A few days ago, Laura asked me how to add Facebook “like” buttons and Twitter’s tweet buttons to her blog.  Instead of replying by email, I’ve decided to blog about it… because I’m convinced that a lot of bloggers don’t know how to do it.

I’m specifically referring to owned domain WordPress blogs here, not the free WordPress blogs.

Before I get into how to do it, here is a list of the sharing links that you HAVE to add to you blog:  Tweet, Facebook Like and Google +.  The others like Stumbleupon are a nice to have but normally Stumblers have a stumbling toolbar on their browser that’ll add your link to Stumbleupon and there’s no real need for a button on the post.

But why do you need this? It’s extra clutter on the page, I hear you asking…

Well, it’s quite simple really, if your article is good, people will want to share it.  The easier you make sharing, the more people will actually send it to their friends.  The majority of my click-throughs on my photography blog (other than Google hits), is from people clicking the “LIKE” button on my blog.

People are inherently lazy online… it’s a schlepp to copy the link and paste it into a tweet… it’s a whole load easier to click on a tweet button, slightly edit the text and press submit.  And there’s an added bonus… you can actually see how many people clicked the button!!

As for Google +, yes I know it’s the new kid on the block, but Google is using it in the search indexing… it’s already made an impact on my blog stats.

OK, so now you know why you need it, and what to add… the last bit is to show you how to add them.

It’s actually very easy if you have a WordPress blog.  All you need to find is a good plugin, if your theme doesn’t have them built in (my photography blog theme has the links built in).  There’s no need for coding at all.

I use the following plugins on this blog:

• 1-click Retweet/share/like - you can choose which sharing buttons to add, and where to put the buttons on the page.  It also includes an automatic feed to social media sites, but I don’t use that because I don’t like publishing all my posts automatically… it becomes spammy.
• Wordbooker - this plugin has added buttons to the top of my post, but I mostly use this one to send selected posts to Facebook.  I like this plugin because I can choose which ones to send, and it syncs the Facebook comments back to my blog.
• Another alternative is Slick Social Sharing buttons which have a slideout version of the buttons

I hope you find this article helpful Now please add them to your blog so that I can share your content with my friends!