You have probably already written some amazing content on your blog. Congratulations! Now let’s get more people looking at it.
Syndication
I think the most obvious example of syndication is the comics page in the newspaper. A comic artist, like Mort Walker who writes Beetle Bailey, writes a series to strips and submits them to one place, King Features in this case, that distributes the strip to multiple newspapers that have all agreed to publish the strip.
In the case of your blog, you write an article and we have a plugin or some other application that syndicates your article out to a variety of other places to be published too. Or at least a link to your article is published.
The social media sites are great for this. Currently I only use Facebook and Twitter. I mentioned this a while back when we talked about external links. This time I want to go into it much deeper with Twitter and next time I will do the same with Facebook.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is called a micro-blogging site because you use it to post short messages of up to 140 characters. The immediate value from Twitter is that it is a great place to quickly get word out about your new blog post to get some quick traffic.
The first thing that you need to do with Twitter is to create an account and set up your profile if you don’t already have one. Go to twitter.com and fill in your name, email address, and a password then click Sign up where it says “New to Twitter? Join today!”. Follow any additional prompts that they give you then you are ready to fill out your profile, which you can see in this video.
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The next step after setting up your profile is to follow some people and hope that they will follow you back. There are a lot of tools that you can use to automatically follow everyone who follows someone else, like follow everyone who follows Mike Dillard. You can also automatically follow everyone who follows you. I don’t use any of these tools because I only want to follow people in my audience, not just people who are trying to inflate their numbers. Having 2,000 followers who are in my target audience is much more effective than having 40,000 who aren’t.
Here are some ways that you can find people to follow and get followers on Twitter. Be sure to follow me too – twitter.com/yonderwillow.
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How to Syndicate Your Blog on Twitter
You have your Twitter account, your profile is set up, and you are starting to get some followers. Now you are ready to syndicate your posts to Twitter. As with any other extra functionality in WordPress, you need a plugin. The plugin for our needs here is called Twitter Tools and the following video shows you how to install and configure it.
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That is the process to create an “application” to register your first blog with your Twitter account. You only want to do that with the first blog that you set up. Any additional websites need to use the same application because if Twitter sees multiple applications like this on your Twitter account they will shut them all down, as I found out the hard way. The following video shows you how to add additional websites to your existing Twitter app. You can skip this until you are ready to create additional websites.
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We’re almost done. If you remember, Twitter limits your tweets to 140 characters and the URLs for your blog posts may be a little long. So we need one more tool, a URL shortener. What these services do is create a URL on their domain that then redirects any traffic it received to your longer URL. I use bit.ly for this purpose.
Here’s an example. Earlier this month I wrote a post titled Bob Proctor, Financial Freedom and Multiple Sources of Income. The URL is http://www.getwealthyinwellness.com/bob-proctor-financial-freedom-msi/ which is about 70 characters long. That only leaves 70 characters for my tweet, so I have bit.ly shorten the URL for me. The shortened URL that I get back is http://bit.ly/r4b3x7, which is only 20 characters long. Now I have 120 characters to use in my tweet.
Of course, there is a plugin to extend Twitter Tools to create bit.ly-shortened URLs. The plugin is called Twitter Tools: bit.ly links. The next video shows you how to create your account on bit.ly and set up the plugin.
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Congratulations! You are now all set up to automatically tweet all of your new posts to your followers on Twitter.
Your Readers Can Tweet Your Posts Too
Tweeting your posts out to your followers can eventually get you a lot of traffic. You have the potential to get even more if you give your readers the ability to tweet your posts out to their followers as well. That’s right, another plugin. This one is called TweetMeme Retweet Button.
The following video shows you how to install and configure it.
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You are now thoroughly connected to Twitter.
Next Time
Next time I will talk about how to do all of these same things to syndicate your blog posts to your followers on Facebook.
Talk to you again in a few days.
Wayne
PS. If you are not already signed up with a network marketing company and are now ready to put what we have talked about into profitable use, I would appreciate it if you would consider taking this opportunity to join my team so that we can work together toward your success online.
Previous Articles
Online vs Offline Network Marketing
Where Are You Going to Share Your Message?
How to Easily Create Your Website
Promoting You and Your Website Online – Part 1
Promoting You and Your Website Online – Part 2
Online Network Marketing is Still About People
How to Write a Blog Post
What to Write About
