Amid all the wild hub bub that the webinar I hosted the other day caused, I wanted to let everyone know that TLW was wonderful, took all the undeserved heat and organized a great event with over 100 people showing up to find out how to import their AR content into a WordPress blog. The technical part of the webinar was over in about 20 minutes so I just spent the rest of the hour just making some general WordPress recommendations for plugins, SEO and usage and talking about some higher level new SEO techniques and how to make your social media more effective and efficient.
The most wonderful thing that came out of all this is that Bob from Active Rain messaged me and let me know they would like to sponsor the event so I can refund anyone who attended their $10. So, for all you attendees, I will be issuing refunds in the next day or so (*Google Checkout says it may take 10 days for you to see the refund). For the rest of you, I am making this publicly available.
The most wonderful thing that came out of all this is that Bob from Active Rain messaged me and let me know they would like to sponsor the event so I can refund anyone who attended their $10. So, for all you attendees, I will be issuing refunds in the next day or so (*Google Checkout says it may take 10 days for you to see the refund). For the rest of you, I am making this publicly available. A VERY SPECIAL THANKS TO TLW (for marketing this like a champ), BOB AND BRAD (for the official AR support) and NICK CAMMARATA (for organizing my life to have made this possible in under 24 hours)!
This is a hands on, highly technical, step-by-step tutorial on how to import your Active Rain blog to a WordPress Blog on your own domain at a hosting service like Godaddy or even to WordPress.com.
PREPARATION
1. Buy a domain at Godaddy you would like to use. I recommend a keyword rich domain like www.andoverrealestate.com or www.chicagocondos.com. Register the domain for MORE than 1 year.
2. Purchase economy hosting on Linux with PHP5 on Godaddy here.
3. Set up your hosting here. Godaddy will walk you through the process of setting up your hosting. Be sure to write down any passwords and user names you create and store them in a safe place on your computer.
4. An ActiveRain xml dump of your content and the rss feed of your content. This video tutorial will help you to do that.
5. You will need to use the following tools on your computer in order to be able to complete the process of migrating your content:
a. A text editor like Taco ($24.99) or Text Edit (free and comes installed) for Mac or Notepad ++ (free download at SourceForge) or Text Editor (free and comes installed) of Windows.
SETUP WORDPRESS ON GODADDY
1. Login to Godaddy
2. Click on the “Hosting” link on the left hand menu
3. Click on “Manage Account” next to the domain you want to install WordPress on.
4. Click on the “Your Applications” button
5. Click on the “Blogs” menu item on the left column
6. Click on WordPress
7. Click “Install Now”
8. This will guide you through a setup process. Be sure to write down all the usernames and passwords you create for both your database and WordPress itself. BE SURE TO INSTALL WORDPRESS TO THE ROOT DIRECTORY AND REMOVE THE /Wordpess/ folder after the domain where you want to install WP so you install to the root not a folder.
9. WordPress will take about 20 minutes to fully install
EXPORT YOUR ACTIVE RAIN BLOG ENTRIES
1. Open Firefox
2. Login to your Active Rain Blog
3. Go to My Home
4. Click “Export Blog Entries” on the left hand column menu
5. Save the file to your hard drive
6. Unzip the file by clicking it (and remember where you have saved it)
CONVERT YOUR XML FILE FROM ACTIVE RAIN TO AN RSS FEED
1. Open the xml file you downloaded to your computer in a text editor by right clicking the file and selecting your text editor (Taco, Text Edit, Notepad++, Text Editor, etc)
2. At the top of the document replace
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<blog-entries>
<version>0.1</version>
with
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<rss version=”2.0″ xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”>
<channel>
3. ADD <title>ENTER THE NAME OF YOUR BLOG HERE</title> immediately after the <channel> tag
4. ADD <language>en-us</language> immediately after the closing </title> tag
5. Find all instances of <body> with <description> and all instances of </body> with </description>
6. Find all instances of <created-on type=”datetime”> and replace with <pubDate> and all instances of </created-on>with </pubDate>
7. Find all instances of <blog-entry> and replace with <item> and all instances of </blog-entry>with </item>
8. Now, go to the bottom of the document and replace </blog-entries> with </channel></rss>
9. Now save the file
IMPORT YOUR RSS FEED OF ACTIVERAIN BLOG ENTRIES INTO YOUR WORDPRESS BLOG
Note: To make this video quick, I am just showing how an rss feed from AR can be imported. Do the same thing with the modified xml file and you will get all your posts from Ar into your WP blog.
1. Go to www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin
2. Login with the username and password you created for your wordpress blog
3. VERY IMPORTANT FROM AN SEO STANDPOINT, on the left hand menu under SETTINGS, click Permalink and select Custom Structure and paste this into the field: /%year%/%category%/%postname%/
4. Now, import your posts by clicking TOOLS in the left hand menu and then select IMPORT now select RSS and then browse to the xml file we converted to the RSS protocol and upload it. VIOLA! You’re done.
Just a few notes – your images and links may still link to your AR blog. This can be fixed over time but for now this is a good start.
If you have any questions or run into trouble, you are welcome to call me at 321-442-3872 or email me at rebloggirl@gmail.com. Sacrilicious also offers a professional conversion for $100. To begin the process, please just email us and include your Activerain content dump file (.xml), hosting login (make sure you have purchased Linux hosting with PHP5) and the domain name you want to use in your account.
Examples of AR content imported to WordPress Blogs:
Professional + semi-custom theme: Broker Bryant
DIY: Brad Andersohn
SPECIAL BONUS FOR PEOPLE WHO ATTENDED THE WEBINAR
Because the process of importing an ActiveRain blog to WordPress is really quite simple, I wanted to make sure everyone got their money’s worth, so I gave a number of basic and advanced SEO, social media and general web marketing tips to fill the hour. So, for those that attended the webinar, here are the links to the tools I recommend with brief reminders of what they are for:
1. Use www.friendfeed.com to aggregate your social media life stream and distribute it on Twitter to make it seem like you spend more time engaged in social media than you do. Bonus tip: connect your Google reader account to Friendfeed to share more relevant information and get retweeted more often.
2. Use www.radian6.com (brokerages managing multiple social accounts that want deep insights into their social media metrics including ROI and sentiment. For smaller teams, use www.hootsuite.com to manage multiple accounts.
3. If you have access to your IDX or RETS feed, invest a few dollars in a developer that can pull the live feed onto your website as real indexed content using the www.bruceclay.com content silo structure for urls for each listing. (example: url structure for a listing would look like: www.yourdomain.com/MA/reading/1-main-street-reading-ma-01867).
4. When using WordPress, be sure to install the following plugins: Askismet for spam protection, All in One SEO for adding SEO value to each post.
5. Get the best out of the box WordPress Themes for real estate at Gorilla Themes, Woo Themes or WP Zoom.
6. And, of course, include Facebook’s new Open Graph protocols to your blog!
Enjoy!
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