Adding Google Buzz to your Wordpress Blog

Firas is a staff writer on Mike’s Life, and you can find out more about him here.

The whole internet has been buzzing with Google Buzz, and after trying it out, some love it and others don’t. Personally I still didn’t decide, but I promise you I will  very soon.

When it was launched, I was expecting to find an available update for all social sharing/bookmarking plugins, but unfortunately I didn’t. I use the “Sexy Bookmarks” plugin and I’m shocked that they haven’t released an update yet, and I have had to manually add  Google Buzz to my blog.  I have heard about a few plugins that will add a Google Buzz button onto your Wordpress blog instead of muddling your hands with coding:

1- Google Buzz Button

I think this plugin was the first one launched. It’s very simple; it adds the Google Buzz button and gives the user the option to customize a couple of options such as the rel attribute to be used for the link, the location of the button and its size.

2- WP Google-buzz

This plugin is almost the same as the one above, but it has one extra feature which is that it enables the user to choose the icon to be used for the Google Buzz Button among preloaded icons. You can choose the one that matches your blog the most and which won’t break the design.

3- WP-Buzzer

I think that this plugin is the best of them for the time being. It provides the user with more options to customize their Google Buzz button. WP-Buzzer enables the user to choose the location of the button (before the post, after the post), it also gives the user the option to choose the target of the button whether to open the link in the same window or in a new window. Customization of this plugin goes beyond the points mentioned above; with WP-Buzzer plugin you can decide whether you want the button to appear or not on pages, posts, homepage and RSS feed.

This plugin has 2 more cool features available for the users where they can customize the CSS style of the button and it also counts how many times each article is buzzed if you add your Bit.ly API key and login.

Some of you may choose not to add a Buzz button to your blogs, but I think you should, because I am a firm believer that if you add more sharing buttons to your posts you will increase the chance of your chance being shared to different users. Adding a button won’t do any harm and might add exposure for your posts on the Internet.

Are you Buzzing yet? What are your thoughts about Buzz?

As well as being a staff writer on Mike’s Life, you find Firas at his own blog Steitblog and on Twitter@steitiyeh

Also check out:

1/ Product review – Performancing Metrics

2/ Getting a decent return from Adsense

3/ How to create great content for your blog