Use your blog RSS to "feed" and grow your social networks.

June 25, 2009 · by Shipwire eCommerce Order Fulfillment Service

If you are serious about traffic generation, odds are you have a blog. If you haven't done that yet...you really should. However, if you are like me, you likely also have some presence on a variety of social networks - Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin in my case.

The problem is keeping all those social networks fed with up-to-date content.

Assuming you have a blog that is built on a reputable blogging platform (Typepad, Wordpress, etc), your blog content can be subscribed to by users. I subscribe to a ton of blogs and publications like Practical E-commerce in my Google Reader (RSS reader). There are a ton of RSS readers out there, so pick the one you like.

Your blog's RSS feeds are powerfull syndication software (P.S. RSS = Real Simple Syndication). So use them to save yourself from the hassle of updating your social networks. Here are a few tricks/tips/hacks.

1. Facebook - Build a Fan Page for your business. This is a separate page that you can update that is different from your personal FB profile. That will take about 5 minutes (don't forget to publish). Then seed your Facebook Fan Page with your existing blog content. I couldn't figure this out at first and then a user on Aardvark (www.vark.com) pointed out to me that the Fan Page "Notes" section has "Import Blog". Here is an instructional write up on Facebook Fan Page RSS integration.

2. Twitter - TwitterFeed was built to do this. I'm still getting some sluggishness with the updates; but, I hope to see it ironed out quickly. I'll comment if I have to to switch to another RSS feed updater for Twitter.

3. Linkedin - Build a group for your company. You can do this from your Linkedin Profile. Once you have your Linkedin Group go to "News" and look for the box to the right with the link "Manage News Feeds". Input your RSS feed URL and you are good to go.

Now that you have "blog distribution", focus on blogging great content to bring yourself new readers (and hopefully buyers) and let the RSS feeds remove the hassle of keeping your social networks well fed. Some of these tools also have some rudimentary analytics and traffic reports so you can see where people are consuming your content.

PEC Readers: Where else have you fed your blog's RSS feeds to get more visitors? Seems to me, the more locations you syndicate to..the better.

Feel free to subscribe to the Shipwire shipping blog if you want to keep up to date on shipping and fulfillment :-)

Happy blogging (and blog syndicating),

Nate G. \ Shipwire twitter \ Shipping blog \ Shipwire order fulfillment \

This post is filed under Tools, Tips and Suggestions and has the following keyword tags: Blog, Facebook, twitter, linkedin, blog distribution.

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