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I’m adding a new category to Blackhatdigest – it’s all about RSS feeds. Marketing with them, using them, scraping them, abusing them, and of course loving them.
I’d love for you to tell me what you know about rss marketing so I can make sure I stay on your level…. I get pretty complex with my stuff with rss feeds and I don’t want to confuse you.
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Obviously, I scrape them for content and blend them with other feeds in an aggregation sort of site. So, inbound as a source for content.
I also make RSS feeds for sites that aren’t really “blog” or “article” sites – like a fishing lure site where the RSS feed shows the “most recently added” lures. Partly for hope that someone else will steal it for content. So, outbound as a source for backlinks.
I’ve used a few RSS feeds more “behind the scene” as a mechanism for telling me that some process happened (“yesterday: updated dvd site, 10 updates…previously, updated dvd site, 12 updates”) but I’m moving away from that and using twitter DMs.
I’ve used rss-to-email and rss-to-twitter scraping/posting scripts.
Excited to hear what you think would confuse me.
Oh, I intended to mention. Almost everything these days has a RSS feed. Google searches? Rss feed. Icerocket search? Rss feed. Craigslist? Yup, RSS feed. There’s a couple of sites I’d like to put into a RSS feed that don’t have one but I’m happy hitting their site.
@sparky – a lot of our readers are still learning. I do things pretty close to you – but probably on a larger scale since I’ve been gathering rss data for almost 5 years. Got a couple servers just filled with rss items.
Not too much here…had a custom wordpress spinner built and I scraped and spun content. Didn’t see much profit from the time and money investment so i gave it up.
Hi Ed
I havent a clue about RSS & how to use it so look forward to learning some.
Brian
I know that RSS feeds are important to promoting one’s website.
However, it does not seem as if people take enough trouble to explain the process that is understandable by people new to the business.
I think that there is a real need to explain the processes to understanding RSS feeds, making them and using them effectively, without a whole lot of hypey promotion of the latest piece of software
Mostly using it to post to rss aggregators for backlinks.
what are your top 3 techniques you use to “abuse” rss? I don’t know much beyond the bascis (creating them, submitting them, scraping them).
Ed,
Don’t know much about using RSS as a tool.
Whenever I create a blog, I submit my feed to a bunch of feed directories, but that’s about it.
John
I am using RSS Feeds to blend or Mix Muliple sites into one feed and submitting that Feed into the directories to help get indexed and for backlinks.
Using free and paid for software to make feeds and to submit into a large number of directories.
Learning how to better use Dapper, DapperFox and Pipes to blend the various RSS Feeds.
No clue.
I would like to know how to set one up on my site. I don’t know that much about scripts, or how to install them.
I would like to know all the possibilities of RSS on a neophyte level. If that’s possible lol.
Same as the basics of the guys above, I use RSS scrapers to generate content for my site. (Go craiglist!).
My biggest issue has been not crashing my shared host. I was doing really well until that happened
It’s been a year and a half since I’ve really focused on it again, as I I’m not sure how to get around it.
After that, my next challenge I’d like to hit is how to mix multiple feeds to make more unique content, and doing the finds and replace well enough so I can integrate affiliate feeds with regular feeds and get the tracking etc. done properly.
Like many, I know what RSS is but not how to use and abuse it. I just bought RSSBot on the cheap so that will be my first delve into it.
O.K. kids – give me about a day and I’ll have a few guides up and how to use it a little smarter.
A number of you are right on the money with mixing, changing, and pushing links to your sites with it.
Now I’d say you need the tools to do it more than anything – manually messing with rss feeds is a pain in the rear.
I was futzing around with my feedburner feeds and found out that they have a mechanism for running the feed right to twitter. So that’s one more piece I don’t need to worry about (running my feed to twitter via twitterfeed.com ). Assuming you don’t mind google poking at your feed (through feedburner) and connecting your dots (some people might want to keep their stuff a little more discrete.)
I have (with some success, and also the flipside, with little success) used RSS in the past. Much of that with a competitor’s products… but when the support goes south, and you run into problems… well, I put things aside. I’ve done a lot of study into RSS and delivering content, and I am anxious to get a truly GREAT pathway towards doing just that. Am anxious to see what you have up your BH or even shades of grey sleeve!
