AddThis has bookmark analytics

Welcome to the second installment of the “Tracking Your Blog’s Progress” series! This ain’t your grandmother’s bookmark! If you want your visitors to come back and bring others, you need to encourage them to use the social media. AddThis is a service that only serves one purpose - putting a little button on your blog so visitors can bookmark your web site or submit it to a social site - like digg, delicious, facebook, furl, google bookmarks, and more! I don’t use this service on this site, but I have it on several of my other sites. The reason it came to mind today was I found out that they recently starting providing stats.

There are a lot of ways to show social bookmarking links, and using a Wordpress plugin is one of them I used for awhile. I switched to the AddThis widget because it’s small and it provides the most options. New social sites are automatically added, and now visitors can even “email to a friend”. Many have posted that they’ve removed their social bookmarking options because they didn’t think people seemed to be using them at all. Without some analytics - how would you know? I think that the fact that AddThis has stats now makes it more of a “must-have” service. Now, using AddThis you can track over time if visitor’s are actually bookmarking your pages and saving to social sites or not - and you can quickly figure out which ones are the most popular. What better way to ‘Track Your Blog’s Progress’ than seeing how many people are saving links to your pages for future reference, or submitting your site to a social site like digg - can you get a better recommendation than that?

So far the service is free, and you can even choose which options are displayed on your button. They serve 100 million buttons per day, and I’ve never had a problem with load times on any of my blogs at all. Maybe someday they’ll have a “pro” service with more features, but like many other blogging tools such as myBlogLog or feedburner - this service is free. Why not try it (if you aren’t already)? Not giving your visitors bookmarking options is a big blogging mistake!

Check out AddThis for your blog…

Have something to say about AddThis or social bookmarking - please, comment now!