Blogger used to be a good blogging platform, especially for beginners. It was easy to use and setup, and not much technical know-how was required. There’s one major setback to using Blogger, though. You can’t take advantage of social bookmarking sites, at least not as effectively as you can with using WordPress. There are numerous WordPress Plugins, and some take advantage these sites.
These social sites act as a “vote” for your website. When people bookmark your blog posts or articles, they are sharing them with others. Other people pick up on your content, and they might bookmark them as well. The more votes the better. Google loves content, that’s no mystery. Google will reward your site for that content and the fact that high authority social bookmarking sites are linking to it. This means more traffic! A lot more in fact.
So how do we take advantage of these social sites when blogging? The answer is WordPress Plugins. Blogger doesn’t give us any way to automatically bookmark every post we make. It has to be done manually. That’s very time consuming! Services like OnlyWire or SocialMarker can make this a lot easier, but you still have to take the time to use those services.
There is a much easier way to drive this traffic to your blog. You have to be using WordPress to take advantage of this. WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform, and it’s no wonder why that is. It requires a little more technical knowledge, but don’t be scared away. The benefits are far greater!
WordPress makes use of Plugins. WordPress Plugins are basically little applications that perform a function or process. There are numerous Plugins that were made for WordPress, and there will be many more no doubt. They all serve a different purpose.
Here are some WordPress Plugins that you DON’T want to be without so that you can utilize the power of social bookmarking sites:
ShareThis – Allows users to share and bookmark your posts.
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – This allows your readers to bookmark your posts.
ShareThis and AddThis are pretty much the same thing. It doesn’t hurt to have both. You want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to bookmark your posts.
OnlyWire Autosubmitter – This will automatically submit your posts to your OnlyWire account.
Sociable – Automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.
Tweet My Blog – This will automatically post a tweet to your Twitter account when you make a new post, bringing more traffic to your blog. You can sign up for Tweet My Blog at my blog; there is a link in the resource box. You’re also going to need a Twitter account. So grab that and start getting followers, the more the better.
This is just a small example of the WordPress Plugins that are available. You want to make sure you have these Plugins installed so you get traffic from the social bookmarking sites. The potential here is huge, and you don’t want to miss out. If you’re not yet using WordPress to blog, I suggest you get on board.
