Build My Site for Free

Hi, guys.  Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com.  In today’s video, I’m going to show you how to use the Sexy Bookmarks plugin.  And what’s great about it is it adds like, an attractive social bookmarking menu to all of your posts and pages you have on your blog.  And it’s a great way to get your readers to actually submit your blog posts to several different social bookmarking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, different Yahoo and Google sites.  And it’s really good because it’s spreading
the word for your blog posts.

So to get started, what you want to do is install the plugin first.  So you would scroll down to plugins, and you want to click “Add New.”  And once you get to the Install Plugins page, you just want to type in “Sexy Bookmarks,” and then click “Search Plugins.”

And this will be the results page, and it used to come up as just Sexy Bookmarks, and then it would be in a Sexy Bookmarks link under your settings. But now, it comes up a little different with a little bit of extra text here.  And it’s going to end up being under your settings as Shareaholic.

So anyway, let me just show you.  You would install this from here and then activate it on your computer, which I’m sure if you’re using plugins,you know how to do.  But now, since I already have installed it prior to this video, it’s going to appear very low down here underneath your settings link. So it’s now going to be considered Shareaholic, but that’s what you know is your Sexy Bookmarks plugin.

So when you click Shareaholic, it’s going to bring you to the settings page for the plugin.  And the first thing you really are going to
notice is all the enabled networks.  So these are all the networks that you can use in your Sexy Bookmarks.  So you know, we have LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook, and you can drag and drop these however you want on your Sexy Bookmarks.  So you can drag just to
reorder them, and you check off which ones you want to actually be shown.

So if you’re not really part of some of these or if you’re not using them or if you don’t really think it’s that popular that people are willing to upload your posts to them, you just keep it unchecked.

And as you scroll down, you just have some settings that you need to insert. So here, for the Additional Buttons box, it’s asking if you want to
include the “Like” button set just above the post.  And the “Like” button is just to show if you like it or not – kind of like how they have it in Facebook.  And then it also asks if you want it to sit below the post.  So you can choose which way you want it, above or below the post. So I just made it below the post because that’s where I want it.

And then we have some functionality settings, and this is if you want it to be shared with Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and Delicious.  So
you have the option to choose yes or no for any of these.

And then there are just some like, designer tooltips.  You can change the background and the text color.  So they give you ones by default, but you actually have the option by clicking this little arrow to change the colors to the way that you want it to look like.  And then you can also have it tracking the performance.  You can add no follow to the links.  If you have links, you want to have them open in new windows, you would click yes for any of these.  If you want to show the Shareaholic link for the plugin, you could also click yes.

But then if you don’t want any of this, you would just check the no box, and it would save those changes for you.  And if you are using the new
version and you wanted to only enable exclusive advanced features, you would click yes for here, and you can switch it at any time.  And you also have some Twitter options, so if you are using Twitter, you would want to configure the template or use a URL shortener.  So this, by default, is Google, but you can also use a few other options as well.

And then the last few options is you can choose if you want this plugin to be spaced center, and I want it to be in the center.  So that’s what I
chose.  And you can even have it animated, so if you click yes, basically when you scroll over the bookmarks, it will kind of have an animated expand kind of look.

And then you can choose the background image.  So it has all these default images basically saying, “Sharing is sexy,” “Sharing is caring,” “Share the love,” and you can choose which one of these you want shown above your Sexy Bookmarks template.

And then finally, you’ve got a few compatibility settings, so I just kind of kept this as default.  I didn’t really play around with it, but if
you want to, you can go ahead and choose these options.  And then last, you can choose where you want the menu locations, so you can have it be above all of your post content, you can have it below, you can have it in both spots.  I made mine below because I figured the person’s probably going to want to read my article first, and then when they get to the very bottom, they can check off which ones – which sites – they want to upload my post content.

And then you can also choose if you want them to be post, pages, and index. You could have it all three; you could have it just two or one of
them.  So depending on what you want, you choose these options right here.  And if you also want it to show in your RSS feed, you can do that as well.  And if you want to hide this menu from all mobile browsers, you want to check off this box here.

So most of these options are pretty much self-explanatory, and it’s really just how you want this to look on your blog.  So once you’re completely done, you want to save your changes.  And now let’s check out how it looks.  So here, I’m back on my blog, and I’m on my privacy policy page, and when I scroll down, you will notice the Sexy Bookmarks.

So we have it below my post, like I chose.  We have the “Sharing is caring” background image that I also chose.  And we have the animated expand links, so when I click any of these, it pops up and shows you that you can post to Facebook, to send via Gmail, send via email
program, and these are all of the different Sexy Bookmarking sites that I chose.

And you can just scroll through each one of them.  You can change it at any time.  So now when your bloggers read one of your posts, they can just scroll right down here and they can check off – they can click off – which ones they want to send it to.

And this is how you use the Sexy Bookmarks plugin.  It’s a really great feature.  I recommend it to everyone.  And thank you for watching.