eAction

As I said last week, there are four main aspects to RSS;

The RSS Reader - so you can read teasers of syndications you want to watch.
Putting syndicated columns on your site- a guest column spot for others.
Syndicating your site’s pages/writing for other sites to pick up and display.
Most blogs are automated for easy syndication - good start for techno-phobes!

We’ve covered the first one about installing the RSS Reader and lining up the
feeds you want to watch and visit. So today, let’s look at how to insert the
syndicated columns of other writers’ on your site.

Why would you want to do that?

When visitors come to your site they are hunting for information and slurping
it up as fast as they can read. If it looks like there is no meaty information
there, they get distracted and click away. You’ve lost them. If they see that
you have excellent articles on the topics that brought them to you in the first
place, they will linger to read. The longer they stay the more likely they are
to notice some well-placed words about your own products or those of your
affiliates’. If they click on those, who knows, they may buy! Profits for you!

If people discover that your site is choke full of good stuff, they will
bookmark it and come back. Or, as we’ll show in future installments of this
tutorial, if you prepare a RSS feed they’ll know whenever you have added more
good stuff.

Now, how do we add syndicated pages from other good writers?

Step 1. find a site like -
www.writingcareer.com/freecontent.shtml#syndicate
This one offers collections of articles on various writing related topics.
Click on “View Sample” on a few of them to get the general idea of what they
look like. Read some articles to make sure they are of the quality you want on
your site.

Step 2. When you’ve found some you want, click on the “Get Code” links
underneath them. On the next screen you are asked for your name, email, and the
site and URL where you will place this content. It’s a good idea to open
another window to your site, and to create that page perhaps from your
template, and name it something close to what this syndicate is called. Give
that information. (Some syndicates will just give you the code snippet to copy
paste, but most want to know who is using it and where).

Step 3. You create the web page leaving the largest article space free for the
syndicated column or content to appear. All you do is give it a title between your header codes.

I provide some formating code so it will look like the rest of my pages; which, unfortunately, is refusing to show up here. Basically the codes for the margin settings, the font face, color and size….

Then you paste in the Java Script code snippet; which is really a link beginning
with “script language” and ending with the close-script tag. Nothing more.
(Sorry, it wants to insert the page here if I put the script in here).

You can still have your usual side bars, or columns with links, and your own
backgrounds, and colours. The only thing different is that whenever that other
site puts new content up on that page, your web page will show it too,
instantly. If you set the font size and color and margins the way I did, people
will not necessarily notice that it comes from somewhere else.

To see samples of my draw-in pages for these syndicated sources, you might want
to check out the following pages;
Writing4Success
EbookPublishing
SpilledCandy
devotional
BibleMinute
Evangelism Guide

(By the way, in checking these over I see that I really need to renovate all the
pages in my Sharing Library. I’ll try to get to it soon)!

Have fun adding lots of good stuff to your site in a matter of minutes!