- Image via Wikipedia
As you may or may not know, I’m an avid blogger. I love WordPress and the things you can do with it are pretty frickin’ amazing, if I say so myself.
So, every week, we have a meeting with Tellman about our traffic assignments, and along with Victor Grosser, the OE blog is mine. I love it! It’s so much fun working with this stuff every day that I love waking up and knowing that I’ll be doing something that I enjoy right off the bat. Not that the other things I do for OE aren’t exciting because they are. As the Product Development Manager, I get to create new stuff all the time, or get other people to do it for us and keep the new stuff humming along. It’s great, but I have always loved blogging and have several of my own (as you can see in the sidebar).
Anyway, a week or so ago, Tellman had us all start personal blogs in our names. I’ve had this site for quite a while, and just never touched it. It had everything to do with writing and the books I’ve authored, but I hadn’t touched it in years. It looked like a nightmare, and I was rather happy to be prodded into doing something with it. My life is still about writing, but not for kids. So, things change and PatMarcello.com should change with me, too. I’ve had this domain for 10 years and it’s time I did something cool with it. But…
OE now has 10 blogs that we’re pulling in content from for the OvercomeEverything.com blog. It’s great! We each have to write something every day, and it can be anything we want it to be. Here are some cool things that folks have been posting:
- a contest on Jodi Meehan’s blog to pick her biggest copywriting influence
- Josh Burns contemplating who would win if he got into a fight with Oprah
- Danny Frank, talking about a Vision Quest he had once
- Dear Tellman videos where Tellman answers marketing questions for visitors
- and tons of other cool stuff.
These posts are lots of fun to read from everyone and being able to put all of it out there is just incredible. It’s coming from 10 different blogs remember!
Want to know how I did that?
First, let me say that if you have a WordPress blog, there’s a plugin for just about anything you want to do. So, when Tellman asked about getting all the content flowing, I said, “Hmm… bet there’s a plugin; I’ll have to research it.” It took a little digging, but of course there’s a plugin!
It’s called “Feed WordPress” and it allows you to leave the permalinks intact. So, though we have the content on OE, the linking is still to the individual blogs, which should avoid the duplicate content issue entirely. It’s great!
The only thing I’d watch for is that it will automatically pull in the categories from the blogs you’re getting content from. So, you have to adjust that if you don’t want a gazillion categories showing up. The plugin will keep the categories you have already and decide where to place the posts, making it pretty danged smart.
I don’t recommend that you just go out and find blogs you like, create a new one, and then start pulling in other people’s posts. That’s not going to help you. Instead, if you have more than one blog of your own, and they’re related, this is a great way to create a “hub” of information. Yet, not sure how it would help your SEO. This may only have application for big companies that have multiple bloggers writing in their own spaces.
Anyway, works great for us!
