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There is a greatly used plugin for wordpress called Gregarious and can be used for bookmarking at the bottom of posts, what do I mean by bookmarking? Well if you have a post that is interesting and someone reads it they may want to bookmark it to there google homepage or to somewhere like Digg or StumbleuponWhat Bookmarks Does Gregarious Use and are They Useful

Simply put yes they are useful and can bring alot of traffic to your site as well as getting your site bookmarked in various places which will add a backlink to your site, I will go more into backlinks later in another post.

The places gregarious will bookmark your site to from first install are as follows

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Furl
• Netscape
• Yahoo! My Web
• StumbleUpon
• Google Bookmarks
• Technorati
• BlinkList
• Newsvine
• ma.gnolia
• reddit
• Windows Live
• Tailrank
• 9rules Clips

Visitors can also email the page to someone who may like or to themseves for coming back to later.

All will work straight away apart from the Feedflare option which we will talk about in a bit.

There is also a option to add other social bookmarking sites so you can offer as many places as possible for the readers to bookmark to. We will add one later so you can get used to the way it is done.

We have covered downloading and adding a plugin before but the part you want is shown below.

Simply download the plugin and unzip it to a folder on your desktop. Ive created a folder called ‘MattNutts’ everything I will use for this site will be kept in that folder so its easy to get to and I know where everything is.

For this you will need an ftp transfer programme so you can upload the unzipped files to your webserver I use CuteFTP but there is plenty of others out there.

Simple steps to add the plugin and get it working.

1 Click on the link to download the file then extract the files to the folder you have created for the files.To create a folder right click the desktop and select new and then folder.

2 Start up your ftp software and enter the details for your server, these will most likely be Username, Host, Password and Site Name.

3 You need to upload the files to /wp-content/plugins if you have installed wordpress into a subfolder other than the Site Root (the first area your ftp will find) you will need to browse to it, it could be something like - wordpress/wp-content/plugins. The easiest way to tell if you are using a subfolder is to browse to your wordpress homepage for mine I just type in http://mattnutts.com yours could be the same but your site name or it could have extras after it like .com/wordpress or .com/myblog

4 When you see the folder open it so you are inside your plugins folder on your server then select the gregarious folder and drag it over to the plugin folder, the upload should start and everything will transfer over.

Once you have followed those steps enter your admin area and activate the plugin from the plugins menu, to do this click on Plugins and then click activate next to the Gregarious name.

To find the grgarious setup options you need to click on Options on the main Navigation bar and you will see Gregarious in the menu that appears below, give it a little click.

There is a nice menu in here, I think its done in Ajax so everything is fluid to use.

First Steps

You should see

• Digg Button
• Feed Flare
• Post Badge
• Reddit Button
• Share This

To start press the Digg Button, you will see it deactivates the button, its that simple to stop a feature you dont want. But you need the digg button so click it again to activate it.

Hover over the icons at the top to see what there is the one you are at is the modules one, you want the one next to it which is the Digg Options, give it a click.

Nearly everything in there is set up as you want it, you can change a few of the things likethe bage colour and how the digg button looks, or just change it to text which could say ‘Digg This’ if you dont want lots of Digg Buttons everywhere.

The next one you want to look at is the one with the flame in, this is the Feed Flare option. Its basically the same as what gregarious does but is run through Feedburner you will need to set up a feedburner account for this so head over to Feedburner and create an account.

Getting the feedburner RSS Link

Feedburner is great for keeping tracks on how your site is doing concerning RSS subscribers. An RSS Subscriber is some one who browses your site though a little applet that is built into a site or on a browser toolbar, it basically shows a little list of your latest posts so they can see if there is anything they want to read.

Once you have created your account at feedburner you need to add your sites RSS so they can track it, to do this from your ‘My Feeds’ page on feedburner (its in the top left) add your sites Web URL into the box that says ‘Burn a Feed this Instant’ so I would add http://www.mattnutts.com then click next. Feedburner should automatically pick up the RSS Feed. You may get a few options but I always go for the RSS 2.0 one. Choose this and then ‘Next’.

You will see your feed title as taken from your site and the little bit it will add onto the end of their feeds API if you think its a bit long alter it abit. then choose ‘Activate Feed’

What you see next is your feed address you need to highlight it, right click and copy. This is what you will then post into the Feedburner Feed URL on Gregarious so do this now, to paste just right click in the box and paste, then ‘Save Options’

Thats it from that side you ust need to activate feedflare from within Feedburners website, so head back there and click ‘next’ through the rest iof the options. You then need to choose Optimize on their menu on the left under services you will see ‘Feed Flare’ choose this. You will see a list of things you can add to your RSS Feed and ones that you will see on the site. You only really need ‘Subscribe To This Site’ to show on your site so put a tick in that. The rest you can alter to your needs and clicking on the little down arrows will drop a box down with information on each item. Scroll to the bottom and Activate. Thats it for that one.

The Next Options

The next ones on the Gregarious options are Post Badge, Reddit and Share This alter the last two to fit your needs like what text it shows or what style.

Finally adding a Social Bookmarking Site

The next option you need is the last one that you will need to alter if needed, Choose it and a long list of the sites Gragarious uses appears with the information about them, no need to alter them unless you want to remove 1 or 2.

To add a site at the bottom choose Add a Social Site then enter the name in the box that appears I wrote ‘Plugg This’ and for the URL I entered http://blogsrecord.com/record/submit.php?url= this will then add an extra button for the Plugg This site on Blogsrecord

Thats it all you need to know everything should appear fine on your site right at the bottom of each post, if you have any problems drop a comment in here.

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