There are dozens of site submission options for publishers / bloggers using the Sociable plugin for WordPress. You’ll see it at the end of this post. It offers you the option of sharing this article with your friends or bookmarking it for later use on many different social bookmarking sites. We use the Sociable plugin because of its versatility and historical dependability.

What is Sociable and Why Should I Care?

On any WordPress blog, you can add these buttons / chicklets at the bottom of each post and page. Each button represents a different social networking or bookmarking site, inclusing, but not limited to: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Google Bookmarks, Reddit, Mixx, Sphinn, Yahoo Buzz, LinkedIn, and more. Your readers can click any of these buttons and share your content with their friends. This means more traffic and more brand exposure for your blog. Who wouldn’t want to empower their readers to help get the spread the word about their site’s content?

But every now and then, I notice a site that SHOULD be on Sociable that isn’t. For example, I find sports options sorely lacking. Sites like Ballhype and Yardbarker are sports only social news submission (think Digg.com) sites that should already have submitted themselves to Sociable for inclusion.

In case someone from either of these sites is reading, here’s a stat that says it all: 500,000 downloads. Got it? If you have a social news / bookmarking site and you’re not listed among Sociable options, you’re missing out on the chance for exposure on nearly half a million websites. Who can afford to miss that kind of free exposure and usability?

How to submit your site for inclusion in Sociable:

If you would like to submit a site to be included in Sociable, you´ll have a far better chance of inclusion if you actually add the site yourself and test it first.

Here’s how:

• Make a 16×16 image, preferably with a transparent background, and copy it to sociable/images/directory.
• Open sociable.php.
• Find the array called $sociable_known_sites.
• Copy / paste the code for another site (they´re in alphabetical order).
• Change the value of favicon to the name of your image file.
• Change the value of url to the submit URL for your social site. Do this by copying a submit URL from somewhere, and replacing the URL in there with PERMALINK and the story title with TITLE.
• Save the file.
• You´re done!

Does it work? Great! Now send Sociable the following:

• A 16×16 icon for the site.
• The two lines of code you added while following the steps above.
• This saves us a lot of time since we cannot keep track of all the services out there to include them on the plug-in.
• Finally, submit this on the forum.

You’re on your way to inclusion in my favorite social sharing plugin. Go you!

To download the latest version of Sociable plugin, click here to download from the current owners.