ASK AN AMBASSADOR: How To Import Your Active Rain Posts To Wordpress

ASK AN AMBASSADOR:  How To Import Your Active Rain Posts To Wordpress

If you follow the path of many Active Rainers, you start off blogging here, and at some point you start a Wordpress website.  And for some people, they see the two as mutually exclusive, you either do one OR the other, and not necessarily both.

Personally, I see Active Rain blogging and our Wordpress site serving similar, but different purposes.  For me, Active Rain is heavily about the community experience, the sharing of learning, having fun, sending referrals.  Wordpress is more for the pure consumer prospecting with customized IDX searches and neighborhood detail.  More evergreen content that will keep on working for us for years.

But there is overlap, some Active Rain blog posts are perfectly suitable for use on Wordpress too (although we recommend enough editing that Google doesn't see you as pure copy/paste...but another reason to get your Google Authorship established!!).

So how do you get your Active Rain posts over to your Wordpress site?  It's actually fairly easy (depending on your tech proficiency).

First of all, Active Rain makes it easy to Export your blog posts (frankly we'd recommend exporting periodically even if you DON'T have a Wordpress site just in case the granddaddy of all gremlins hits the AR servers).

Go to My Home on Active Rain, then on the left sidebar, click Other, then click "Export Blog Entries"

That will bring up a pop up window, click Save file.  That will download the .xml file you need, but as a ZIP file.  Before taking it to Wordpress, you'll need to unzip the file and save the .xml file so you can retrieve it.

Depending on your needs, you can stop right here.  ALL your Active Rain posts (including the drafts) are backed up in this .xml file.

If you want to take them into your Wordpress site, there's a little prep work to do.  Jeff Turner of Zeek Interactive had his team create an Active Rain Blog Importer plugin for Wordpress.  Click the link, save the file from the pop up box and then install the plugin on your Wordpress site. 

So now you've got your XML file saved, you've got the AR Importer plugin installed on your WP site, it's time to Import your AR blog posts. 

From your Wordpress Dashboard, go to Tools, then Import.  Once you click Import, you'll see a selection of tools. 

Click the Active Rain Import Plugin to get to:

Select Browse and Path to your saved XML file.  Click Upload and Import. 

Next you'll see:

Change to DRAFT!!  I say again, CHANGE TO DRAFT!!!!  If you don't, every Members Only post, and your actual Drafts will be out there for the world to see, and I'm betting that's NOT what you want.  Then click SUBMIT.

You can watch post after post quickly load up until you see:

And don't worry, if you've done this before the plugin recognizes posts you've ALREADY uploaded.

Once the Import is done, you can go to your Posts tab on your Wordpress site and see:

So all your AR posts are now Draft in Wordpress.  Take a look at them, we're not guaranteeing a complete pull of all pictures and graphics, or that the font will always stay exactly the same (ours didn't!), but your content is there and you can pretty quickly bring a draft up, freshen it up, click Publish and there you go!

Just a reminder, MAKE SURE YOU UNZIP YOUR XML FILE INITIALLY BECAUSE IF YOU TRY TO UPLOAD THE ZIPPED VERSION YOU WILL GET ERROR MESSAGES!!!

Keep on Blogging,

Liz and Bill aka BLiz