.

David Dalka on social media and an improved democracy: “How to Forge a New American Mandate Via Social Media Political Revolution”

Trouble at Netscape, Trouble at digg? Graywolf and Calcanis share their insight.

MarketSmart Interactive closes it’s doors. That’s too bad because we used to get a good number of inquiries from their dissatisfied clients.

Google’s Blogger now offers free domain hosting or mapping for blogs.

FeedBurner’s BlogBeat blog stats now available. I spoke with Rick Klau about this at WMW Pubcon in Vegas but he didn’t give many details.

There’s a bit of a meme going around regarding the potential use of Google Reader as an alternative to digg. The idea is to be able to view the the most popular shared feeds. Steve Mermelstein starts out with a post, “Google Reader Could be a Digg Killer” which caught the attention of prominent bloggers Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble with nice roundup by Jason Lee Miller from WebProNews.

I wasn’t sure about posting about getting the nix from digg earlier this week, but apparently it was on many people’s minds. The response has been pretty amazing. Note, it was a blog domain name, not a user account that was added to the digg banned submission list.

Here’s a list of blogs/sites that have been talking about digg’s spam and editorial policies this week.

• How to be a dirty digger – Graywolf
• The list of domains ditched by digg keeps growing – Chris Winfield
• Done with digg – Kim Krause
• A new social news site for SEO
• digg banning domains open to abuse – Brian Turner
• digg digs further down deeper – Red Dixon
• digg members go renegade – Lisa Barone via Bruce Clay blog

More aggressive SMO marketers often talk about being careful not to get user accounts banned on digg. But what about the domain name? Banning user accounts has to do with the actions of the user. That is, behaviors and actions the user can control.

However, a domain name brings into other considerations. For example, whether or not influential members of the digg community like or don’t like a certain site or topic, regardless of what the mass of digg users respond to in the form of story submissions and votes. The site or blog owner has little control over whether other people submit stories and/or vote on them, bury them or report them as spam. Even if they’re not.

I was very torn between attending this session and Big SEO, but I got a bit of both. Here’s the official session description:

“Today’s search landscape is more diverse than ever. There are hundreds of new social bookmarking, community tagging, feed search and news search sites and systems emerging. This panel has representatives from some of the top social and feed search engines on the web today. These expert panelists will look at the top issues they are currently facing, as well as new options they can offer webmasters who are looking to get their sites listed.”

This topic could easily have been broken down into at least 2 different sessions as these are somewhat disparate topics and no one really talked about blogs per se. Speakers included: Owen Byrne from digg, Rick Klau from FeedBurner, Chris Tolles from Topix.net and Niall Kennedy.

Danny Sullivan has posted a very interesting and THOROUGH description of how the Search Engine Watch Blog had two different stories get major play on Digg and Google News at the same time. This provided an opportunity for a comparison and it was interesting to read that Google News sent significantly more traffic than being on the home page of Digg.

He does make the distinction that one event does not make the rule and that the Search Engine Watch blog is included as trusted news source in Google news. There are about 7,000 site included in Google News, so this isn’t a situation you can test on your own. Or is it? I’ve written before about how to get into news search engines, including Google News.

Marketing Sherpa Gets Acquired by MEC Labs Group (Marketing Experiments)

Quintura LSI Keyword Research Tool Updated – SEOBook
The Digg Algorithm – Unofficial FAQ – Cristian Mezei
Transcribing Matt Cutts’ Videos: One through Fourteen РPeter T. Davis
Elite Retreat – Learn to optimize your business with Dave Taylor, Shoemoney, Aaron Wall and Lee Dodd