There are several handy WordPress plugins that offer sharing buttons both within your posts and on your blog for a lot of social-networking sites. Here are our top 5:

• Bookmarkify

  (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bookmarkify/)
  This popular plugin includes sharing buttons for over 50 popular social-networking sites and allows you to add a button for readers to share information by e-mail. You can choose buttons for all the sites available or customize it to share with only those sites you like. Buttons can be included within individual blog posts or on the sidebar. You can use the plugin with WordPress or use the html code for any other site.

• Add This

  (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/addthis/)
  Add This provides sharing access to 330 of the “most popular” social-networking sites through a small sidebar widget with one master button. You can also sign up for a free account to get feedback on how your visitors are sharing your content and find what social-networking sites are getting the most activity. You can then tailor your marketing efforts.

• Dandy ID Services

  (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dandyid-services/)
  Share your presence on 300+ social-networking sites (you have profiles on all of them, right?) with your blog so that readers can connect with you. This plugin allows readers to connect with your social profiles, rather than sharing through those sites. It also allows you to quickly share your content through those profiles. You choose simple text links or icons, and choose the sites you want to display, in a sidebar widget.

• Sociable

  (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/)
  Get a line of cool icons with links for readers to share your blog posts on their social-networking sites. You can also set up the buttons to share pages on your blog or your RSS feed.

• Bookmark Me

  (http://www.satollo.net/plugins/bookmark-me)
  This handy plugin allows your readers to share content through social-networking sites that are not in English. It currently includes Russian, Arabic, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Slavic, Dutch and Swedish sites.

There are dozens more plugins that allow you and your readers to share your content through social-networking sites. What are some of your favorites? Tell us about them in the comments!

About the author:

Amanda Tradwick is a grant researcher and writer for CollegeGrants.org. She has a bachelor’s degrees from the University of Delaware, and has recently finished research on grants for math majors and illinois education grants.

Well you must be knowing 2 if not 3 of the below methods already. The third option is a method commonly used by many bloggers, however there are still seasoned bloggers who don’t know about it.

Here are the three methods we will be taking a look at:

1. Upload Via FTP
2. Search and install via your blog’s plugins page
3. Install using One Click Plugin Updater plugin

Upload Via FTP

The most common and recommended method is to download your plugin and then upload it to your server via a FTP client like FileZilla.

In this process you find the plugin you want to install to your blog, download it to your computer and then upload it via the FTP software to your plugins directory/folder of your web-host (which is situated in the wp-content folder). Alternatively you could use an online File Manager provided from your web-hosting provider.

Plugins folder (as seen in FileZilla)

Search and install via your blog’s plugins page

This method works only for installation of plugins that are hosted on WordPress’s Plugin Directory. There are thousands of plugins hosted here so there may not be a need for you to go searching elsewhere.

So the first step here is to search for a suitable plugin in the directory. Alternatively you can search for the plugin via the Add New page in the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard (yourdomain.com/wp-admin/plugin-install.php).

Search for the plugin

Once you press the Search Plugin button, the WordPress software searches for matches and presents a list to you.

Search results for the plugin

In this case the first result is the one we were targeting. So just click Install to the right of the result. Now a lightbox-type pop-up should open up. Click on install once again.

Now the plugin will be automatically downloaded and installed for you. When the page refreshes just search for the Activate Plugin link and click on it. Now your plugin is activated and you are ready to go!

Install using One Click Plugin Updater plugin

Well using the previous method, you could install plugins without using a FTP client. But the one condition was that you could only install plugins that were hosted on WordPress’s Plugin Directory.

To overcome this drawback, here is a plugin called One Click Plugin Updater. Firstly, use any of the above two methods to install this plugin. Now when you activate it you’ll get an option called Install a Plugin in your Plugins menu.

Search for the plugin you want to install. Now get the download link (by right-clicking and selecting ‘Copy Link Location’ or something similar), go to the Install a Plugin page and insert it into the top-most text-box, titled URL. Select the type as Plugin and click on Install.

Installing the plugin using One Click Plugin Updater

Thats it now, when the page refreshes just click on the Activate Plugin and I guess you can take over from there. You can also upload a plugin, which you might have earlier downloaded and stored away on your PC.

Interestingly the One Click Plugin Updater also allows you to install themes, without using a FTP software. Its similar to installing a Plugin, only change the type option to Theme.

So how did you find this article. Know about more ways to install a plugin? Please do share it with us.

Its very easy to add this search box to your site. In fact if you don’t prefer to install it directly and want to test it, just go to their site sikbox.com and enter your blog’s address. There is a live preview search box, using which you can test the results. A live preview of makeuseof.com yielded the following results:

To add the widget to your blog just go to http://sikbox.com/ and fill in the preview form. Then just click on the ‘Get the Code’ button. Now you will be asked for your name and email. Fill it up and click on the ‘Customize and Generate Code’ button. Now you can customize the search-box (actually you customize how the results appear) and then select the code generated below and add it to your blog.

Advantages:

• Free and fast
• Ease of use, no complexity
• Easy to install and use
• No programming required
• Extremely fast and lightweight
• Fully customizable via skins or CSS
• Image search support

Disadvantage:

The only disadvantage that I found was that for the search results to appear properly, your site must be indexed by Yahoo. This is because the  widget uses Yahoo API to get the results. Otherwise its a great plugin

You can try it out by visiting sikbox.com