Bloggiesta! Mini Challenge: How to put Social Media Icons on Your Sidebar

Social media is one of the best, easiest and funnest ways to promote your blog and those awesome posts you spend so much time writing. But why go through all that effort creating those accounts, and using them, if no one knows they exist? Our bloggiesta mini challenge for you is:

Put your social media links in your sidebar!

Here’s how:

1) Go search and hunt down some social media icons that you love. It’s better if they match in some way and look good on your blog. You want them to be nice and clear so people can spot them easily. I found the ones for this tutorial {here}.

2) Save the images to your computer and upload them to where ever you normally upload your blog pictures. I use Picassa because it’s connected to my gmail.

3) Go to your blog settings and create a new widget for the html. You want this to be high up enough so people with small screens can see it without scrolling down, so make it one of the first widgets in your sidebar.

4) Add the html (this is for 3 buttons but you can copy/paste for more):

Change the bits in capitals to your links. So mine says:

Your image link is the DIRECT link to your social media image. You can find this by right clicking the image and choosing “Copy image URL”.

5) Make sure the icons are centered and all grouped together. If you want to have a set of icons, say 4, then just repeat the same code, replacing the capitals with the correct links.

This is what you should end up with:

Clicking on these images takes you straight to some of my favorite ways to share posts. It’s a great idea to give your readers a couple of different ways to follow you (RSS, Facebook and Twitter would be the basics for me) to make sure everyone who wants to, has access to your fountain of awesome.

I hope this helped! Happy Bloggiesta-ing! Lisa xxoxo

P.S. - If you need more help than this, this is the best post I’ve found explaining each individual step. Good luck!