I’m Caving in and Being a Hypocrite

Editor’s Note: When I was publishing the post for tomorrow, tumblr somehow managed to overwrite today’s post.  I am sorry to those who commented on this post that their words are now lost in cyber space.  I cannot express how frustrated I am with tumblr beyond saying I plan to move this blog off of it soon, and I am sorry I lost those comments.

A while back, I posted that I hate sharing buttons.  I still do, but I recently added Twitter’s new tweet button to my site.  Why?

I’m greedy and I want more traffic.  That’s it.  Nothing more.

The vast majority (about 40%) of my monthly traffic comes from Twitter.  I’d love to enhance that percentage.  This button makes it easy to do so.

One of my biggest complaints with most websites is sharing buttons do not look integrated with the site.  I’ve been able to get it in a way I like it.  Also, Twitter makes it pretty easy to customize that look of that button, and I may go ahead and do that to make it even more integrated with jagged lines and angry red numbers.

Does this mean everyone needs a tweet button?  No.  Does this mean you should still have a crap ton of sharing buttons on your website?  Hell no.  My decision is a calculated risk to draw more traffic and I hope my audience doesn’t hate me for it.  I still think many sites are littered with too many of those buttons.

It’s better to figure out where your website’s traffic is coming from and get more of those people than to cast the net wide and pray you get who you want.  I may be selling out some, but I’m doing it in a cold and calculated way.

Now, when start putting banner ads all over my site and every other word is an affiliate link, then you can start raising hell.

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