Since TCN provides you with tips and articles to post on your blog, you need a way to move the text and graphics over to your site. One way would be to go to each article (linked on your Posts page), copy the text, and drag the graphics to your Desktop to download them. Then you could switch over to your blog, paste the text in, reformat it as necessary, and insert the graphics. We also provide Word files and standalone graphics as an independent download each week. There’s nothing wrong with copy and paste, and working with the text in this way might make it easier to personalize each article.
For WordPress users, the easiest way to bring TCN content to your site is with the CyberSEO Pro plug-in. Once configured, it uses your custom RSS feed to download all new TCN articles to your site as a draft post, ready for editing and posting.
(An aside: CyberSEO was originally called CyberSyn and then renamed to CyberSEO Lite. More recently, the company behind it has stopped development on the free CyberSEO Lite. Although current installations will likely keep working for some time, new users must purchase CyberSEO Pro ($29.95 for the first year and then $15 per year for each subsequent year of updates). It makes sense to upgrade from CyberSEO Lite at some point since unsupported WordPress plug-ins can open security vulnerabilities. The company has also recently introduced another plug-in called RSS Retriever that’s only $19.95 and offers a subset of CyberSEO Pro’s features. I haven’t tested it, but it probably works extremely similarly; let me know if you give it a try.)
Here’s how to configure CyberSEO Pro:
- First, verify that your WordPress installation is compatible with CyberSEO Pro. If it is, buy a 1-site license for CyberSEO Pro. Follow CyberSEO’s installation instructions.
- A new CyberSEO Pro item appears in your Dashboard’s navigation sidebar. Click it and then General Settings underneath. There are many settings on the General Settings page, but you only need to pay attention to those specified in bold int the bullets below. When you’re done, click Update Options at the bottom of the screen.
- Set the RSS pull mode to auto.
- Make sure Link to source is unchecked.
- Leave the Full text extractor URL field blank (CyberSEO Lite fills it in automatically).
- For now, select Disable feed duplicate control while you’re testing (you can turn it off later if you wish).
- Open a new browser tab and go to your TCN Account page. At the bottom of that page, in the Member Links section, Control-click the RSS Feed link (it will have another word or two before it, depending on your membership type) and choose Copy Link, Copy Link Location, Copy Link Address, or whatever your browser calls it.
- Now that you have your RSS feed’s URL in the clipboard, go back to the tab for your WordPress site and click CyberSEO Pro in the CyberSEO Pro sidebar menu. Paste your URL (it should look like the one below, but with your memberkey) into the New Feed URL field and click the Syndicate button.
- On the CyberSEO Pro Syndicator page that loads, you should see the full text of the first post. If you don’t, or there’s an error about content being restricted, you probably entered the wrong RSS feed URL. Scroll down to the Basic settings, of which there are many. The next few bullets will explain the important ones.
- For Check for updates every, I recommend 1440 minutes so your site only checks once per day. We update articles on the TCN site only once per month so there’s no reason to check more frequently.
- For Maximum number of posts, enter 10. In most months, we publish eight new posts, but some months have nine when there are bonus news articles.
- For Post author, choose the WordPress user on your site that you want to appear as the author of these articles.
- For Posts status, choose Save as draft. This one is important since it gives you the opportunity to edit each article, schedule them however you see fit, and remove the social media teasers from the bottom of the article for storage elsewhere.
- For Categories, select whatever local categories you want to associate with incoming posts. It would be a good idea to give them all a single unique category, should you wish to work with them as a group later on.
- For Undefined categories, choose Post to default WordPress category. Otherwise, CyberSEO Pro may create new categories for you, which might not be ideal.
- Click the Advanced tab and make sure Extract full text articles is set to Don’t extract. It’s off by default and must stay off.
- Click the Media Handling tab, where you should select the checkbox for Store images locally so images are copied from your site and not merely linked to on the TCN site, which might cause them to disappear from your posts in the future. Leave Add to the Media Library unchecked and, for Posts thumbnails, choose Generate from the image media attachment so you get the featured image correctly.
- Leave all the other settings in all these tabs at their defaults for now—you can tweak things later as long as you don’t change the ones I’ve specified above.
- At the bottom of whatever tab you’re on, click Update Feed Settings.
- You’re taken back to the main CyberSEO ProSyndicator page. Select the checkbox next to your feed, and click the Pull Selected Feeds Now button.
- CyberSEO Pro retrieves the content for your feed. Click Posts in the WordPress sidebar to see all your draft posts, and click one to make sure all the text and images are present and in the right places.
That may seem a little involved, but you have to do it only once. From now on, CyberSEO Pro will automatically retrieve new posts added to your custom TCN RSS feed and turn them into drafts on your WordPress site.
Note that CyberSEO Pro stores featured images in your Media Library but does not put other images from posts there. It stores the files locally, but only in your /wp-content/uploads directory.
I presume you know how to make a draft post public, but just as a reminder, you’ll want to cut out the social media teasers at the bottom of an article before posting. Then, after you’ve posted, you can use those teasers with the link to the article on your site, to promote it on social media.
If anything in the instructions above isn’t clear, or if you have troubles, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do to help.