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Set Your Content Free

flyShahramSharifI’m still amazed by how many businesses have only partial RSS feeds from their blogs or websites.  A partial RSS feed usually just has the title and a excerpt with the hopes that it’ll entice you to click to the website to read the rest of the post.  We’re all busy people.  I read my RSS feeds in Google Reader because it allows me to catchup on lots of different sites without having to spend the time visiting them all.  What makes your content so different from TechCrunch or the New York Times that I should bother visiting your site to read it?

With the proliferation of various mobile devices – smartphones, the Kindle and others yet to be released, it’s important for people to get to your content as easily as possible.  One of the easiest ways to create a mobile website is to use a service such as MoFuse or Unity Mobile and provide them with your RSS feed.  If you only have a partial feed, people on the mobile devices will have to click to go to your website.  Is your website optimized for mobile visitors?  Why make people click from one place that’s made for their device to another that many not?

Unless you’re selling your content, why be so protective of it?  If you set your content free and allow people to view it however they want, they’ll be more likely to read it, and more importantly, share it.  It makes your content easier to view on many different devices and platforms.  And it doesn’t annoy people who you want as your customers.  Most businesses are selling something other than their content.  By freeing your content you get your name and brand and reputation out to a much larger audience, which is much more productive than forcing people into a funnel.  Even if you do happen to sell your content, or sell advertising on your blog, there are ways to advertise via RSS or other methods.  By freeing your content, you are giving readers a reason to trust you.  Which will make it much easier to sell them something later – an ebook, study, webinar, whatever.

Free your content.  Connect with your readers.  Allow them the freedom to share, read, comment and repurpose what you write.  You’ll build trust and reputation and your message will spread much further.

(photo by Shahram Sharif @ Flickr CC)

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Twitter Tip – Automate Sending Articles to Twitter from Google Reader

automatejurvetsonI used to mark articles in delicous to be automatically sent to my Twitter feed via Twitterfeed.  Now, I am able to mark articles from anywhere with my iPhone and have them sent automatically to my Twitter feed using Google Reader.  This method requires both a Google account on Google reader, and an account on Twitterfeed (both are free).

  1. In Google Reader, in the upper right, click on Settings
  2. Click on the Folders and Tags tab.
  3. Click on the checkbox next to “Your shared items”
  4. Go up to the box that says “change sharing…” and select Public.
  5. Click on View public page (it’ll be empty right now).
  6. Now go back to the feed in Google Reader.  At the bottom of any post you want to share, click “share”.
  7. If you refresh the public page, you’ll see your items show up.
  8. On the right side of the public page, you’ll see an item that says Atom feed.  Click on it (it’ll probably show a bunch of code stuff.)  This is the feed to the items you want to share.  Copy the URL at the top of the window
  9. Goto twitterfeed.com and sign up for their free service.
  10. Login to the service. Click “my feeds”
  11. Click “Create new feed”
  12. Enter the username and password for your twitter account (you can then test to see if it’s working)
  13. Paste the URL of the Google Reader public page where it says “RSS feed URL”
  14. Feel free to mess with the other options, but they should be fine if you want to leave them, so click “Create”.

Twitterfeed will automatically check what you’ve marked as “Share” in Google Reader every hour (or whatever you set as the frequency) and then send it to your twitter feed for you.

(photo by jurvetson @ Flickr CC)

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Twitter Tip – Automate Tweets with Twitterfeed

twitterfeedThe point of Twitter is to have a conversation, but it also nice to send out useful information to your followers – perhaps links of interest or a link when you post to your blog. Twitterfeed allows you to use RSS feeds to automatically send links to your Twitter account.  Just add the RSS feed from your blog to Twitterfeed and you will automatically tweet the blog title with a link whenever you add a new post.

Once you have an account you can add any RSS feed and tell Twitterfeed how often you want it to post items from your feed (every 30m, every hour, etc) and how many items to post (1-5).  Twitterfeed will only post new items, so don’t worry about posting redundant content.  Once you add a feed it may take a few minutes for Twitterfeed to pick it up.

Twitterfeed can also be used to post directly to identi.ca and custom laconica installations. Using Twitterfeed in conjunction with Ping.fm or HelloTxt you can also post to any sites those services support.

Here at Sazbean, we use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet our blog posts and links we add to delicious.

If you use Twitterfeed, we’d love to hear how in the comments.

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