Find Yourself: Search Flipboard to Add Content to Your Magazines

Digital publishing is about putting your content where your readers are. That sounds straightforward, but it’s not so simple, because lots of readers are now on lots of different channels — blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and more. That’s why, for bloggers and content publishers, it’s handy that Flipboard magazines let you combine content from all your current social platforms, all in one place. But if you want to add your own content to your Flipboard magazines, you must first find yourself.

Happily, that doesn’t require an awkward journey of personal exploration. Instead, all you have to do is use Flipboard’s search tool to add your content to your Flipboard. Here’s how you do it:

Do a Vanity Search
Say hello to Flipboard’s search box. On smartphones, tap the red ribbon on the Flipboard home screen to reveal the search box located at the top of the Content Guide.  On tablet devices, the search box is on the top right of the screen. Search for your content by typing the name of your blog, or your social network usernames, or a hashtag you use.

Check Your Sources
Here’s an important thing to remember: Flipboard search gathers results from across the social web and organizes them by source — Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Flickr, RSS, etc. — so scroll down to find your own content feeds from the sources you seek.

For example, I publish a WordPress blog called Bernalwood. I also tweet as @Bernalwood, administer a Bernalwood Flickr Group, and manage a Bernalwood Page on Facebook. When I search for “Bernalwood” in Flipboard, all those options appear as search results, as you can see in the image above.

Try The Back Doors
Don’t worry if a basic search doesn’t locate your blog’s RSS; There are other ways to access your blog content.

First, try typing the complete URL for the blog’s RSS feed into the Flipboard search box to search for it directly. Be sure to include the “http://” part at the start of the link, just like in a browser. To search for my blog’s RSS feed, for example, I type “http://bernalwood.wordpress.com/feed/” into the Flipboard search field.

Even easier: If you regularly share your blog or website content via Twitter, use that to bring your site content into Flipboard. Just search for your Twitter @username, add it as a feed, then use Twitter to deliver your web content on Flipboard.

You, The Magazine
Once you find your content in Flipboard’s search results, tap to open your preferred feed, then tap the Subscribe ribbon at the top of the feed section to add it to your Flipboard. Once that’s done, it’s very quick and very easy to curate your own content in a Flipboard magazine.  Just open the section for your own feed and flip your content into your magazine via the [+] button.

All set? Happy publishing!