How to Add a Psychology Today News (RSS) Feed to Your Therapy Website
We mentioned last week in our 6 Qualities of the Best Therapy Websites post the importance of having a blog or resources page to provide additional information and resources for your clients (and potential clients) online.
We always suggest writing your own content for your website to offer a unique perspective on your practice and also to give your clients a personal glimpse into how you think and work as a mental health professional. However, we also realize that as a private practitioner (many of you working full time at a different practice while you set up your private practice on the side), free time is scarce and sometimes that blog schedule is not so easy to maintain.
The good news is, you can still setup a resource page with regular new content even if you don’t have the time to write your own posts. We have set up RSS feeds for our clients from Psychology Today to show relevant, well-written articles on their own sites to act as a resource. Today, we’re showing you how that works.
What is an RSS feed & how can it help my Private Practice website?
An RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed is a format to deliver regularly changing website content—think new sites, blogs and online publishing. If you use any sort of online reader as a way to subscribe to a blog or a news site such as the sadly discontinued Google Reader, Digg Reader, Feedly, or Feedstop (among many, many others), you are reading those posts through an RSS reader. If you subscribe to any blogs or news sites via email, that post is also coming to you through an RSS feed.
How can I make RSS work for my site?
Not only are RSS feeds a great way to keep up to date on your favorites blogs and news sites, but you can also use them to pull content onto your own site as we mentioned above.
So, for example, let’s say you are a mental health professional who mostly provides marriage therapy or couples therapy. If one of your favorite mental health resources is Psychology Today, you might want to pull an RSS feed from Psychology Today onto your site to lists all the articles concerning relationships.
How to add a Psychology Today RSS feed to your WordPress website
- We recommend the WP RSS Aggregator plugin for this task, but there are plenty of RSS plugins out there. We utilize that plugin for all our clients.
- Find the category you would like to use from Psychology Today and add /feed to the end of the URL
Don’t panic, this is what the page is supposed to look like:
- Go to “RSS Agregator” in the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard and click “Add New”
- Add the URL of the RSS feed and decide how many posts from that feed you would like to show on your site at any given time.
- Go to the page on which you will display your RSS articles and click the RSS icon in the toolbar to implement the code.
Check out this beautiful website to see what the feeds look like from your potential clients’ perspective: http://www.michaelsessions.com/articles/
How else can I use this information?
Most websites have RSS feeds…even your own! To determine the URL of a website’s RSS, it’s often as simple as adding /feed or /rss to the end of their blog or news page. Many websites have an RSS icon (similar to the orange icon at the top of this post) that links to the correct feed.
Use this tutorial to add an RSS feed to your site from any of your favorite sources. You can also add your own RSS icon to your website so that visitors can easily find your own feed. Or you can also add your RSS feed to your newsletter so that your subscribers automatically get an email when you publish a new blog post.
If you are an existing Brighter Vision client, this is a great use of our lifetime support. Simply let us know you would like to add an RSS feed to your site and we can help you out!
What Has Your Website Done For YOU Lately?
If you’re interested in a professional presence for your practice, and want your website to bring in new clients, let us show you how we can help.
Donald Mulkerne says
Caitlin,
You’re amazing! I like all your ideas, now, can/will you make these changes/additions/modifications for me?
Perry Rosenbloom says
Hi Don,
We’d be happy to make those changes for you! In the future, you can always just submit a ticket through our support desk for promptest service. I’ll go ahead and get one created for you and our team will be in touch shortly 🙂
Best regards,
Perry