Email is still the most popular way of sharing articles from a blog / website.

While carrying out routine admin tasks of my blog today I came across some very interesting statistics that I thought of sharing with my readers.

Nearly a month back I installed a plugin called ishare that helps readers to share articles published on trak.in blog. Now-a-days, having social bookmarking buttons on your blog is commonplace. It helps to bring in traffic to your blog. ishare is a neat plugin that not only allows you to share the articles through social bookmarking sites but also allows you to email the post, convert it to pdf or word document and even print it.

When I installed this plugin, I thought more than 3/4th of users will use it for sharing articles on social bookmarking sites. But I was wrong !

The traditional way of sharing articles via Email still rules !

Here is the snapshot of how readers have shared articles using button.

Out of total 244 times, readers shared articles 86 times via email, 73 times via social bookmarks. 71 users saved it to either PDF or word document and 14 of them sent the articles directly to printer.

Here is the breakup of how users shared it via Social Bookmarking sites. Here too, I was wrong. I had thought Digg or stumbleupon would be at top. But the top social bookmarking site was Facebook, followed by Google, Delicious and Yahoo. Interesting !

One conclusion that I can draw is that these stats will be different for different blogs/sites. Sites like Digg and Stumbleupon are popular with Tech blogs / sites as the users are more tech savvy. Business Blog like Trak.in will have more traditional users who still prefer email or saving it to their machines.

I would be interested in knowing the experience of other blog owners.