I recently had a conversation with a TCN trial subscriber who had a fundamental misconception about how TCN content works. Since he was posting only to Facebook and was using Buffer to schedule those posts, he thought he could put his custom RSS feed from TCN into Buffer and have it post to Facebook for him. Bzzzt!

That didn’t work because what Buffer ended up posting on Facebook were links to the original articles on the TCN site, which are accessible only to TCN members. When his readers clicked any of those Facebook posts and were redirected to the TCN site, all they saw was “This content is available only to TCN subscribers.” Not good.

His core confusion was that he was using TCN articles like any other random post on the Internet. What makes the TCN model special is that you can treat our tips and articles as though you wrote them yourself. You can edit them, change photos or screenshots, and post them on your blog under your byline. They are yours to do with as you please (within our generous terms of service, of course).

Here’s the key fact to remember: The custom RSS feed on your account page (Apple Pros Members Feed or ASMC Members Feed) is there to help you load TCN tips and articles into your blog via an aggregation service, like the free CyberSyn plug-in for WordPress-based sites. You could also use it with a standard RSS reader like Shrook to save a copy of everything locally to your Mac. Once you have the articles, post them on your site, and when you link to them in social media, point those links at the articles on your site. Got it?

Any questions, just ask me!