If you have a blog, you already know the importance of traffic. What if you had a way to syndicate your blog posts across an assortment of Web 2.0 sites, where interested readers could get a taste of your content and then click on a link to go to your blog? Well, guess what – now you do! It's a brand new plug-in called WPSyndicator, developed by Andy Fletcher.
WPSyndicator takes an excerpt of your blog post and posts it for you to 14 popular Web 2.0 sites plus will automatically tweet it for you to your Twitter account. Of course, along with the excerpt will be a link back to your blog for the viewer to read the rest of the post. Brilliant, isn't it? Not only do you get direct traffic but a very valuable backlink as well, if you use anchor text for the link.
You have the choice of what to set the excerpt to, with the default being 500 characters (around a paragraph or two). The key is to give the reader just enough to get them hooked and be eager to go to your blog to read the rest. You can easily adjust the length of the excerpt, depending on the content you are syndicating, so you'll always be able to have just the right amount out there as bait.
Andy does offer lifetime updates to WPSyndicator, which makes it even more of a bargain. He's already issued a couple of updates that incorporated features suggested by his beta testers and pre-launch customers. The latest update added the ability to syndicate pages as well as posts, auto-syndication capability and rate limiting so you don't get booted off the Web 2.0 sites for spamming.
The plug-in itself is very easy to install and activate, just like other WordPress plug-ins. It will take an hour or so the first time you use it because you'll have to set up all your accounts for the various sites that your content gets syndicated to. To make it very easy for you, Andy has included instructions right in the menu plus some helpful videos to walk you through many of the steps. He even built in the bit.ly connection so your links are automatically shortened for the micro-blogging sites like Twitter.
One of the favorite features for many of the early users is the ability to syndicate past posts. Once the plug-in is installed and set up, you will see a link that says “click here to syndicate” whenever you go to edit a post. You can syndicate old or new posts at the click of a button.
Do be careful not to overdo it as you will look like a spammer. Andy recommends doing just a couple posts per day, perhaps one new and one old. This will also give your readers time to see what you have to offer on the Web 2.0 sites instead of drowning them the first day out.
I've been using it on a couple of my blogs and the results are unbelievable... Check it out here.
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