You see those buttons down the right side of the screen, the ones which say MyYahoo, MyMSN and so on? Well they are not buttons, they are chicklets. On this and many other blogs you will see three types of chicklets. They can all get you readers and/or traffic, so despite the silly name, they are worth taking seriously.

The first type is just graphics in place of the text links to your own feeds that most themes provide. Blogging scripts routinely auto-generate RSS feeds and if you decide you prefer graphic links to text, grab an appropriate image and insert it into your templates the same way you have always added images to HTML.

Next come the “social” chicklets, so-called because they allow your visitors to bookmark articles in their social network. But unlike regular browser bookmarks, social bookmarks generally work online and are public. So if your site gets social bookmarked regularly, scores a high rating or a favorable comment, other people in that network may come and check you out, adding their own bookmarks, ratings and comments in turn. If you are lucky, you could even get someone blogging about your site.

Obviously this group of chicklets need special links to function properly and why insert them manually around your templates, when they can be placed automatically. Plugin-wise there are quite a few options: the one I like best is simply called Sociable. Installation is the usual procedure: unzip the files and FTP the whole directory to wp-content/plugins and then activate from your Dashboard. Then look under Options –> Sociable to decide which chicklets you want to show and where. That’s a personal choice but don’t overdo them so they become distracting. There are more networks than you are likely to want to provide links to, so either look around to see which are popular, or check out the results of a poll.

If you think regular bookmarking is a good thing to try to persuade your visitors into, the third type of chicklet is like bookmarking on steroids. These chicklets are for those visitors who use services like MyYahoo for their homepage. All they have to do is click on the relevant chicklet and a few seconds later your site’s RSS feeds have been added to their home page. What more could you ask?

The Chicklet Creator plugin works really well for this and includes all the chicklets as well as the code you need. One word of warning on this one: although the code works, it generates invalid output. You may want to install the plugin, validate a page and update the script. It is a simple job of just a few minutes.