Socialize and Share Your Blog, Your Way

Most blogs have some kind of social bookmarking implementation whether that’s a Digg plugin, that gives Diggers a quick way to Digg a specific post or a plugin like AddThis or ShareThis that give you the full spectrum of bookmarking sites to choose from. They’re very useful for any blog hoping to find new readers via sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Mixx, the aforementioned Digg, del.icio.us etc. However, the likes of AddThis have a couple of major drawbacks.

The first issue is that, when a user chooses to AddThis, they’re taken off your site to an AddThis page where they get to choose which web 2.0 page to visit and add your link. But that intermediate page does nothing for your site’s brand and everything for the AddThis service. Fair enough, you might say, the service is free after all. However, if you want to invest a little more in your site, then you could try Siphs.com.

SiphsMail works in a similar way to other sharing services, and the basic setup is free, but they also offer a two-tiered paid-for service, which they’ve kindly let me try on Sciencebase.com so I can report back on the experience. There were a few glitches in the initial setup, but for the benefit of all, we’ve hammered those out between us, so you need never know, although you can find out more here. PLUS & PREMIUM subscribers can now customize the page title and the message underneath the email text, which were things that I requested of the Siphs team on your behalf. They also now allow you to tweak the confirmation message seen after an email has been sent.

Anyway, visit Sciencebase.com and choose a post to share or email. There’s a personalized button (another feature of the paid-for service) just below the title of each post. When you click it you head off to a siphs.com page branded in a Sciencebase style (by me in the template editor, the user and with options to monetize the page). They are looking into opening up a CNAME extension so the page would go to share.sciencebase .com or whatever you choose.

Once you’re on the page, the rest of the sharing process is standard, you can Stumble, Digg, Mixx or add to any of the other bookmarking/social news sites listed, or email the post to a friend. It’s at the back end that things are very different for the the blogger. Siphs provides direct access to which pages have been shared, how many times and to which sites. You can grab this information when you, the blogging user, logs in or access them as RSS feeds, which is very useful if you have a vanity page in Google for your site results etc. Anyway, after a week of use, it is proving to be a useful service, so thanks to the Siphs team for letting me try it out. As to actually getting more people to bookmark your posts…well…that’s down to the content you create.

Since writing this review, I’ve learned that Siphs has now set up a rewards system for associates. So, if you want to give this new brand-aware method of socializing your site please use this link. Every paid subscription will go a little way to paying for the web hosting for the Sciencetext site.