The use of plugboards to promote your blog is a relatively new means of advertising, but one which has gained a lot of momentum over the past few months.

So what is a plugboard and how does it work? A plugboard is a widget which you can paste into your blog via a script. Visitors to your blog can paste their ‘button’ (which you can create in a simple application such as ‘Paint’) into the plugboard, promoting their own blog on someone elses, completely free of charge.

A plugboard may have space for any number of ‘plugs’ (for example, my blog has space for eleven plugs). The way it works is like this – if you paste your button into a plugboard, your button will appear at the top of the plugboard. As other people after you paste their buttons into the plugboard, your button will steadily move down the board. If a plugboard has room for twenty different buttons, once twenty people plug their buttons after you, your button will ‘drop off’ the board. In order to get it back on again, you have to go back to the blog where the plugboard is, and ‘re-plug’. As a general plugging rule, it is bad etiquette to plug your button onto a plugboard when you already have a button displayed, i.e. make sure you only display your button once on each plugboard. Failure to do so may result in the plugboard owner banning your button from the plugboard. For clarification, it is perfectly acceptable to re-plug your button once it has dropped off the plugboard.

In my opinion, this is a great form of free advertising. You can find as many plugboards as you can, and plug your button onto them. It is best to find plugboards on blogs which have similar or complementing content to your blog, as this will increase the chance of someone ‘clicking through’ to your blog. After all, if I was viewing a blog about fly-fishing, I wouldn’t be inclined to click on a plugboard button which advertised high-heel shoes! There are, however, blogs and websites which are entirely devoted to displaying plugboards, and these are a great place to get noticed.

So how do you put a plugboard onto your blog? Go to a search engine and type in ‘plugboard’, and you’ll find plenty of sites which will provide you with the script necessary to create a plugboard for your blog.

After you have created your button which you would like to display, it has to be uploaded to the internet, so that when you plug your button, the plugboard knows where to ‘look’, in order for your button to be displayed. I store my button(s) in my flickr account (a free photo sharing service). Once you’ve uploaded your button, right-click on it, go to ‘Properties’ and the web address of your button will appear. After this, it’s just a simple case of copying and pasting your button address into the ‘Button URL’ section of the plugboard. You also have to enter the address of your blog into the ‘Website URL’ section, so that when someone clicks on your button, they will be taken directly to your blog.

So how effective is plugging, in terms of blog traffic generation? Many people may visit your blog by clicking on your button on someone else’s blog or website. But the reason behind that may be that they are checking to see if YOU have a plugboard, in order to plug on your blog, and not necessarily to read the contents of your blog. This is why I try to use plugboards on blogs which may be relevant to my own blog. In this way, there is a greater chance that anyone landing on my blog via a plugboard may be interested in the contents of my blog and may return at a future date for more information.

Plugging may also help your blog in terms of incoming links. If you repeat the plugging process consistently, search engines will eventually ‘pick up’ your blog address from other blogs or websites, which will in turn increase the ‘weighting’ of your blog. And since using plugboards is absolutely free, you’ve nothing to lose and plenty to gain by being a consistent plugger.