Written: October 27, 2012

Integrating your Web Site, Blog and Facebook

There are so many ways that a client or prospect will discover your business, become aware, get interested, then finally decided to take action and phone or email you. If you communicate with a web site, blog and Facebook, then consider integrating all three to maximize your marketing impact.

Let’s take a look at what Nancy Emerson did with her surfing business. Her web site is www.surfclinics.com and at the top we added icons and links to both Twitter and Facebook:

Next, we actually embed a Facebook badge on the Home page, so that web visitors can see what’s being shared on Facebook:

Finally, on the Home page we embed her top four blog Posts:

We built Nancy’s web site with WordPress which has excellent support for blogging, so there’s a menu called Blog where you can read the most recent blog posts or search for words in any blog.

 

In Facebook you can install a free app that will automatically publish your Blog post on your Facebook page, this allows you two write the blog once then have it appear both on your web site and on Facebook. There are many Facebook apps that do this: RSS Graffiti, Social RSS.

 

You can even have your blog posts automatically Tweet using a free site called TwitterFeed.

I do the same thing on my web site, where I can write one blog post then have it show up on my:

• Web Site
• Facebook
• Twitter

The more ways that a client or prospect can read about your business, the better it is for your business.

Tags: blog, Facebook, RSS, Twitter, WordPress

Re-using Web Content From One Site on Another

I blog professionally at a site called SemiWiki.com along with several other bloggers, and we write about the semiconductor world plus the software tools used to design semiconductors called Electronic Design Automation (EDA).

The new blogs on the front page of SemiWiki would work great on my marketing consulting site, MarketingEDA.com but in abbreviated form.

So how did I re-use the web content from SemiWiki on my site MarketingEDA?

This re-use is accomplished through a web standard known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication). If you look at that screenshot from SemiWiki there’s a little orange icon for RSS: 

By clicking on that icon I can retrieve the RSS address which contains all the info that I want to re-use.

http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/external.php?do=rss&type=newcontent&sectionid=1&days=120&count=10

If you view that RSS feed in a reader it will show something like this:

The marketing site is built with WordPress, so I searched for a plugin that would read this RSS feed from SemiWiki and then display it on my Marketing site. Within a few minutes I found and installed a plugin called RSSinPage. In WordPress I edited my Home page and added the short code to re-use this RSS feed:

[rssinpage rssfeed="http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/external.php?do=rss&type=newcontent&sectionid=1&days=120&count=10"]

This RSS plugin worked great and I just needed to make the output more compact by adding a few settings to make the Title appear first, then the date and no description:

[rssinpage rssfeed="http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/external.php?do=rss&type=newcontent&sectionid=1&days=120&count=10" 
rssdescription="no" 
rssitems='10' 
rssformat='Y  x' 
rssdateformat='M j, Y' 
rsstarget="_blank"]

Here’s what each plugin option does:

• rssfeed – The RSS address from the site I want to re-use content from
• rssdescription – I didn’t want to include the description, so this ignores it
• rssitems – The 10 most recent blog titles will be shown
• rssformat – Y is the blog post Title with a link, and ‘x’ is the date
• rssdateformat – American date like: Sep. 26, 2012
• rsstarget – Clicking the link opens a new tab in your web browser

Summary

If you have a WordPress site then it’s quick and easy to re-use content from other web sites that support the RSS standard.

Tags: RSS

Adding an RSS Feed with PHP

I have a marketing web site at www.marketingeda.com and when I updated from PHP 4 to 5 my RSS feed reader stopped working. So I browsed for a simple replacement that worked well with PHP 5 and found something called MagpieRSS at SourceForge that worked wonderful.

Here’s the simple PHP code that I needed to insert on my page where I wanted the RSS feed to appear:

require(‘classes/rss/rss_fetch.inc’);
$rss = fetch_rss(‘http://www.chipdesignmag.com/payne/feed/’);
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
$title = $item[title];
$url = $item[link];
$description = $item[description];
echo “<a href=$url>$title</a></li><br>$description<br>”;
}

Here’s what this feed outputs on my page:

Tags: PHP, RSS

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