I recently came across a cool new widget for bloggers called Add This. With it you can quickly and easily help get more of your content noticed in more places.
Before I go on, I should say that it isn’t just for bloggers. Anyone can use this.
With that out of the way let’s take a look at “Add This”.
There are a couple ways you can go with this product. While it is free either way, both have their benefits.
You can get a free widget that gives your site enhanced bookmarking abilities or you can create an account to get that plus stats on bookmarking.
In either case you get your choice of 3 buttons to add to your blog , website, MySpace page or article:
or my personal preference:
Once you’ve selected your button you are presented with a few lines of code to insert into your web page or template.
Once you rebuild your site (if you are a blogger) you will see your new button. Buttons can be placed anywhere, even in individual entries, allowing visitors to add your posts to their favorite bookmarking engine.
When a user clicks on the new bookmark button they get a screen that looks like this:
Where they can chose the service(s) they’d like to use to bookmark your site.
To save to Facebook, for example, they need only click on the Facebook link where they are sent to the login screen. Once logged in they will find their new bookmark added.
Just what I want – Another bookmarking service
By now you are probably wondering what’s so special about Add This? And the truth is, not much. It is the same as a lot of other services like Feedburner.
Well, one difference is that since it offers so many services where readers can add bookmarks for your site, it does offer tracking of those bookmarks (This is where you need a free account):
With the free account you get to see what services people are using the most to store your site. As a blog owner this can be very helpful in targetting prospective readers.
For example, if you find that most of your readers prefer Technorati over del.ico.us then you must ensure to set up your pings so that Technorati is informed whenever you have an update.
Another useful service for site owners and bloggers shows trends:
Here you can see the top social bookmarking sites according to Add This users. In other words, these are the sites most often used to store bookmarks via the Add This widget. Again, this can help show the rising or falling popularity of some services.
They also offer similar feed reader trends:
Here you can see that Google is by far the preferred feed reader. Using this type of trend you can optimize your feed for the preferred feed reader, as well as watch for new or up-and-coming popular readers.
Conclusion
There are advantages to using this service. One of the primary benefits which I haven’t mentioned yet is the savings in screen space.
Typically you’d add one button per service, but with Add This you only need one button. The pop-up screen then shows all the other services.
This may become a downside, however, as more and more social bookmarking services become available. This is because it will make it harder for the Add This team to keep the nice clean single screen interface they currently have in the pop-up window.
This is still probably down the road a ways, so I wouldn’t worry about that now.
In the end I’d say this is a worthwhile addition to your site. Further, it can help clean up some clutter which you may be experiencing with all the other social bookmarking services.
