Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Website Content Management Automation

I was recently asked to explain how to publish site content to the web sort of automatically. Plus how to receive new content to your site.

Voila- here is the short version of how you can do that FR.EE:

PUBLISHING CONTENT: Take some content from your website and put in your blog (if you haven’t got one, you can set up one for free at e.g. Wordpress.org).

Find your RSS feed on your blog and ‘burn’ this feed in Feedburner.com. Feedburner will then automatically notify ‘the web’ whenever you write something new in your blog.

RECEIVING CONTENT: If you want to receive updates directly into your website whenever new content has been published, you simply integrate the respective RSS feed into your site or blog. You can find the RSS feed of a blog/site by looking for the orange RSS feed symbol or you can just look up the RSS directories to find any feed.

‘RSS’ sounds rather technical, but just think of it as a (zero emission ;-) sports car that gets you to where you want to go faster. How much of its electronic ignition do you really need to know to be able to drive that (RSS) car? Zero, right?

Let’s make a quick example: I mentioned to Steve Oxlade the other day that I would love to have quotes from his great book (The Abundance Zone) on our IEL website. Ideally new quotes every day. (Marketing for him - inspiring new content for me. Win-Win.) To make this work Steve would put a couple of quotes from his and Matt’s book onto his blog every other day. Done in a minute or two. I would ‘subscribe’ to the RSS feed from his blog and integrate it into my site. Whenever Steve puts some new quotes into his blog, they show up on my site, automatically. So when visitors come back to my site, they see (Steve’s) new content -magic.

This can be done with any content really and there are many ways how to use RSS which I will explain at another time.

p.s. RSS also helps your search engine optimization because Google and the others like fresh content! It really is a win-win-win.

So long for now, take care and god bless.

Karl