Having an online presence is like having bookshelves.

You don’t want to mix your personal journal with your business newspapers, neither your family photo albums with your company brochures. So how do you tidy everything up?

Firstly you need to have clearly in your mind what is personal and what is for business purposes. This can be hard depending on your profession but that should the easiest part – after all you alone know what your are trying to achieve. This will determine what message you would like to spread and to whom.

Once this is clear, the best approach is to merge your efforts by focusing on crucial websites which will feed others.

You probably know that some people visit your website, some people have a look at your Facebook pages, follow you on Twitter, or comment on your blog etc. Your visitors have so many ways to get in touch with you that the challenge for you is to get your message out there, to all of them, at the same time and with a minimum effort.

So how do you do that? Social Networks, RSS feed and embedding are the keys. Let me explain you with concrete examples and tools how to tidy up your online social life…read full article

Those tips can be applied to your website if you have basic knowledge in HTML, otherwise you can also use most of those quick steps for your blog.

So where do you start?

- Twitter: If you don’t already have an account with Twitter, I’ll encourage you to do it. I was myself a bit sceptical about it, thinking how can I have possibly the time to tell others about small details which you think nobody will care, but I was wrong. Twitter can also be used to feed content to your website or blog thanks to badges, which you can get directly from them. Badges is a piece of code that you can copy and embed on your site, which allows you to display in real time your latest tweets.

Those little message of 151 characters can be very useful to send updates to your followers, whether it’s promotional message, status update, day to day thoughts, possibilities are unlimited. This little badge will act your “What’s on” board, which you can display on your homepage, or news page.

Tips: Update your Facebook status through the specific Twitter app and save precious time

- Flickr: “A picture is worth a thousand words”, so why not having 200 for free? 200 pictures is what you can upload and share from the Free Flickr Account. You can upgrade anytime later on to their “pro” account which gives you unlimited upload.

So how can we use Flickr for our website? Well, this Yahoo! service, will be your images library, you can organise them, name them, even Geo-tag them so you could later on display a world map of where your pictures have been taken thanks to Trippermap.

Once you’ve organised your pictures, you can find on the web an arsenal of tools to display your galleries. One of my favourite is http://www.tinou.com/coverflow.jsp which give you chance to have a nice iTunes style gallery. Another good one, ready to embed is http://flickrslidr.com.

- YouTube and the like: If a picture is worth a thousand words, can you imagine how many a video is worth? By Creating a channel on YouTube, you can upload anything, technical videos, tutorials, office tour etc…Then once uploaded, you can display them through a badge like twitter thanks to this website: http://flashandburn.net/youtubeBadge/

YouTube, owned by Google, is the biggest and most popular, however you’ll find on the web a pleiad of video sharing sites.

The aim is to achieve a website that you’ll build once and for good, without having to go back to the code time and time again, as everything will be updated from external sites interface. It’s a way to use CMS (Content Management System) functionalities without having to spend a penny.

Now that you have a badge for your latest news, your photo gallery is embedded and your latest videos displayed, you’re going to tell me: what about the content?

- Using RSS feeds is the best way to make your life easier, in order not having to update your HTML page, then re-upload and overwrite all the time, which can be very time consuming. So my advice it to get yourself a blog (thanks to Worpress or Blogger for instance), which will be your platform to write contents in no time.

Once your content is written, you could go to http://rssfeedreader.com (sign up for free) and specify the RSS feed of your blog. Rssfeedreader.com allows you to customise how you would like to display your posts. It will generate a JavaScript or PHP code so you can copy and paste it. (Don’t forget to name your page “.php” if you use the php code).

- .tel domain name: This new generation domain name allows you to update all your contact details from one place. .tel already has a lot of application making your mobile user’s life much easier (for iPhone and Blackberry’s users), but more recently, Telnic released a new functionality making possible to embed your .tel details in your website. That means having your contact details up to date at all the time, and again without having to touch HTML code!

And here we are, you now have a website which will be constantly up to date thanks to the Web 2.0 technologies. Feel free to leave comments and share your experiences so we can enhance this guide!

http://easily.co.uk/blog/2009/05/how-to-use-social-networks-to-update-your-website-part2/