How To Promote Your Content: Getting More Out of Zimbio

Under "My Articles" select "My Settings" and take a look at the feeds you've submitted. Check to make sure the right URLs are listed.

From here, if you select "Change Settings" you can enable or disable Automatic Blog Promotion.

For most things, you can probably leave Automatic Blog Promotion enabled, but if you find problems like I did with my submissions from Squidoo, you may want to disable it, and submit your posts by hand.

I had re-written my Lens on Tony Levin and decided to compare it with what had already been posted to Zimbio months before when I first published it.

This post still hadn't been posted to a Wikizine, so I had to find it in my Article Queue. I made a note that it was on page 12. Previously I learned that when I finish editing an article in my Queue, I'll have to find it again, if I want to go back into the edit mode.

There was barely anything here, not even enough for a teaser.

Comparing that with a blog post I had published to announce the Lens shows that Zimbio will use the picture from some sources, but for whatever reason it didn't use the picture from Squidoo. I'm also not too happy with all the white space to the right.

It's pretty clear that you can't rely on the auto posting feature for some things, and you may need to post them manually.

If you do have articles sitting in your Queue and you want to make sure they have a new date on them when you post them to a Wikizine, don't just edit the existing article. Copy the content, then click on "Write an Article" and either paste your content to the editor, or import the post over from the original source.

If you just edit the article sitting in your Queue, it will retain its original date.

The first thing I wanted to do was to upload my intro picture. Just clicking on "Add a Picture" brings up the "Add Picture" dialog box.

After adding a picture, another box pops up that allows you to change the location of the picture. Since I wanted to keep it similar to my intro on Squidoo, I changed the size from full to medium and selected the left placement orientation which automatically nestled the picture in the text eliminating that large white space I didn't like.

I didn't need to add a link because where it says, "from Squidoo" at the beginning of the finished article, "Squidoo" links to my Lens, but I want to make it clearer.

I selected the text, "Tony Levin" right at the beginning...

...clicked on the chain link symbol on the toolbar...

...which calls up the "Add/Edit Link" dialog box.

This box is pretty self explanatory, the two things I mostly concern myself with is adding the correct URL and a title.

When you add something to the title line, it will pop up in a little balloon when a reader hoovers their mouse pointer over the link text. I like to make sure my links have titles because I feel it helps the reader to know for sure that it is a link they can click.

I wasn't happy with the amount of text that had been pulled from the RSS feed and posted to my article, so I decided to just copy and paste my new intro text.

One drawback was that I had copied a text link ad. I may not have opted out of them for my Lens, but I certainly didn't intend to spread someone else's ads around the Internet!

Luckily breaking the link is easy enough, I just highlighted the text that had the add on it, which was green and double underlined, and clicked the broken chain link button on Zimbio's editing toolbar.

That still left me with green, double underlined text, which I deleted, back arrowed to the previous text, and re-typed. Other editors allow you to enter into the HTML and edit it directly, I don't see a way to do it on Zimbio, but I would only do that if I couldn't break the formatting.

I could have also tried reloading the Lens on Squidoo, but sometimes that just changes which words are highlighted, and they may still be in the intro.

After I've finished editing my article, I can go back and look for a Wikizine to post to. Zimbio will give me three choices, a list of suggestions, a list of Wikizines I have posted to before and a search box to look for more places to post to.

When finished, you can take a look at your handiwork!

The way Zimbio works, it actually duplicates your content. I personally have no problem with it, but if you are worried about being penalized by the search engines for having duplicate content, just do a bit of rewriting.

How To Promote Your Content:
Getting More Out Zimbio
by CleanerLife
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License.