Can Readers Share Your Articles?

Can Readers Share Your Articles?

Many people know that I am a dog lover and I recently lost my beloved Pepperz a few months ago. So I read a few newsletters from dog trainers, etc. One of my favorite newsletters always has great articles, and I read one today that I wanted to share with my daughter. Well I could share it via Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and Yahoo (see image  below) — but my kid is not on the social media sites – so all I really wanted to do was share the article via email.

So this is the thing — Sure I could have copied the url in my browser and copied and pasted the link to her in an email – but the same excuse could be made for all of these social media sharing sites as well. The whole point of including easy to share buttons below (or above) your articles is to make it as easy as possible for readers to share your wonderful content! The key word here is EASY. No copying and pasting.

Your typical reader who would have shared your article via email would probably have simply clicked away because they had to do much in order to share your article. It irked me so much, that it moved me to write this article:) Just remember:

1. Most article directories already include email sharing on their sites, but just check to make sure. A good article directory will include both “old school” and tested sharing options like: email sharing, adding to favorites, and printing options as well as “new school” social media sharing such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.

2. If you write articles on your own blog (and you better be:), please make sure you are including a way for folks to share your articles. Something is better than nothing — but ultimately you need to pick strategies that a new internet user can do (like email sharing) as well as savvy ones  (such as Twitter).

3. If you own a WordPress blog, there are oodles of sharing plugins that you can use to share your articles easily. I use one that looks like this (share and follow) and includes what I feel are the most used social media sharing tools in my niche as well as the old school sharing ones like plain ole’ rss feed, printing, and emailing. Best of all, they host their images on their own CDN which means that their plugin doesn’t slow your site down. A few that I’ve used in the past slowed my blog down tremendously.

So have I convinced you? What’s the point of writing great content if folks who love it can’t share it with others? Let me know what you think in the comment section below, and feel free to share this article with someone you think needs to read it