Daily Tip: Create Your Own Social Bookmarking Site With WordPress

The surest way to build a community around your WordPress blog is to allow as much input from your readers as possible. Make them feel like they’re part of the process – not just members of the audience.

Stuck for ideas on how to make your blog more interactive and user-focused? How about letting readers submit their own content and vote on the stuff the like?

With a couple of plugins, you can quite easily transform your blog into a mini-social bookmarking site, in the style of Digg or Reddit. You’ll need two basic components to put this into action:

1. Front end posting

You need to make it as simple as possible for people to submit content to your site. This means front end posting: allowing your readers to contribute to your blog without having access to your dashboard.

Check out this list of 8 WordPress plugins that enable front end posting, and decide which one best suits your own requirements.

2. Post voting

The second ingredient in your social bookmarking experiment is post voting functionality. You need to give your readers the ability to rate content on your site.

The Post Voting Plugin from WPMU DEV adds a sleek ‘thumbs up/thumbs down’ voting button to your blog posts.

You can also add a ‘top voted articles’ widget to your WordPress site, which allows readers to see the most popular content, as chosen by your audience.

On the back end, you can view a range of voting statistics and see how different posts have fared in the long term.

Get content and get votes – that’s really all you need to create your own little piece of the social bookmarking movement.

Have you implemented something like this on your own WordPress site? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Leave us a comment below.

_{Images credits: Community and Vote from Bigstockphoto.}