How to optimize your blog for social sharing

How to Make Your Blog Shareable

NOTE: In early 2019, Social Warfare experienced a huge security breech after a long string of other technical issues. I no longer recommend this product. I have switched my site over to SocialPug, which is identical to SW, minus the isses. 

My husband and I are officially on the Keto Bandwagon.

It’s been 2 months. He is down 23 pounds and I’m down 12. Which I’m secretly a little upset about because I’m eating the EXACT same things as him but I’ll spare y’all my rant.

The other day I was emailed an awesome link to some Keto- friendly pancakes. I have searched for recipes of this sort before but never felt compelled to make them based on the ingredient list. I just thought there was no way they would taste good.

But these pancakes were DIFFERENT! They looked delicious and when I looked at the ingredient list I knew they would taste delicious.

I began searching for a way to pin this awesome new-found recipe so I could share it with the rest of the Keto pinteresters.

But there was no “Pin it” button to be found. There was no Facebook Button. If I wanted to share this, I was going to have to open a new window, go to Pinterest, create a new pin…. and just make alot of effort.

So I just bookmarked the link instead.

I will go back to the page maybe 2-3 times. But imagine if it had been easy for me to share that post? It would have gotten in front of all of my followers (currently 16,000!).

The point of the story: make it easy on readers to share you blog post! 

This can start with share bar on your page. Top of your page, side of your page, bottom of your page, there are alot of options as to where it could be placed. I have it at the top and the bottom of my posts.  I’ve done quite a bit of research on the best way to do this and my plug-in of choice is Social Warfare. All of the screen shot sets ups shows below are from the Social Warfare Plug-in.

How to add a floating social share bar to the top of your post

Another great way to make content more shareable is to have the “Pin it” button on each picture. This is another feature available with Social Warfare.

How to add a floating Pin It button over your blog photos

Finally, the item that sold me on Social Warfare was the ability to set the Pin Descriptions.

In the case that a new readers clicks on that “Pin It” button, the Pinterest window would open, the photo they clicked would be there and the pin description would default to a description I wrote.

How to create default pin descriptions using social warfare

That means I have written a description, packed with all the amazing keywords I researched and that is what the follower will pin. Meaning every piece of material that is pinned from my site is optimized for Pinterest.

It goes beyond that too! You can also write custom tweets and social media titles and descriptions:

How to control what shows when your blog post is shared on Facebook

It know that having my blog optimized for social media sharing is the reason that I have seen over 7 million pageviews in less than 2 years. 

You can check out more details on Social Warfare here. 

Always include a call-to-action

Sometimes, when a reader is done going through your post, their thought process might not be “wow, I need to share this”. So you have to ENCOURAGE them to share it. Example: “If you found this post to be helpful, be sure to share it with your friends! Sharing is caring!”…. maybe not that exact phrase, but you get when I am saying.

Don’t leave it up to chance that your readers are going to remember to share something. Always include a call to action to share in your post, either at the beginning or the end, or both!

A blogger should never stop learning....

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