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Connect Your Art Blog to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, & all Social Media
Time is the biggest concern I hear about when discussing marketing and promoting art online. Which I completely understand. I imagine you’ve been doing some research in how to market your art online and you’ve been overwhelmed by what you’ve found. There are just too many options out there and it seems as if you must be in all of them or you’ll be missing out on something.
I am a big believe in a blog being sort of an artists online home or headquarters and all efforts are connected to the art blog in one way or another. It makes sense to invest the time you have available to online marketing on your own digital real estate. Focus on creating a quality blog with quality content and then let the magic of the internet take care of the rest by broadcasting your content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media outlets.
Internet Magic = RSS
These tools and this system is based on taking advantage of your blog’s RSS feed. RSS is a way that blogs and websites broadcast their content and allow other applications to receive the content directly. If you think of your blog as a radio station the RSS feed is it’s number on the radio dial.
The following list of tools will work with any blog platform you are using be it WordPress.com, Blogger, self hosted WordPress, Tumblr, TypePad, Posterous, or any other site that takes advantage of RSS.
Here are 5 tools to help you do that:
Time Saver #1:
Feedburner is a service from Google that works to make all types of website feeds play nice together and is a good starting point to building this system. Head over there and “burn your blog’s feed” so that you’ll have one simple standard RSS web address that will work all across the internet. For example Art Palaver’s feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/artpalaver and it is what I use whenever I am connecting Art Palaver to another website or service.
Feedburner has many features and options associated with it but the one I want to mention here is the the email subscription feature. This is hands down the simplest way to deliver your blog’s content via email. Visitors to your site sign up using a form that Feedburner provides and then receive an email every time you update your blog. Once you put the form in place Feedburner and Google take care of the rest. (Read all about Feedburner’s email subscription option.)
Time Saver #2:
Ping.fm is a nifty service that let’s you “post anywhere to anywhere” as they put it. After you sign up you put in that RSS feed address you got from Feedburner and then connect to as many services as you like. Currently they have 32 different social networks that you can publish to but I mainly use it for my Twitter account.
After you set it up the next time you post to your blog Ping.fm will automatically update all the networks you told it to with a short description and link to your fresh post.
Time Saver #3
RSS Graffiti is what I use for Art Palaver’s Facebook page. It is a Facebook tool that published my content to my page’s wall. I like it because it gives me a lot of control over the how and when a post is shared. And you can use it on your profile or multiple pages within a single Facebook account.
Time Saver #4
Mailchimp is an email service provider that is great for email newsletters and list building. But it also a great way to publish your content via an email newsletter without having to write a newsletter. Using Mailchimp’s RSS to Email feature you can create and design a very nice looking email newsletter that will automatically send your blog’s content to your fans.
This is a much more advanced option than the Feedburner email subscription I mentioned earlier. It takes a bit more work up front to set up but once you have it in place it runs on its own with little maintenance on your part.
Time Saver #5
Nutshell Mail is what will help you bring a little humanity to all this automation we’ve been talking about. It is a service by Constant Contact that sends you an email however often you’d like to update you on your social networks. I believe this is key because it helps you listen and respond to your audience.
Everyday I receive an email in the morning and one in the late afternoon from Nutshell mail that lets me know if anyone replied to me, followed me, unfollowed me on Twitter or if anyone commented on my Facebook wall. I like this because I know I check my email everyday without fail. I might not open Twitter or Facebook but I’ll always open my email.
Any questions?
This list is by no means all inclusive. There are many tools out there to help you get control of your social media and internet marketing. These are just the ones that I personally use and have found to be helpful. I am always open to hearing about news though so leave a comment if there is one you feel I am missing out on.
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