WordCount – Freelancing in the Digital Age

Ever since LinkedIn added a status update feature, the online business network’s members who blog – including lots of writers – have used it to let people know when they put new material online.

Now LinkedIn’s made it even easier for bloggers to flag friends and acquaintances about new posts. The networking company has partnered with leading blog software platforms WordPress and Six Apart to display LinkedIn members’ most recent blog posts directly in their LinkedIn profiles.

Adding your WordPress or SixApart blog to your LinkedIn profile is pretty simple. Go to LinkedIn’s new Application Directory page and click on the icon for the blog software you use – the WordPress icon works for WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted blogs that use WordPress.org. You’ll see a bunch of other applications on this page, I’ll talk about those in a minute. Now do the following:

1. Click on the icon to go to an application preview page for your particular blogging software. Check the boxes to have your blog appear in your profile, and on the LinkedIn homepage, and then click on “Update settings.”

2. Next you’ll see a preview page that displays what your blog posts will look like on LinkedIn. Click on the “Edit” link to choose whether to have all of your blog posts show up on LinkedIn, or only blog posts that you’ve tagged “LinkedIn.”

3. If you choose to only have blog posts tagged “LinkedIn” show up, you’ve got to make sure to go to your blog and add a “LinkedIn” tag to all those posts.

4. Once you’ve added your blog to your LinkedIn profile, fellow LinkedIn users will be able to click on the blog header to go to the blog’s homepage, or on a blog post title to go to that post.

I added WordCount to my LinkedIn profile this morning. Start to finish it took about a minute. You can see what my updated profile looks like here. You can watch a video from WordPress about the new feature here.

LinkedIn’s new blogging feature is one of several applications the network is trying in a beta test of Open Social, an open-source application programming interface, or API. Developed by Google and a bunch of development partners, Open Social makes it simpler to create software programs that work across multiple Websites. But unless you’re a software developer, the only thing you really need to know about Open Social is that because of it, you should expect to see more of these mini-programs popping up on your favorite social networks, blogs and other Websites in the future.