When building a website to promote your books(s), one element to include on each page is a share button.

A share button allows visitors to literally tell the world about your page. With a single click on the button, the visitor can tweet your page to all of his follows, post it to his Facebook wall, pin a photo on the page to a Pinterest board, and more.

This benefits you in a couple of ways. In the short run, it flashes your page before at least dozens and sometimes even thousands of people; the total number depends on how many people follow the visitor’s various social media sites. If you’re lucky, that tweet or post will be shared by some of the visitor’s followers. In the long run, this sharing benefits you by offering another link to your website, which in turn boosts your site’s ranking on search engines.

Often website hosts offer these share buttons so that you have to do very little to set them up. Just pick which ones will appear, all determined when building your website.

If the website provider doesn’t offer this, you still should be able to add share buttons, though it’ll be a little more arduous to do. Go to each social media’s website and locate html coding that you then cut and paste into the html coding for your website page. You likely can paste this coding onto a template for all of your website pages so that you don’t have to do it for every single page.

Don’t go overboard with the share buttons. Select the four or five social media platforms that your readers are most likely to use; any more is overkill and offers diminishing returns. Remember that readers who are in middle age (30s-50s) typically use different social media than teens and young adults; if your book is aimed at the latter, include share buttons for social media platforms that young adults use, not someone in his 40s.

You may want to use the share buttons yourself. Anytime you stop at your page for whatever reason, tweet it or post it to Instagram to remind your followers about it. Many of your followers/friends may have missed the last time you tweeted or posted that page, or you may have new ones who aren’t aware of it.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.