How to spread blog content to social networking sites

Feedburner. Make your RSS feed highly useful

Use Google Feedburner for your main feed and comments feed. RSS is how content moves around the web. You don’t have to understand RSS to use it, as setting it up is easy.

Lots of people, including me, read much of their news in a RSS Reader rather than going to the website itself. Add your original feed to Feedburner. It will create a new feed with lots of added functionality. This new feed is the one that everyone, including those using RSS readers, should use.

Polizeros currently has 380 subscriptions on Feedburner. Not only are these people who might not read on the blog on the site, this also cuts down on server usage, as Feedburner reads the RSS feed every 30 minutes, then pumps out that content to them when they want it. This lets their servers do some of the work too.

Also, you can use Google Adsense to put ads in the Feedburner feed. Currently such revenue, modest, as it is, pays for hosting and domain name registrations for all the sites Sue and I have.

If your blog runs WordPress, get the FD Feedburner plugin. This seamlessly routes all possible RSS feeds to your Google Feedburner feeds. Just add the Feedburner feed URL and it does the rest. Again, you don’t have to understand everything here, just know that it allows many more people to read your content.

Twitterfeed. Autopost your RSS feed to Twitter

Now it gets fun. You can tell Twitterfeed to read your Feedburner feed at specified intervals and add any new posts to your Twitter account. It’ll automatically post the first 130 characters or so, with a link back to the original. It also has filtering capabilities, in case you only want to repost certain posts.

Friendfeed. Create a lifestream

Friendfeed will read whatever RSS feeds you give it, reposting it onto your Friendfeed account. Because it has a powerful commenting system, you can get lots of feedback (and also comment on other posts too.)

Not only can Friendfeed reposts status messages from Facebook, it can also repost automatically to Twitter. Thus, if I update my status on Facebook, it automatically ends up on Friendfeed and Twitter too.

The goal here is to engage people and get conversations going, not to spam them, so use such reposting capabilities carefully and intelligently.

So, that’s what I’m doing now. What are you doing with social networking?