Adding Social Media Like Buttons On A Blog - A Five Step Tutorial

 

A few days ago in my post I Did It! I Really Did It! Now, Please Like Me! I talked about how a friend of mine, Marcy, had posted a tutorial on how to place social media icons at the top of a blog in order to make it easier for people to like you or your blog in the different social media platforms.  After I wrote the post it was suggested that I link to her blog so that others could do the same.What I failed to mention, though, was that Marcy had posted it in a private forum so I couldn't link to it. I contacted Marcy and found that she had never written an actual blog post tutorial and graciously gave me permission to do so.

It really does make sense to create an easy way for your readers to like your page. It helps build your readership. The reason that many folks don't take the time to like your different pages on the different social media sites is because it is too difficult to figure out how to like them. My blog used to be a prime example of that. I would have one social media "like" banner here on my blog and another one there. That is if I were lucky! There were a couple of social media sites where I couldn't figure out how to place a "like" button on my blog so there never was one. If it isn't easy for someone to like your blog (or if it's not even there) then people aren't going to take the time to search out how. Marcy made it super easy for me to do it and if I can do it I know that you can as well.

So, without further ado, here, in five easy steps, is how to create the same row of social media icons for your blog that I have at the top of my blog.

1. Copy the pictures of my icons in the top right corner and save them onto your computer. If you have a windows based computer then all you should have to do is place your cursor over the picture and right click. One of the options should say "save picture as". Click on that and then name it what you would like to name it. Do that for each of the icons that you want to use.
2. Upload them to Photobucket or another online photo storage site. I uploaded mine to Photobucket. Photobucket is very easy and it is free - at least for what I want to do with it. I'm not going to go into detail about how to upload something on a storage site because each may be a little different. After you've chosen one, upload the icons for the social media that you use.
3. In the following code, replace the information in red with your own information. I copied the sample code that Marcy provided and pasted it into a Word document so that it would be easier to change the information for each icon and then copy and paste it into my blog. The information at the top after the "href=" is where you would put the address to your main page of each of  the social media platforms. The information after the letters "alt" isn't a code from anywhere, it is just something for your own information that tells you what social media icon you are working on. The information after the "src=" is the html code from photobucket (or whatever storage site you are using) for the picture that you are using. You'll need to do this once for each icon. Here's the sample.

   <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Families-Again/268872677464" target="_blank"><img border="0" alt="FamiliesAgainFacebook" src="http://i872.photobucket.com/albums/ab289/tink38570/facebook_zpsez1rxdky.png" width="40" height="40" />

4. Decide where you are going to place the icons. Toward the top is better. Place them one by one and make sure you put a space in between each. For my blogger blog I went to "layout" on my dashboard, then clicked on "add a gadget" toward the top of my blog, and then chose the option "html/javascript". Then I pasted the above code with my information in it. I did it once for each social media icon that I wanted to add and added a space in between each code. Otherwise they will be all squished together.
5. Look to see if they are arranged the way you want them and then test them to make sure they direct people to the page that you want them directed to.

That's it folks! That's how I did it. It is a bit time consuming because you have to keep copying and pasting the new code for each social media platform and icon picture but it really was fairly easy.

I know that some of you will understand each of those steps easier because you have done those things before. For some of you, though, the above might look like gibberish or like a daunting task. Just take it step by step and if you come to a spot where you can't figure it out, leave a comment here or Facebook message me and I will try to help.

How do you become friends with me on Facebook? Just click on the Facebook icon at the top of my blog of course!

Have fun! I'm praying that each of you who try this has great success!