Share Social WordPress Plugin – FREE Social Share Plugin

Social sharing options are pretty much a must for any blog.

You want to make it easy for your visitors to share what you’ve written with their social networks so that others can discover your content.

And the best way to do that is to include a button or two that puts the idea of sharing front and center, and makes it incredibly simple for your users to post your link to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or elsewhere.

Below are ten great social sharing plugins for your WordPress blog. Most are free and all have sharing options for multiple platforms. Some even include upwards of a hundred or more services you can implement.

1. Sharebar

Rail-style sharing icons have quickly risen to be one of the most popular styles seen on WP blogs today. Sharebar is arguably one of the most attractive plugins in this list, and one of the most usable. Its location to the side of posts, rather than at the top or bottom, improves visibility for those reading posts, especially since it moves with the viewport as you scroll. The only downside to Sharebar is that it only supports a limited number of services: Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Buzz, and Email.

2. AddToAny

AddToAny is a button-based sharing plugin that’s un-intrusive and easy to use, both from the perspective of the blog owner and the visitor sharing content. It includes a ton of services, from the most popular to ones you may never have heard of, though they’re arranged so that only the most popular show up on initial hover, with an additional click required to show the rest. It also includes bookmarking and email options.

AddToAny also includes an options panel that lets you customize which services you want to include, how the button will look (including color scheme), and more. This makes is much more friendly to users who want to fully integrate it into their site without having to dive into the code.

3. ShareThis

ShareThis is one of the most versatile plugins on this list. You can configure it to display share buttons in a variety of ways, including a single icon, a series of icons or buttons, or a series of widgets with the number of shares or retweets displayed. Registered ShareThis publishers get access to various tracking reports to see how much their content is being shared.

In addition to the main sharing options above, ShareThis is also testing a ShareBar for the bottom of your pages, and a HoveringButtons bar for including share buttons in a rail style along the side of the page.

4. Sociable Pro

Sociable Pro is the premium version ($9.99) of the popular free Sociable plugin. The Pro version adds a number of functionality improvements over the free version, as well as some additional options. One of the biggest reasons Sociable Pro is worth paying for, though, is the ability to use your own custom icons. This alone makes it a much more attractive plugin, and makes it easier to integrate directly with your site while maintaining the ease of using a plugin.

5. AddThis

AddThis includes both sharing tools and robust analytics so you know how your content is being shared. It includes dynamic personalization options, so users see the right options at the right times. It has a huge directory of services to choose from (more than 300), and there’s deep Twitter and Facebook integration. It also includes automatic translation to more than 70 languages. You can use AddThis without registering, but then you miss out on the analytics options.

6. Socialize

Socialize creates sharing buttons that include sharing counts. It works with Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other services. The fact that the buttons can be placed either within your post, in the footer, or elsewhere is a big advantage for Socialize.

7. I Love Social Bookmarking

I Love Social Bookmarking is a simple plugin that’s based on a single icon that displays various subscription, social bookmarking, and sharing options when hovered on. It’s small and unobtrusive, and has a number of more advanced administrator options, including automatic or manual display, background colors, font face and size, link target, list title and style, and the ability to select which social media services are included.

9. Light Social

Light Social is a simple plugin that places sharing icons at the bottom of your posts. Services supported include Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Delicious, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Buzz, and more. It’s implemented with lightweight HTML code for minimal impact on your blog’s file sizes and load time. You can enable or disable each individual service, but other than that there aren’t really any options.

10. SocioFluid

SocioFluid is another stylized social sharing plugin that uses icons. The icons in this case zoom slightly when hovered over, and the name of the service is displayed (similar to the way the Dock works on Mac OS X). If your blog has the right kind of design, it’s a neat plugin. It’s MIT and GPL licensed, and can be used completely for free. The icons are from Icondock and the plugin uses jQuery for the effects.

Share Free Social Widget

We know the better way to let your visitors to share their opinion and driving more traffic to wordpress powered websites is through social media plugins like Twitter, Facebook, Google+1, Pinterest etc inside your WordPress site to promote both your content and your social networks, I’ve collected some of the best free and premium WordPress social media plugins that will encourage visitors to share your content with their friends and followers.

Allowing your visitors to quickly and easily share content from your website is important. When someone shares a page from your website on a social networking website, it more or less translates into free advertising and free traffic. This free traffic requires little to no direct work from you, either. All you need to do is make sure your visitors have the tools they need to share your pages. Luckily, there are several services out there that take the work out of letting your visitors share their content (literally) however they want.

If you are already using our embeded script version on your blog you will need to remove that in order for the plugin to work properly.

With !Share plugin by Cunjo you can design your own Social Floating Bar and/or Attention Grabber Bar. This plugin also include inline share buttons that can be placed above or under your blog content.

