Cross posting is all about spreading the reach of your blog content with minimal effort – you just publish an entry on your main blog and it gets mirrored across all your other blogs.
Here are some scenarios where you may consider cross-posting your blog articles:
Why Cross-Post your Blog Entries?
1. You have just one blog but are looking for a system that will backup all your blog posts automatically.
2. You maintain two blogs – one is private (or password protected) for family members while the other one is open for all. You can use cross posting to publish blog posts that may be of interest to either groups.
3. You have some old blogs on Live Journal or TypePad that are now lying in an abandoned state but there are some people who are still subscribed to those blogs. Cross posting (with short summaries) will help you grab the attention of your old audience to your latest content without any effort.
4. You are into some sort of "reputation management" business and have therefore created blogs across every blogging, μ-blogging or social networking platform including Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Xanga, MySpace, Diigo and so on. You can thus spread word about your client’s new product more easily by posting the same message to multiple sites simultaneously.
Related: Publish the Same Blog to Multiple Sites
How to Set-up Cross-posting?
Now that you know the benefits of cross posting the same blog content to multiple sites, here’s how you can do it with Windows Live Writer.
The first step is to install the xPollinate plugin from Windows Live Gallery. Now add all your secondary blogs to Windows Live Writer – this is a mandatory step because this plugin uses the Live Writer database to figure out addresses of your other blogs.
Now publish some article to your main blog and click the xPollinate button. Here you have the option to pick individual sites / blogs that should mirror your original blog post. You may choose excerpts instead of republishing the full article on secondary blogs and these cross-posts can also link to the source article – all in a simple click.
And since the plugin can be integrated with Ping.fm API key, you may use Windows Live Writer to update your current status on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites.
If you are not using Windows Live Writer, check this article for ideas on how to update all your blogs with the same content in a single step.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/cross-post-blogs-with-live-writer/8155/
Tags: cross post, feature, publishing, windows live writer, Blogging
Reader Comments
Interesting post Amit. Thanks for the info. One question, though: am I right in thinking that Google’s seach robots exclude or penalise duplicate content on mirrored blogs?
Written by Chris Proudlove on 04.10.09
Google may not penalize a blog for duplicate content but they surely hide stuff from search results which they think is a carbon copy of another article.
xPollinate lets you link to the main article from all the cross posting so you can easily help search engines recognize which is the original article that should get the maximum google juice.
Written by Amit on 04.10.09
Thanks for the tricks.
xpollinate.codeplex.com is really great it creating cross platform buzz.
Though i don’t prefer to rip the same content of different blogs but i have few dilemma on “content duplicacy”.Is their any other automatic way(plugin) to include tags and synonym words for avoiding the issue on cross blogs?
Written by Honey Singh on 04.12.09
Yes, this looks like an interesting and helpful tool, Thank You for sharing it, Amit! :)
I agree with Chris that I would be a bit concerned about the Search Engines, e.g. Google, penalizing you for Duplicate Content, you know?
Does anyone have any evidence one way or the other as to whether or not cross-posting with Windows Live Writer gets you penalized for Duplicate Content?
Thank You again, Amit, for sharing this with all of us! :) and Everyone Have a Great Day! :)
Written by TheVCF on 04.12.09
@ Chris Proudlove
Just can we make a sub domain in our own site or another site and just make robots.txt to dis allow it
Written by Balaji on 04.12.09