Every blogger wants to have a lot of readers for their blog. No one wants to be writing without an audience. It’s human nature to always want more, and this is true with blog subscribers and visitors. For bloggers, one of the best ways to promote your site is to use social media and social networking sites.

Bloggers can devote their time in different ways in order to get better results with social media (writing new blog posts, networking with other social media users, etc.), but one thing that tends to get some easy results is to use recognized social media icons and voting buttons on the blog.

By placing a voting button on your site you are encouraging visitors to vote for you (think of it as a friendly reminder) and you’re making it quick and easy for them to vote. Simply reminding visitors that they can vote for you will help to increase the number of votes that you get.

Common Mistakes When Using Social Media Icons/Buttons

The first thing to know about voting buttons is that you don’t want to overdo it. Because they can be very effective, some bloggers decide to include an icon/button for every social media site known to man.

In almost every case, this strategy will backfire. Adding too many buttons will create a cluttered blog that distracts the reader and just plain looks bad. Just as important, having too many buttons can spread out the votes that you get to the point that they have no impact.

For example, lets say you are using 20 different voting buttons on your blog and each one gets one vote from a reader. This isn’t enough to get any kind of traffic to your site. But if you were to use two different voting buttons and get ten votes with each, you may be able to get some traffic from that.

By showing only a few voting buttons, you are helping visitors by telling them that these are the specific sites where you want votes. With too many buttons they will not know which sites are your preferred places to get votes.

How to Use Social Media Voting Buttons

Place only a small number of social media voting buttons on your blog, I recommend 2 or 3. Carefully chose the social media sites based on fit with your audience, as well as their potential to send traffic to your site.

Another thing to keep in mind is that small bloggers will typically not have the best results if they are only targeting major social media sites like Digg. With a small audience, you are much more likely to get significant exposure from a smaller niche-specific social media site that will require fewer votes in order to become “popular.”

Depending on your audience and their familiarity with social media, you may want to explain to them what social media is, and how they can vote for your site. For audiences that are not tech-savvy, you may only have a few readers that use social media, but if you introduce the others to specific sites, they may become users and vote for your content.