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AddThis is a feed or bookmarking button. You can see those in action at the end of each post on this blog. This guide will show you how to add those buttons to your Blogger posts. This guide is written for new Blogger layouts, but may be adapted for old templates.

Having those buttons in place allows your readers to share your blog post, which is great for your viral marketing. I’ve explained the importance of this in an older post on social networking as a marketing strategy.

AddThis has a code wizard with help on how to place the button code into your template, but it only shows how to put your feed button on your sidebar. Where I want it is after each blog post. When a reader reaches the end of a good post, he is likelier to click the subscribe button, if it’s right there in front of him.

First, go to the AddThis wizard, and generate the code for your bookmarking button. Note that if you want to get click stats, you must have an account and be logged in.

Select the code for the Blog Post Button. Copy it somewhere, for instance a Notepad document.

Then return to the wizard, and create a feed subscribe button. Remember to use your Feedburner feed URL, if you are burning your feed. Copy the resulting Blog Button code into the same Notepad document, or wherever it was that you pasted your Blog Post Button code. You code should look something like this:

Then you’ll need to make some changes to the code, because the feed button code is not valid XML, and a Blogger template must validate. First delete the div-tags from the bookmark button code to get your buttons on the same line. Then add ‘amp;’ (without the quotes) after both ampersands, ‘&’, in the feed button code. Replace border=’0′ from the feed button code with “style=’border: 0px; padding: 0px’” (without the double quotes), and you’re done.

Then you are ready to insert the code into your template. Go to the ‘Edit HTML’ tab in Blogger Dashboard’s ‘Template’ options. Check ‘Expand Widget Templates’, and search for the line with a div class=’post-footer’ tag. You can use ‘Find on this page’ from your browser’s ‘Edit’ menu, and type that in.

Insert your modified code after that line, and you’re done.

Your blog posts should now have the buttons in the footer, as mine do. If you haven’t yet made sure you have unique meta tags on each blog page, you might want to do that, too.

by Sutocu | August 21, 2007