WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

25

Helping Others Connect to Your Site

In the preceding lesson, I showed you how to bring in content from other sites; now, it's time to look at ways WordPress can help others make use of your content. Using social media (“liking” your site, bookmarking it, and so on), publishing an RSS (really simple syndication) feed of your site, subscribing to your site through their RSS reader, or simply linking to your site: these are examples of how others can use your content. Making it easy for people to take these actions should be an important part of your promotional plans for developing online relationships.

CONNECTING VIA SOCIAL MEDIA

Although the options I talk about here aren't about others directly connecting to your site, the connections made indirectly through social media are too powerful to go unmentioned.

I talk about social media plugins in Lesson 37, and they'll offer a whole host of new options, but for the moment, let's look at how you can quickly get some social media connections going even without the use of plugins.

I showed you in Lesson 24 how easy it is to insert code on your site that displays various social media feeds, such as your Twitter account activity. It's just as easy to allow others to connect your site to social media.

In the case of Twitter, you simply choose the Twitter Buttons option and you're given some HTML to paste into a WordPress text widget, creating a nice button on your sidebar (or wherever the widget area is) that lets people follow your ...