Chiclet - How to build small buttons for your Blog

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What's a Chiclet? It's those little bitty buttons you see on blogs everywhere...

Hey! I want one of those little blog buttons with my website name on it!  How do I make those? Where can I put them? What are they anyway?

The truth is, they are easier than they look because of some great online tools.

 These are Chiclets (or at least that's what I call them, they probably have some better name but I look at them and think 'chiclet')

 

Grumpstump Button Sell My Lens Button Zecco Button Find your Lens Value Lensroll Chiclet 

 

 

 

These small little guys can make a huge impact on your marketing and networking efforts on the web! 

My Chiclet Collection` 

This is a chiclet collection of all the sites I own or manage (inc. some lenses)

Captain SquidGrumpstump Button Sell Your Lens Zecco Button Find your Lens Value Create These Buttons My Toyota Tacoma Build your Instant Online Auction Lawn Chariots Smoker Fanatic Lensroll Chiclet

What are these things good for? Anything? 

Sure they are! Just give them a chance.

Here are some common uses and benefits of Chiclets over traditional link lists.
  • They are much more pleasing to the eye. The graphic naturally draws the eye a lot more effectively than a wall of blue hyperlinks.
  • They can show your affiliations. I've seen people with chiclet blocks that include their school, job, organizations, and basically anything that they support. They are a great mosaic of a person.
  • They help your networking voice. It is much easier to market a blog or other site if you have a chiclet for your client/customer/reader to add to their content. Links are boring, but if someone asks me to add their chiclet to my site when I use their service, I almost always do.

How to Make em 

A couple of different approaches to chiclets.

Blog Buttons (Chiclets) are predominantly made in 2 sizes: 80X15 & 80X31 pixels. Here's a step by step guide to making your own!
  1. Build the graphic. You can always create your own button using Photoshop or other image editing software. However, if you are fully fluent in that software, I probably don't need to teach you how to make chiclets :). I would recommend going to the Blog Flux Button Maker or one of the others in the link list and following the simple steps to make your image.
  2. Save this graphic that the button maker produces to your computer. Don't forget where you put it!
  3. Upload your picture to the web. If you don't own your own web space, you can always take advantage of Picasa (a Google Pack Software) to host your pics online.
  4. Create some HTML code. Super Easy I promise!

    Use the following Structure:

    <a href="http://www.grumpstump.com/"
    target="_blank" title="Mouseover Words">
    <img src="http://www.grumpstump.com/the-grumpstump.gif"
    alt="Alternative Name" /></a>

    Where the first web address is where your chiclet is linking to

    "Mouseover Words" are the words that will appear when you mouse over the chiclet (not required but it is supposed to help with SEO)

    The second web address is the location of your chiclet graphic. Find your graphic where you have posted it on the internet and copy whatever is in the address bar of your internet browser into this line.

    Alternate Name is what will be displayed if your graphic can not be found.
  5. That's it! you are done! Copy and Paste your new chiclet code into whatever webpage you would like it to appear in. Tell your friends! You now have a logo instead of a link!

Other Great Lenses to Help You 

featured lens Adding Links to your Images on Squidoo - An iframe alternative

In order to combat those nasty spammers, iframes were disabled on squidoo on July 12, 2007. However, all hope is not lost! If you were using iframes for affiliates, pictures, or other static-type content, here is a work around for you!

featured lens Squidconomy - The Economics of Squidoo

Historical Adsense Payouts, Buying and Selling lenses, Affiliate payouts and more make up the mountain of ways you can make a few bucks using squidoo. Here is the history of these things and how they evolve through the life of Squidoo.

featured lens How to Value a Squidoo Lens

As Squidoo Grows and develops, the marketplace for buying and selling lenses is also bound to grow.  The question is, how much is a lens really worth??  Lets explore a couple of classic ways for valuing assets and apply them to the Squidoo...

featured lens Buy and Sell Squidoo Lenses at Auction with Sell My Lens

Finally! A way to turn your long hours of slaving away at the keyboard into some cold, hard cash.  SellmyLens has been developed to enable Squidoo Lenses to be bought and sold without all of the high fees associated with many online sales.

Come visit my chiclet collection 

I've built up an impressive collection of chiclets on my blog sidebar over the last few months. Come by and check some of them out!

My most recent post:

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More Blogging Tips and Tricks 

Chiclets are a great start, but what else can you do?

WordPress 2 (Visual QuickStart Guide)

WordPress 2 (Visual QuickStart Guide)

by: Maria Langer, Miraz Jordan

I am personally a wordpress user. If you are lost in how to get started or you want to pick up some new tricks, check out this guide.

Publishing a Blog with Blogger: Visual QuickProject Guide

Publishing a Blog with Blogger: Visual QuickProject Guide

by: Elizabeth Castro

Blogger is Google's Blogging platform. There are a lot of things you can do with it in addition to chiclets. Check it out.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Web Page & Blog, 6th Edition

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Web Page & Blog, 6th Edition

by: Paul McFedries

This is a great general reference text for general blog design.

Recent Visitors and Supporters 

Thanks for your support and stopping by!

supermom_in_ny, rea_of_sunshine, dilysho, mtsandeep, Junyuan

Do you like chiclets (blog buttons)? Think they're dumb? Do tell! 

Lensmaster

Lori_Lee-Ray wrote...

Love the button maker. It was simple! thank you for the tips! Now I'm off to insert!!

ReplyPosted May 11, 2009

Lensmaster

rydigga wrote...

Excellent advice. I always wondered where chiclets came from :)

Ryan

ReplyPosted May 05, 2009

Lensmaster

grace_antoinette wrote...

Hi,

wow, thanks for sharing! Great information!

ReplyPosted May 05, 2009

Lensmaster

KimGiancaterino wrote...

These look great. Sounds like something I need to try. Congratulations on your Giant Squid Awards nomination!

ReplyPosted December 16, 2008

Lensmaster

clouda9 wrote...

I love the eye appeal and the colors. Great share. Congrats on your 2008 Giant Squid nomination...woot! (http://www.squidoo.com/2008-giant-squid-awards)

ReplyPosted December 14, 2008

 
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