Monday, July 08, 2013

Mentor Monday - Social Media Buttons

I've been on such a journey in just a short week. This time last week I had a BBB on my hands - that's mespeak for boring, blah blog. Through the help of some very creative people I brought that mess into the future and made something I like looking at each day.

This is a good thing, because I also have developed a format for my blogging that will keep me coming back more and more to share my world with you. Before I just posted things I thought you might want to hear. Which, if you look back far enough, you'll notice the thoughts were few and far between. With an established routine, I will blog more and be more consistent so you aren't waiting forever to hear from me.

Mentor Monday is just a rehash of what I've learned in the past week that is will make my TpT store better and how I can share it with you. The biggest lesson I've learned this week is that you have to promote, promote, promote to get your message out there. Especially if you are brand new to the blogosphere. You've got to literally SMEAR yourself everywhere to increase the amount of people that see your presence and will come in to visit your site. More people means more sales, more sales means more vacations!

In order to get yourself out there make sure you've got all the social media arenas covered. There's the biggies like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and of course Tpt. Then you can add in some other personal favs like Instagram, youTube, and flikr. All of which you can direct them back to your humble blog. If they like you, they want to know more. Once you've set up accounts at all of these places come back to your blog and make sure that your visitors can find you at all of these places, so they can tell their friends all about you.

If you do a Google search on Social Media Buttons that you can add to your blog, you'll find a ton to download and most of them are free. There are so many styles of the same buttons you are sure to find a set that works perfectly with your blog esthetic. Here's a site that had a lot of different styles to choose from called Slodive.

Download the set you love to your hard drive.  Next you'll have to upload them all to a sharing forum such as Photobucket which will give you some HTML codes that you can post onto your blog. You'll need to add a gadget that includes all of these codes that link the image icon say of Facebook to your actual FB page.

Go to your blogger design section and click on "Layout" where you can click on the "Add a gadget" section and select the HTML choice that's about 2/3rds of the way down the selection window. In there you can add in the HTML code for each button. Here's the code for you to use:




I found this idea on the All About Kimberly blog.

So, count up how many different social media icons you have and cut and paste the above code that  many times into your new HTML gadget. Then go through each HTML code and put in the website link and the photobucket image code for each.

When you are done, your visitors have easy access to all the places that you hang out.  Now you can sit back and watch the traffic to your blog multiply. Believe me,  it works! Last week I had a view count of 0 for the past six months. Today, I have over 200 views in the past week. Whoo HOO!

Hopefully, this helps you on your path to greatness. If you have any questions feel free to contact me in the comment section or click on the little envelope icon at the top right of my blog to send me an email. If you like this and it does help you out, I'd love to hear that as well.

Until tomorrow!

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