If you are using the blogging function of your WordPress site, you can automate the syndication of your blog posts to your various social profiles such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In this article, we go over how to connect your blog to LinkedIn so that your posts will automatically appear on your LinkedIn profile after being published on your blog.

(To feed your blog posts to Facebook and Twitter, we recommend using the free Twitterfeed service about which we don’t go into detail here. It’s free and easy. Try it, you’ll like it.)

1. From your LinkedIn profile, navigate to “More” and then click on “Get More Applications…”.

2. From the applications page, scroll down until you see the WordPress application. Click on the icon to start the installation.

3. On the installation page, check the boxes to display the blog on both your LinkedIn homepage and on your LinkedIn profile. Click the “Add Application” button to install the application.

4. The next page is where you will enter the URL to your WordPress site.

It’s not necessary to enter the link to your RSS feed if you don’t know it, LinkedIn will detect your RSS feed from the main URL of the site. Select whether you want to display all recent posts or only the recent posts that are tagged with ‘linkedin’.

You may want to specifically control the posts that are allowed to post to LinkedIn by choosing to only allow posts that are tagged with the LinkedIn-specific tag of ‘linkedin‘. When composing posts on your site, if you would like them to post to your LinkedIn profile, then just be sure to tag them with ‘linkedin‘.

5. Verify the blog posts are feeding to your LinkedIn profile.

Go to your profile and your posts should be appearing underneath the summary of your information. That’s it. Done.

Uninstalling the application

If you ever need to stop the blog posts from posting to your LinkedIn profile, the application is easily uninstalled. All you need to do is:

1. Go to More, Get More Applications
2. Scroll to find the WordPress icon and click on it
3. Click on the Remove button in the bottom right next to the Update Settings button

We are pleased and proud to announce the launch of the redesigned site for Target Dental Marketing.

Target Dental Marketing helps dentists build successful dentistry businesses, through  targeted, precision marketing.

Our latest WordPress website takes advantage of the superior Search Engine Optimization capabilities that WordPress provides giving our client control over the keyword-rich URLs.

• Do you want to be able to update your own content?
• Do you want good search engine optimization (SEO) without knowing the first thing about it?
• Do you want awesome valid semantic code without even trying hard?

We’ve been using WordPress for years to build business websites. Years ago, in our quest to find a simple-to-use, open-source content management system for our small business clients, we tried just about every platform out there. Everything we tried (I’m not naming names, but you know who you are) was OVERKILL (meaning confusing and overwrought) for our clients who just wanted to be able to update their own pages and keep a blog for events and news items. In addition, many of the other CMS programs we tried produced the most heinous code, full of table tags and in many cases, code that would not validate without a major overhaul.

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the web.  But what many people don’t know is that it is also a powerful, user-friendly, FREE Content Management System (CMS) that can be used for much more than just blogging. With WordPress you can build a blog, a website, or both.

By using WordPress for your small to medium business website, you also get the following:

• Search Engine Optimization – WordPress provides REALLY good search engine optimization (SEO) right out of the box.
• Control of your content -  It is easy for non-technical users to update content on a WordPress website without knowing HTML. Do you have to wait for your webmaster every time you want to make a small change to your website? Once WordPress is set up for you, you can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor.
• Did we mention it’s FREE? – WordPress is an open-source platform, which means you don’t have to shell out big bucks for a license to use it for your website.  It’s ideal for small to medium size businesses who don’t have a huge web budget.

WordPress 3.0 launched June 17th and we are very excited about the new features. Look for an upcoming post with highlights about the new version and how they can be leveraged by business websites.