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How to Add Google Friend Connect aka Follow to Your Word Press Blog

January 23rd, 2010 |

In our last post we talked about Follow vs. Feedburner. Now we are going to discuss how to add Follow or Google Friend Connect to a Word Press blog. This of course serves as just one more way to add reader retention to your blog. Once you finish this you can also get more Google Member tools to add more interaction to your blog it can be done the same way as this tutorial it’s just a different gadget.

*Before you start this process though I must warn you that this only works on Word Press blogs that you are hosting yourself. This does not work on Word Press blogs that are hosted free at Word Press.

1. You’ll want to go to http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/ This link opens in a new window so you can go back and forth. If you don’t already have some type of Google account you are going to need to get one. So, on this page you either Sign Up or Sign In.

2. After you get signed in you’ll want click Add new site. On that page you will fill in the name of your site and the URL.

addnewsite

3. If you did the last step properly you’ll be taken to a page that says Congratulations you added…. Click the Add the Members gadget box.

4. Here is where you will choose the size of your gadget and colors. Then click generate code. Easy enough!

5. Now you’ll want to log in to the dashboard of your Word Press blog. Go to appearance and then to widgets. For this choose a Text widget and drag and drop it in to where you’d like your Follow box to be on the side bar. Click the arrow to open up the ‘editor’ on the text tab. Copy the code from the Google Friend Connect generator to this open box. Click save at the bottom of that box when you are done. Adding a title to the text box is optional.

textbox