What can AddThis add to your website?
AddThis is a very user friendly marketing tool that allows you to add small widgets such as Follow buttons, Share buttons, Donate buttons, Related post widget, Email collecting popups. I haven’t tested Donate buttons yet (since it’s not within scope of what I do) but I’ll try to give information about all these widgets below. AddThis provides scripts for each widget and all you have to do is to insert them to your website via Google Tag Manager. If you have a wordpress blog, they provide Wordpress plugins for each widget. They have also easy integration with Magento, Tumblr, Shopify, AngularJS, Cloudflare.
Follow Buttons
Follow button is are the floating links to your social channels that you can place on top or bottom corner of your website. AddThis supports more than 65 popular social sites, so most probably whatever social channel you are active on, you can include the links of your website.
Share Buttons
For your visitors, spreading your content to their followers via their social accounts must be very simple. This is very crucial to more traffic to your website. Actually it’s not only for your visitors but also for yourself. As you become more active on more social networks, it will become harder to share your content on your social channels one by one. You can simply insert Share Buttons of AddThis to your blog pages and once your new blog post is live, you can share it with your followers via this button.
Related Posts
This is a small popup that displays other blog posts but to be honest I have 2 issues with this widget:
1- It’s breaking the user experience. Sometimes it covers the main content.
2- It shows rarely related posts. It seemed to me it shows some random posts in the website.
That’s why I’m not using this widget at the moment. But feel free to test it.
Website Tip Jar
This widget allows you to collect donations on your website. At the moment AddThis allows you to accept donations from PayPal.Me, AmazonSmile, Venmo, Square Cash (Cash.me) and Patreon. Apart from your account, you will need your payment link or user ID for setting up your Website Tip Jar widget.
List Building
List building is an email subscribe popup which is integrated with around 10 email tools including the very popular ones such as MailChimp and Hubspot. If you don’t use any of those tools, you can download your email subscribers in CSV format. In order to convert your visitors into returning visitors, email is still one of the most effective channel. You should inform your subscribers about your new content. AddThis List Building widget is perfect for this purpose. It’s very easy to embed and it has many customization options.
Bonus: Analytics Tool
You can monitor the activity through AddThis via its Analytics section. AddThis not only provides detailed reports but also it allows you to integrate it to your Google Analytics account.
Conclusion
All the information about AddThis I’ve given above is included in the free version. It has Pro and Business editions as well if you’d like to have more customization options or extensive support but I could live without those. AddThis is free and requires almost no technical skills. This is a perfect tool in order to improve your website traffic engagement.
