Blogging Tips

Add Social Bookmark Links to your Posts in Blogger

Written by Amanda Fazani from Blogger Buster

Social bookmarking services are a useful way to aggregate your content across the web and bring more awareness to your blog. Services such as Digg, Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us allow readers to bookmark posts of interest and offer a means for others to discover them too. In this post, I’ll explain how you can add bookmarking links to three popular social bookmarking sites beneath each of your posts in Blogger.

One of the best ways to encourage visitors to bookmark your best posts with these services is to add links to these services beneath each of your posts, like this:

The text links themselves don’t take up too much space (especially if you choose to display these side-by-side), while the icons help draw attention to the links and visually communicate the service they link to.

In Blogger powered blogs, you can add some code to your template which will automatically add your post’s permalink and title; this encourages your readers to use such services as they are able to add your posts quickly and easily to their bookmarking service of choice.

Instructions to add Digg, Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us links beneath your Blogger posts

In your Blogger dashboard, go to Layout>Edit HTML and check the “Expand widget templates” box.

Then search for this line:

<p><data:post.body /></p>

Directly beneath this line, add one or more of the following sections of code:

Add your post to Digg:

<a style=”background: url(http://digg.com/img/badges/16×16-digg-guy.gif) left no-repeat; padding-left: 20px;” expr:href=’”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=” + data:post.url + “&title=” + data:post.title’ target=’_blank’>DiggIt!</a>

Bookmark with Del.icio.us:

<a style=”background: url(http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif) left no-repeat; padding-left: 20px;” expr:href=’”http://del.icio.us/post?url=” + data:post.url + “&title=” + data:post.title’ target=’_blank’>Add to del.icio.us</a>

Stumble this page (Stumbleupon):

<a style=”background: url(http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble.png) left no-repeat; padding-left: 20px;” expr:href=’”http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=” + data:post.url + “&title=” + data:post.title’ target=’_blank’>Stumble This</a>

If you prefer to add these links side by side, simply add a space between each of these links. To have each link appear on a separate line, add a line break (<br/>) between each link.

Of course, there are dozens of social bookmarking sites you may like to add your Blogger posts to, but in my experience these three seem to be the most popular ones.

Useful Links

Here are some useful links you may want to read with regard to social bookmarking sites:

30 Social Bookmarks links for blogs
Why you’ve got to dig Digg to get Dugg
Social Bookmark Link Creator
AddThis (an easy button/widget to encourage sharing of articles in blogs)

Written by Amanda Fazani from Blogger Buster
Posted on April 7th, 2008 and filed under Blogger
Do not forget to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates

10 Responses to “Add Social Bookmark Links to your Posts in Blogger”

Author comments are in a darker gray color for you to easily identify the posts author in the comments

Larry Keiler says:

April 7, 2008 at 11:03 pm

These codes don’t seem to work. I keep getting error messages when I try to put them into my template. I don’t know enough about code to fix them.
Rajeev Edmonds says:

April 8, 2008 at 12:41 pm

Codes are giving error messages. Not working
Louis Liem says:

April 9, 2008 at 2:32 am

Or you can also use Social Marker. They serve up to 50 social bookmarking sites and saves readers’ time bookmarking your post by auto submitting them to all social bookmarking sites listed.

You can read the review on my blog
Jason Bridgewater says:

April 21, 2008 at 1:07 pm

I had the same issue. Getting Errors.
pradeep says:

May 23, 2008 at 12:26 am

hi had some issue. when i added the code after that “data:post.body”. it shows template error while i saving the template
Eterniel says:

June 3, 2008 at 12:01 pm

The original template code was autoformatted by publishing engine and got some symbols autoreplaced. (like ” for ”, ‘ for ’, ‘16×16′ for ‘16×16′ and so on). To make it work you need to replace these symbols back (you can use autoreplace) and also expand ampersand (&) symbol to the actual & code.

I didn’t knew if my response here is going to be autoformatted as well, so I made a post in my blog with the code that can be properly copypasted: How to add social bookmark links to your posts in Blogger, linking to this original article.
Hope it helps.
Michelle at Scribbit says:

August 7, 2008 at 1:02 am

I’ve been working on this all night and haven’t been able to get Blogger to take my code. I’ve Googled it all over the place and have used six or seven different codes that everyone assures should do the trick (it should be so easy right?) but every time Blogger rejects the code. I got it to work for my Kirtsy tag and even tried copying the Kirtsy code with the changes for del.icio.us but it still won’t work. I’m pulling my hair out, crazy with these dumb blogger notices of “your template isn’t properly formed . . . “
Start social networking says:

August 11, 2008 at 6:07 am

I totally agree Social Bookmarking is a great way to actually get your content recognized. By placing bookmarking buttons at the end of your blog posts your actually requesting your visitors to bookmark the content for future referece, This is a great way to get the visitor back to your website.