If you are a blogger, you probably are already using a plugin that allows your visitors to share your posts with their friends using  the social bookmarking and networking websites. For most of my WordPress blogs, I have some sort of social bookmarking plugin installed. Until the other day, I never gave the plugin much thought.

The other day when thinking of ways to increase traffic to one of my blogs. I made a post on Self Starters internet marketing forum about which plugin I should use. I figured that having the plugin could only improve my stats if anything else.  I got a couple responses on the forum that recommended using  Sociable. I then looked at their blogs and seen big social bookmarking icons. For some reason, I never even looked to see if I had already installed the plugin. I downloaded the Sociable plugin and when I went to install it, realized I had an older version of the plugin. So I upgraded. I then went to my blog and seen the little icons, see below:

Okay, this was not the icons that I seen on the other two blogs. When I installed the plugin there was an option to put a link to your own images. I knew this was the answer so I downloaded some bigger icons and changed the path. I refreshed by blog and they were still small. I right clicked one of the images and seen that they images were being scaled. So I knew I was not crazy. I then had to look for the answer which I found.

To make your icons a certain size, you have to edit the Sociable.css file. If you open the .css file, you will be able to change the height and width of your icons. Example below:

.sociable img {
	float: none;
	width: 48px;
	height: 48px;
	border: 0;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

Once I uploaded the updated version of the .css file, I reloaded my blog. I was so excited to see BIG icons. See below:

I LOVE the big buttons. Now I plan on adding this plugin to this blog and a few others. I see so many people using small buttons and think that maybe they just don’t know how to make them bigger. If you want big icons, you can download a set of icons at iconspedia. You can download the Social Me icon pack that includes 30 icons in sizes of 32px, 48px and 64px. I choose to use the 48px icons above.

Until Next Time

Stefani

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I am one of the Google Alert users. I like to know when and where my name is being used. Now you can be the first to know who is Twittering about you too! There is a new service out called TweetBeep that gives you Twitter alerts by email when someone Tweets about you or your services. You can actually set it up to notify you of many things. You setup phrases for it to search by. I think I just might have to sign up and give it a try!

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Yesterday I found the site Social Marker and wanted to give it a shot. It is a free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a site/page on multiple bookmarking services. It allows you to select up to 47 different bookmarking services of your choice. My goal was to do all 47. I thought that it was going to take about an hour to do this. WRONG! It took me all morning, afternoon and evening. That is with several breaks, checking email, etc. I really didn’t get much done other then using this FREE tool.

How Social Marker works is you add a little icon to your bookmarks toolbar. When you find a page you want to bookmark you would click the little icon. The Social Marker website will come up. It has the info for the page populated into a form located at the top of the screen. You verify everything is correct and add anything you want to be added. When you click submit, you are then taken through each of the 47 different bookmarking services to submit your info. That is if you checked all 47 of them. You can select all of them them or just the services you want to use. Once you click submit you will go to the first site that you selected. It has a little menu at the top of the screen that says 1/47. You will click next each time you submit your information to each of the sites, then taking you to the next site. Since I am not a member of most of these 47 services, I had to signup for accounts with them. This was the time consuming process. With me, I like to setup my account then edit my profile with my picture and links. Just in case someone does visit my profile, I like to have my information there. Any free promotion to any of my links is good for me. Now, I was a member of some of these bookmarking services, I think about five of them. There were two I use daily: StumbleUpon and Twitter. So that saved me some time of having to sign up with those. I have been reading about StumbleUpon and have the toolbar. This is really the only bookmarking service I have tried to use on a regular basis.

So at about 8:30 last night I get finished with the last site. A couple of the 47 site gave me errors, one I am waiting on a confirmation for to login and another I decided not to use because it was for health related topics. So I think I submitted to at least 42+ sites. I checked my stats in the early evening and seen that something was working. My stats had blew up yesterday and I was getting excited. I am still excited. I want to share my new stats with you. This is about 14 hours laster, from yesterday’s stats I posted:

Yesterday, May’s unique visitors was 438. My unique visitors now, only about 14 hours later is 852. Whatever I did yesterday generated me an additional 414 unique visitors to my blog. I believe most of it came from StumbleUpon from further research on my stats. This goes to show though, that my time I have been investing in building friendships and reviewing sites with StumbleUpon is finally paying off too! This gives me motivation to work harder for that FREE traffic! I recommend anyone who wants to bookmark sites to use Social Marker to save time!

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Are you one that tweets with Twitter? I really love the Twitter website and was looking for a certain plugin today that would publish my tweets in my sidebar of one of my blogs. I came across a post titled “Twitter Toolbox: 60+ Twitter Tools“. If you thought you had enough tools for your Twitter profile, you will want to check out this post. Lots of neat stuff there!

For those that haven’t heard of Twitter and want to know what it is, here is Wikipedia’s definition of Twitter:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook

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The other day I posted about a great resource I had stumbled on for StumbleUpon. I have been trying to figure this website out and found this resource as a great asset. Today I was browsing the site and found they offer a “Ultimate Digg Resource“. I don’t know too much about Digg yet but plan to figure it out in the near future. Yes, I have heard of it and it and been to the site. I just haven’t sat down to figure out how it works and how to use it. This Digg resource is a great list of articles and such on the topic of the Digg site. If you are trying to benefit more from Digg I would bookmark this post.

For those that don’t know about social bookmarking websites, they can generate lots of FREE traffic to your content!

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If you are into social bookmarking you will want to check out this list. Now I didn’t create the list but found it online and thought I would share. The Social Media Optimization blog has a post titled “Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites“. The list gives you a short summary of each of of the websites. Might give you a start if you haven’t been involved in social bookmarking yet but want to start.

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Are you involved in social networking and bookmarking. I have seen in my stats the StumbleUpon website which I had signed up for in 2006. I know that it can bring in traffic but I haven’t really sat down to read up on the subject and see how it can bring even more FREE traffic to my websites. I was reading a blog the other day that had a comment regarding a great StumbleUpon resource. This resource is a webpage that lists a ton of articles on the subject of StumbleUpon. Now if you are new to the subject but want to learn, I would definitely bookmark this page. You can find it at “Ultimate StumbleUpon Resource“.

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If you are a regular user of Myspace, you will know that most love posting colorful, animated graphics on your profiles on the holidays. Well, today is Thanksgiving so why not share your thanks by placing a cute graphic on your friends profile too! Below are some websites you can find graphics to place in your friends comments:

http://www.wishafriend.com/ac/holidays/thanksgiving/

http://mygirlyspace.com/myspacegraphics/index.php?category=805

http://hotprofileplus.com/myspacegraphics/index.php?category=813 

http://www.dressupmyspace.com/thanksgiving.shtml 

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