Using RSS Feeds for Blog Content
Learn how to use RSS feeds to build up an automated blog network
By Tiffany Garden, October 2008 | Klixxx Webmaster Magazine
So, you're starting your blog empire, but you just realized that means a heck of a lot of writing. Now many people do end up outsourcing their daily updates and just take care of things on the backend, but for those of you that would rather do everything yourself, there is a simple and elegant solution to filling up your blogs with plenty of content - RSS feeds.
RSS is a protocal that stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, but this article isn't going to get into the nuts and bolts of how RSS works. Instead, this one is going to cover exactly where to find great RSS feeds to use as search engine fodder.
There are a few things that really make or break a RSS feed. If you aren't going to be doing any of your own updates, finding ones with consistent updates is very important. Some sponsors are really on the ball with this, but the vast majority of them keep it going for awhile and then get bored. This is probably because getting blog traffic is a long term type of strategy, and it can take some time to see a return on investment.
The next thing you want to look for is well written text that is long enough to keep the search engines happy. Some RSS feeds are literally nothing more than glorified gallery descriptions - you get one short line with a crappy thumb and that's about it. Now, it's possible that you have accidentally stumbled onto the actual gallery RSS, but chances are the sponsor doesn't really know what blog feeds require.
The longer the better, usually, but in general you are looking for 50-100 words. The last thing you want to look for are eye catching thumbs. Your text will get the visitors there via the search engines, but good pictures will keep them there and clicking though to your sponsors.
There are so many different RSS parsers that it would be impossible to cover them all, both free and paid. If you're using Wordpress there is a world full of plugins that you can try out - the one I personally have used is Feed Wordpress. There are stand alone scripts and hosted scripts and any other type of script you can think of - the main thing to do is just try them out and see which one works for you. The best kind have some sort of rewriting function so that you can swap out enough words to make the feed post unique to your blog. That way, you can actually get ranked instead of competing with everyone else that is using that feed. Now you just sit back and let the script handle it.
If you're in a smaller niche that either doesn't have RSS feeds at all, or they are just crappy ones, there is another solution - you can make your own. Now there are two scripts that I know of offhand for this - one free and hosted, the other paid. The one I use most often is the paid script called Gallery Scraper. This allows you to input a list of hosted galleries, it generates the screenshots for you, and then you just put in the text. You do need an RSS parser for the actual feeds, but the amount of time saved by these pre setup galleries is just mind blowing.
The other script that will do this is Gallery2Blog (http://www.adultblogresource.com/gallery2blog/). It is not quite as elegant as Gallery Scraper, but it is free and hosted elsewhere. Like Gallery Scraper, it will generate the screenshots for you from a list of hosted galleries, and all you need to do is put in the text. This one also requires a separate RSS parser.
Although high quality handwritten blogs do very well, it is very hard to build up a huge network of those. The time and/or money sink is just gigantic, and sometimes you don't have much luck with a particular niche. So making a combination network of both handwritten and RSS fed blogs is one way to really build yourself up without much of an outlay. With theRSS automated, you'll have plenty of traffic generation to feed your handwritten blogs, along with income coming in from these.
Whether or not you want to actively promote your RSS blogs is up to you - the thing that I did was just make niche directories that I could dump all of my RSS blogs into. I did make my handwritten ones prominent in these directories, but the hubs like this also make it easy to keep track of just how many blogs you have per niche.
So whether you're a diehard blogger looking for ways to expand your network painlessly, or you're a blog newbie looking for some advice, hopefully you have found plenty of useful tips and ideas! Now get to blogging.