Major new features in !Share 1.0 include:

On/Off Switch to show or hide the !Share social features from your blog.
Easy and fast visual builder for your widgets creation.
20 !Share Bar themes
4 Inline Button Skins
You can use both !Share Bar and !Share Inline in the same time (not possible with our main embeded/non-wp version)
12 Bar positions (bottom-center, bottom-left, bottom-right, top-center, top-left, top-right, left-middle, left-top, left-bottom, right-middle, right-top, right-bottom).
Resize bar width/height from 20% of user’s screen to 100%.
Drag & Drop Social Links.
Attention Grabber Bar Features – Setup a text, link and icon to be shown on your floating top and bottom bars.
The !Share Bar generating script is hosted on our server so we can update/improve the script without you having to update the plugin.

IMPORTANT: The !Share Plugin holds the !Share Widget builder form and saves your settings in your WordPress database, this functionality is under GPL License. The Script that generates the actual share buttons/bars is hosted on cunjo.com server and is a Free Service provided by cunjo.com. You have to register for a Free !Share ID and agree with our Terms and Conditions.

PS: You’ll need a FREE !Share ID to use it. Once you generate the ID from your !Share Dashboard in Settings > !Share check your email and copy the share ID from the cunjo email received. Paste the code in the right side form and activate.

How To Change Your Permalinks Structure In WordPress

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.

Most of the time I tell people to change their WordPress permalink structure, it’s to get rid of the dates in their permalink structure. If their content is “timeless”, it just shouldn’t be there. In my opinion, the only type of site that should have dates in their permalink structure is a news site. All other sites should strive to write content that is “timeless”.

There are two steps in changing your WordPress permalink structure. The first is simple, go to Settings -> Permalinks and select Post name:

If you don’t have the post name option yet, you’re not on WordPress 3.3, the release of which is imminent. You could wait a bit for the update, or you could just add /%postname%/ as a custom permalink structure.

The second step is to redirect your old permalinks to your new ones. To do that, you have to add redirects to your .htaccess file, I have created a little tool that generates these redirects for you based on your domain and your old permalink structure. To use this tool, click the button:

There you have it! If you copied the redirect into your .htaccess, you should test whether it’s working. If it’s not, chances are you’re not allowed to use RedirectMatch, which makes changing your WordPress Permalink Structure a bit harder and not something I can easily cover in this post.

Let me know whether the turtorial works for you and what you’ve done to your permalinks!

How To Create New Blog Posts

1. Access /wp-admin/
To access the WordPress Login panel, go to http://www.%5Byour-domain-name.com%5D/wp-admin/

2. Enter your username and password
When the page loads, you’ll see a page that will ask for your login details. From here, login with your username and password. If someone else made your site and you don’t know what your login information is, contact them and request the username and password.

If your site was designed by Domainshive and you don’t know this information, email us with your domain name, first & last name (this will be your username), and phone number.

3. Add New Post
From the Dashboard, place the mouse on “Posts” on the left and select “Add New”.

Writing And Formatting

1. Basic: Visual
The basic way to write a new blog post in WordPress is in “Visual” mode. For the most part, you can see how your post will look once it’s published.

To format your text, just highlight and select b for bold or i for italic. Same for lists, adding links, and everything else.

2. Advanced: HTML
The advanced way to write your blog post is in “HTML” mode. This is the way we publish content at Domainshive. Even though you still take the same steps when formatting your content (just highlight and select b for bold or i for italic, etc), there are advantages.

For example: You might notice that “Visual” mode creates extra spaces between paragraphs. If you see this happen, just switch over to HTML mode, find the <p> and </p> tags and delete them.

Be careful in “HTML” mode – if you’re not familiar with basic html formatting, I suggest steering clear.

Categories And Pictures

1. Post Categories
It’s really important that you get your post into the right category. You’ll probably see “Blog” and “Uncategorized” in your list if your site was designed by Domainshive. In almost every case, we’ve set up your website’s blog to be under the category “Blog”, so be sure that’s selected.

2. Pictures
To upload an image, select the option above your content box. A popup will appear, telling you to drag or upload your media.

Once you’ve selected how you would like your photo positioned, select “Insert into post”.

Publishing

Preview, then Publish
Always “Preview” your post before publishing. Your preview will open in a new tab or window, allowing you to easily edit anything you missed without having to navigate all the way back to your draft.

Once you publish, make sure you go to your blog (either http://www.[your-domain-name.com]/blog/ or http://www.[your-domain-name.com]/category/blog/) to see how the post looks. If you’ve attached an image or do any funky code, this page could end up looking pretty weird.

Don’t see your post? Usually this means you’ve posted it in the wrong category. Just edit the post, change the category, and “update” (this will be the option you’ll have instead of “publish”).

Look at your published post. Everything good? Start sharing!