One of the easiest ways to get additional backlinks for any website or blog is to include social bookmarking icons on the page. Doing this allows your visitors to directly bookmark your site if they are interested. Each time your site is bookmarked you are effectively given a free backlink to improve your position in search engines.

If you saw my Best wordpress plugins post, you will see that I recommend the use of the ‘Sociable’ social bookmarking plugin available from Yoast.com

The reason I particularly love this plugin is because it currently offers a staggering 95 social bookmarking sites to choose from. As you can see at the bottom of this post, I only use a small selection of these. It’s also extremely easy to use and allows you to use your own icons if you wish.

But there were a couple of things that I wanted to change after I first installed it. To see the plugin in it’s original form take a look at http://seo.sophisticated-woman.com. As you can see, the graphics are much smaller than the ones I have used here AND they are opaque until you hover over them. I wanted to make them stand out more so I made a couple of changes to templates.

The first template change removed the opacity of the icons. First of all I went to “Appearance>Editor” in the left hand panel of the wordpress dashboard and selected “Style.css” from the right hand panel. I then added the following code to the bottom of the style.css template before clicking the update file button underneath the editor field.

.sociable-hovers {
opacity: 1.0 !important;
-moz-opacity: 1.0 !important;
filter: alpha(opacity=100) !important;
}

Then, to increase the size of the graphics I went to the plugins page. In the list of installed plugins I located the sociable plugin and clicked the edit link beneath it. This takes you to the template pages for the plugin. In the right hand panel click ‘sociable.css’ and search for the code below. The easiest way to find this code is to click your mouse inside the editor window then click ‘ctrl f’. This will cause a dialogue box to appear (in IE) or a search bar at the bottom (in Firefox). Simply type img in the search field and click find next to find instances of the text within the editor window.

.sociable img {
float: none;
width: 16px;
height: 16px;
border: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

When you find this code replace the ’16px’ in the width and height lines with whatever icon size you want to use. This blog uses 48px. Please note that if you increase the size without replacing the icons you will lose image quality on the icons and end up with grainy looking graphics.

The sociable plugin uses png files for icons. To change the icons used find the icons you want to use, make sure the icons are the same file type (png) and are named exactly the same as the existing ones in the wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/ folder. Upload those images to your hosting package then access the plugin settings in your wordpresdashboard. To do this click the settings link in the left hand panel then the sociable link from the submenu. On the settings page scroll down until you find the section on ‘image directory’ then enter the full URL to the directory where you placed the replacement images. Eg. http://www.mysite.com/images. Then save the settings. In future the plugin will use that directory for it’s icons.

Please note that the replacement icons shouldn’t be uploaded into the same directory that the plugin uses by default. If you do this then your changes will be erased the next time you update the plugin. This can be a real nuisance so it’s easier to keep the images in a separate folder.

Also, in the settings for the plugin I always check the ‘use target=blank’ box to make sure that the bookmark site is opened on a separate page so that visitors do not get taken away from my site.

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Blogs provide an excellent way to earn an online income. Whether through affiliate programs, displaying adsense advertising (or one of the alternatives) or by selling products, either your own or products that you have resale rights to.

Most people are now aware of this and blogs are popping up all over the place as a consequence. In fact, most people have more than one. I have about ten blogs myself on various niches, all of which combine to make me a nice little residual income :)

The biggest problem that bloggers face is the tedium of keeping their blog up to date. While you can write posts on your computer, the process of uploading them is extremely time consuming… especially when you are maintaining more than one blog.

The answer….

Automated blog posting software

There are several programs that can be used to automate the posting process but IMHO (in my humble opinion) the best one available is called ‘auto blog feeder’.

The software is a wordpress plug-in specificially designed for wordpress version 2.7 (Also works for versions 2.5 and 2.6). It provides a convenient, simple to use interface that even my eight year old could use. Eight year olds are sooooooooo computer savvy nowadays :) Simply upload your articles as text files to the supplied directory ensuring that your first paragraph contains only your article title (this will be used as the title). Tell the software how frequently to publish new articles and voila… automatic, hands free updates of your blog for as long as you like. Upload 52 articles and set updates to weekly and you don’t need to update your blog for a whole year. Plenty of time to create another 52 articles.

So what are the pros and cons of this software I hear you ask?

The Pros:

1. Easy installation: Install the autoblogfeeder directory and php file to your sites wp-content plugins directory then log in to your blog and activate it like you would any other plugin.
2. Easy access: Click the plugins link in your blog admin to find it.
3. Easy to use: Upload your article files to the specified directory. Access the plugin and specify how frequently you want your blog to be updated in hours and minutes.

And that is it… your blog will now be automatically updated however often you specified without you having to log in at all.

The Cons:

1. Limited compatibility: Doesn’t work for wordpress versions prior to 2.5.
2. Limited capabilities: Pesky thing doesn’t WRITE your articles for you LOL. So you still have to do that.

Watch the video below to see some of the functionality of this excellent automated blog posting software. Note that the video incorrectly states to use the article title as the filename, as mentioned before the first paragraph becomes the post title.

The recommended price of this software is US$47 (see www.autoblogfeeder.com) Note: You can’t purchase the software at this site as the payment button is not connected to a payment processor (try it and see). But you can purchase it here for only US$7 for personal use or US$27 with Master Resale Rights.

100% Secure Payment via Paypal Automated blog posting software for Personal Use US$7

100% Secure Payment via Paypal Automated blog posting software with Master Resale rights US$27

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