Are you sharing for the sake of it?

It’s an easy temptation when you’re just starting your blog. You want to get your content in as many places as possible. So you go to sharethis, like the look of all the buttons and decide to add them all onto your site, hoping that this will bring you much-needed traffic at the start. The chances are, it won’t.

There are now so many options for sharing content, it can be easy to get lost in the mess. You also have to ask yourself the value of sharing your content. Is it going to be in the right places, where you’ll attract a relevant audience? I see far more value in engaging with someone on my blog, encouraging them to comment on a post, than I do in 50 diggs. It means they have a deeper level of engagement. It’s very easy to distract people with all the fancy ‘sharing’ options, when you actually want them to do is read the content you’ve spent time producing.

You have to also question the value of sharing. Is it actually going to bring new traffic to your site, or are you sending people on a meandering path to submit your content everywhere, when actually, it’s not really reaching new audiences? Obviously sharing content is valuable, but I don’t want people to get distracted into spending all their time on making something shareable across multiple platforms, when there may be negligible benefit to this. On our blog, we have a retweet button on posts because we’ve recognised that it’s where a lot of our traffic comes from and it’s a relevant audience for our type of content. Honestly, I think that’s enough. Anymore and you begin to confuse people – when is it right to digg, stumbelupon, tweet, delicious, like ? Too many options and the point is lost.

Google reader for example have started to confuse me with all the features they’ve added. It’s great that I can share a post, I regularly do this and make sure I read other people’s as well. But then I also get options to add a star, to ‘like’ it, to share it with a note, to send it to friendfeed. I admit I get a bit lost, so I just stick to one option – sharing. Everything else just creates unnecessary noise and dilutes the purpose.

Now I’m not suggesting that you don’t make content that’s shareable, it’s great if it’s going to bring you in front of a new audience. But the way to create shareable content is to write something original, compelling, something that makes you stand out. Something that people actually see a value in and are happy to say that this is something worth reading. A digg button won’t do this for you.