A "share this" button is a very simple way for 1 visitor to your site to share your blog post with 100s or even thousands of other people. A lot of of you have even possibly seen these buttons on other peoples blogs. This is a way for the visitors of that blog to inform their friends about a post that may interest them.
It doesn't stop with just one kind of site though, as there are buttons that will enable you to share posts on facebook, myspace, digg and many other social networking web sites. If you really want to see how potent this little button can be don't limit the sites that your visitors can post to. To be able to get the most out of buttons like this search for one that permits people to add the comment to many different sites. At the very least you need to add a button for most of the popular social sites. You need to remember that not everyone has got a twitter account, so if you only add a twitter button you are limiting the options for people to tell other people about the post.
For those of you applying a wordpress theme for your blog, you'll be able to find loads of various types of buttons that you can use. An individual can just search for "share this" on the add plug-in screen. Just be sure the button you add will give your website visitors options on where they wish to share your post. The key here is to find a "share this" plug-in that contains as many sites as possible.
At this time I want to explain how powerful this button can be when it comes to generating more traffic to your blog. Let's assume you have only one visitor to your site on a particular day and they liked the post so they chose to share the post with each of their friends on facebook. They implement the "share this" button and presto, they just promoted your post to 50 of their own friends. If only just 8 of those people went to your blog and really liked your post you just got 8 more visitors. And if just 3 of them share your post on several other social sites by using a "share this" button, you now have other people promoting your post. And by those 3 men and women sharing, this post may possibly now be suggested to another 150 people. From there lets say 20 or 30 men and women stop by and 10 of those people share it together with others. I am sure you can easily see how one post together with a good "share this" button can turn into loads of traffic.
The little things you accomplish can get you more traffic than all those "traffic driving" programs that become available every single week or so. And along with the law of averages, more traffic means more money.