Display blog RSS feed on Linkedin
To continue in suite of my previous article on automatically displaying your blog’s posts (the RSS feed) on a facebook page, let’s see how this can also be accomplished on Linkedin.
Before I dive into the image-rich detailed description of the process, let’s take a few second to remember why and how we would do such a thing…
The internet has changed.
Just a few years ago, web developers were quite content creating static pages of information and posting them onto the web like tiles on a wall. With the blog-revolution began a series of innovations that enabled non-technical people to easily publish data on the internet. Sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and Blogger started offering a new way to look at the internet: rather than an accumulation of domains and sites, it became a collection of databases and ways to access them.
By now, in many ways thanks to open-source developers of projects such as WordPress, the frontiers between websites are falling apart. Content and styling, data and presentation: these entities are being defined, separated and re-invented.
Though I personally build websites that are made to attract, retain and remain in the bookmarks of internauts, the fact is that you are publishing on the web, you want to people to read and watch everything you post. You can expect everyone to constantly come back to your website to check if you have added anything new recently.
This is why RSS feeds were invented: by formatting your posts in a specific fashion made precisely for distribution, RSS feeds, automatically available on most blogging platforms, are the best way to send your posts flying everywhere.
Back to Linkedin feed display.
The process is extremely simple, even easier than on facebook in my opinion.
Step 1: Edit your profile.
Simple to understand: in order to add something to your profile (this is where the blog posts will display), you must edit it.
Step 2: Add an application.
Scroll down the profile-edit page till you see this:
In Linkedin, everything that is not a direct display of a Linkedin information field is called an “application”. These applications are made available to you for free and function surprisingly well.
Step 3: Choose the most appropriate application.
There are a certain number of applications to chose from, I will review three:
Blog Link:
The Blog Link application is extremely powerful. It basically searches your profile to find the link the RSS feed for your blog. For it to function well, you must make sure that you have already edited your profile to display a link for your blog.
The Blog Link application doesn’t stop there. With ambition to provide a large amount of ‘blog functionality’, it will ALSO search the profiles of your Linkedin contacts and fetch the feeds for any blogs THEY listed. It then creates a box with two tabs where you decide to display it (see step 4): “By Me” and “From My Contacts”.
If you are running a non-wordpress blog, this is really your only option, and it ALSO works with wordpress.
WordPress:
This application is much simpler and more straightforward. It does exactly what you expect it to and nothing else. You tell it what your feed URL is, and it displays it on your profile.
Pros: I personally like the fact that is it less intrusive, and find the display to be more attractive that Blog Link’s.
Cons: It only works with WordPress blogs.
Tweets:
This application does not display your blog posts, but your tweets instead, so if you’re a Twitter type… well Tweets too can be distributed via RSS!
Step 4: Choose where to display… and DO IT!
Well that pretty much sums it up. Once you’ve made this far there’s no hesitating!
Choose where you want this Feed to read by checking the little boxes and click the big blue button.
If you’re curious but afraid to do it… have no fear, you can always come back here the same way you did last time and un-check those boxes.
I hope you found this tutorial useful, feel free to leave your comments or ask questions.
Soon I will explain how to make a WordPress blog generate self-linking Tweets, so stay tuned.
Tags: blog, blogging, feed, how to, images, instructions, linkedin, RSS, step by step, tutorial, web publishing, WordPress
[...] Also, read my post on displaying an RSS feed on Linkedin. [...]
RSS Feeds are really very helpful and you could get site and news updates from it.,,;
RSS feeds are really great because you are always updated with the latest news or blog posts.-.~