Mar 09
10
Syndicating your blog/website
I’ve made the acquaintance of Rachel Levy through Twitter, we’ve been talking back and forth on twitter, and bouncing ideas off each other. I have the utmost respect for her and her ideas regarding social media and I’ve gained valuable insight in reading her material. I was able to help her the other day with a formatting problem she had with a post as well, the text was not going where she was expecting it to, so I explained the <BR> </BR> to her would force a line feed where she needed it to get the text where she wanted.
We are both currently looking for work. She made a new post to her blog regarding how to syndicate your blog/website that I found interesting, and wanted to add my own ideas here as well.
Her post is located here: How do you Syndicate a blog or website?
The first thing she mentions is posting it on Twitter 3 times in a 24 hour period at different times of the day. Her blog also has a list of applications for twitter. I’ve used some of them on the list, it is extensive, and something I’d recommend taking a look at to help make your Twitter experience a little easier.
One of the applications is called TweetLater, which I have utilized to spread out messages during the day on Twitter, even when I’m not at the computer. With as busy as I have been lately, it has been something I’ve used a bit more often. I compose messages I want to send, even referencing older blog posts I’ve written to get people to read content that may be helpful or related to my most recent post, and also a couple just saying “Check out my new blog post @ http://martinpiraino.com/” without making reference to the specific permalink to the new post, and I’ve noticed this gets people to read more of the site than just the new post.
Along with this, I also send direct messages to new followers I get on Twitter, thanking them for following me, and just making a simple statement as above, and the response to that has been positive as well.
Her second point is to post on Ping-o-matic, I actually utilize this through Google’s feedburner, and go into further detail about that later in this post.
I have also used Digg on my own post before, I don’t think it it something you should do too often as she also states in her blog post.
There are plug-ins for WordPress where you can add links for readers to click on to help them syndicate your posts for you, if you look at the bottom of my posts, there is a section that says “Share and Enjoy” where you can click on those links and share it on the sites I’ve selected to share it on.
She also says that you should update status on your social networking sites, and I do this regularly, with LinkedIn, even adding a short comment about what I may be doing for that day (networking, interviews, meetings, etc.)
On Facebook I also added my own blog to my profile there, you can see it following this link: http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/martin_pirainos_blog/ I then invite users in my network on Facebook to come to my blog, I have 6 followers there (including myself). For now have to manually update and add a notice that I posted something, but if I get enough followers there, it will be following my blog feed automatically, I only need a few more users to follow it to do that.
One thing that I did add was a RSS feed from Twitter on Facebook, so when I do send a message on Twitter, it actually gets posted to my Facebook, and Friendfeed sites as well, basically making it easy for me to post in one place and it to be syndicated to other social networking sites that other contacts read.
It helps if you can use an RSS feed from one site to feed into another, or use applications on those sites that offer syndication, two sites I don’t utilize often but do pull my Twitter feed to are Plaxo, and Friendfeed. On LinkedIn they have a WordPress application and Bloglink appliction, so my network can see when I’ve either sent a twitter message or written a new blog post, even if I forget to update my status there.
Some people I know including Rachel and myself have also been in the news media in some form (News Print/TV) as some news media outlets turn to job searchers/bloggers to showcase their stories in regards to the current state of the economy.
I was actually contacted by the reporter for ABC15 a week after I wrote an email to him asking if I could link to a story he had on the job fair I attended. I never imagined that one email would get me the exposure I’d gotten, but I’m glad it happened.
I have links to the ABC15 story on my sidebar on my blog so that users don’t have to search for the blog post I wrote about it, and even now three weeks later I continue to get hits off that story directly, but for people reading my blog for the first time, I also direct traffic to the video interview and story on the ABC15 site, my being on a taped/televised interview, it gives people an idea of who I am and what I am passionate about with my blog as well.
When Rachel and I were speaking on Twitter on Monday March 9th, she asked for other ideas for syndication, Along with some of the ones I’d mentioned previously here, I thought of one that she hadn’t mentioned and that was to create a sitemap if she hadn’t already, I utilize the tools on my web hosting account to do just that, created in XML markup, and update it at least once a week, letting it find new URLs by my server logs or by what I post, update it, and push it out to Google.
The following is from a Google press release “Major Search Engines Unite to Support a Common Mechanism for Website Submission”
How Sitemaps Work
A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.
There are also other things I’ve noticed in how traffic has come to my site through searches, people searching for particular tags or people I’ve mentioned in my blog posts. I’ve made it a habit to tag the names of people I talk about in my posts, and that too has brought some traffic to my site as well. One of my last posts was indexed rather quickly on Google when I mentioned “Sean Connery” at “Austin’s Who’s Who in Arizona”, which pushed it to the top 2 pages in a search on Google. It is worth it to pay attention to what search terms are bringing visitors to your site, and to work on different words to tag to help in that.
Another way to help syndicate your blog/website is to participate in other blogs, commenting on them, providing trackbacks to posts you reference in your own writing, as I’ve done here with two of Rachel’s posts.
I’ve also added google feedburner links on my site for the RSS feed, and the ability to subscribe to my feed by email, as someone had asked me about that recently, they preferred to be subscribed by email to my blog.
Another option in feedburner is under Publicize is called PingShot, where you can have it notify other services when you post a new message, the following is my list:
When I publish new content in my feed, notify these services…
Technorati — Technorati is the authority on what is going on in the world of weblogs- My Yahoo — a customizable web page with news stock quotes weather and many other features
- Bloglines — helps you subscribe to and manage lots of web information
- Ping-o-matic — Pinging lets dozens of services know you have updated your site and increases traffic to your blog
- Newsgator — tracks it all and brings the web pages to you
… plus up to five additional services.
Lastly, one other thing you can do to help get the word out, is to add your blog/website to your email signature, and have it on every message you send, my email signature consists of my name, email address, web site (this blog) and my LinkedIn public profile page.
While I’ve discussed ways to syndicate your blog online in this post, word of mouth is another very simple way to get more readership, adding your blog/website to a business or networking card is another way to get the word out with people you meet and network with face to face.
Happy Reading!
-Martin