I am like several others who have posted their comments…
I know about RSS Marketing and have read quite a bit about it.
However; I am not sure how to set it up on my site nor how to use it as an effective Marketing tool. I’m very interested in learning more about this, and am looking forward to your posts on this subject.
I use RSS to get some automatic content blending 3 or 4 of them.Also use my RSS to get suscribers and links to my site using web 2.0 RSS.
I would like to know well if :
Using a combination of RSS and an HTML page it will be really possible to automate the 99% of one blog?I mean f.e your display RSS script works on sites not woordpress blogs.So i imagined to use the script on a page and then get the content to be posted on a blog.Do you think it is possible or maybe you have a good idea on how to post directly to my blog the rss blended results?
Keep up the good work Ed!
Paul
I’ve known about RSS for a while, but really don’t know how to use RSS at all to set up “pretty” or “technically correct” feeds on my sites or use it in marketing. I know that every wordpress blog has an RSS feed built in, that you can add them easily to your websites in XSitePro2, and that you can find keyword rich content to share via RSS from other blogs.
Am I understanding it correctly? I want to learn the right way to do this so I can be sure that I’m not stealing copyrighted content to show up on my sites, but sharing related content with proper mention of the author. Is there a best practice in all of this?
Best,
Mary
I’m completely in the dark. I had no idea it was such a big deal.
I use RSS for a lot of things. Here are a few:
- to collect relevant info in aggregators
- to collect blog postings with my keywords
- to send out tweets relevant to my niche
- to build yahoo pipes to do all sorts of things
- to bookmark blog posts
I love RSS. It is the way of the future. I would love to hear more from you Ed.
Thanks for all the great content you provide.
I use rss feeds to add some different views to my blog other than my own auto-posted PLR content.
All of my blogs get spidered regularly, but this doesn’t bring the traffic I would like to see. (Keyword research needs to be improved I think.)
On these blogs I use a stats plugin that instantly lets me see the number of visitors, pageviews, spiders and feeds.
The feeds numbers are interesting – I have no idea what this actually means – I hope these are valuable as some of them are in the 1,000′s. Any help as to whether I can do anything with these to make myself some money would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Phill
I feel I’m still in the dark, at least mostly, when it comes to the best use of RSS feeds. I know I can use them to bring content to my sites, but not sure about the “mashing” and how to use them to gain backlinks. This is where things get fuzzy for me. So much of what I read about RSS assumes I know a whole lot more than I do so I still end up feeling confused without a clear path of what I should be doing to make the most of it for my sites.
Any clarifications and step by step help will be greatly appreciated!
I know about rss on blogs but how do you get rss xml links for HTML and PHP based websites?
Do websites that have rss feeds offer the same link promotion as blogs?
I need to know more about rss So I will check here more often.
Thanks
I use rss feeds for content filler on some sites. Had a scraper site that I used for Adsense income.
I’ve also been playing around with yahoo pipes. It’s great for creating your own rss feeds!
Looking forward to see what you have to offer Ed!
-Mark
Keep em coming. I’m about to give you guys my favorite tool for rss management and a number of posts and guides.
Well boys and girls………
Thanks for all the comments. Guides are on the way — but I’ve got a goodie for you as well.
For all your comments I’ve decided to give you rss rebound for free. It’s at rssrebound.com
No clue how long I’ll leave it like that. It’s been selling regularly for 37 to 147 for years.
I’ve got a pretty long rss guide in the works… need to clean it up a bit over the next day or so and then I’ll post it.
Don’t stop commenting though. Ideas are great – and I learn things sometimes.
Have played around with RSS for years and initially the RSS pages got indexed and appeared in the serps quite quickly, however i havnt seen that happen in a long time so haven’t bothered recently.
OK, I just went over to rssrebound.com and my eyes glazed over in the first paragraph. I’m afraid this is probably not for me.
Thanks anyway Ed
@jimmy
That’s just my poor copy writing
It’s a pretty easy script for you to use and installations pretty easy as well.
Give it a go – or hang tight a day or so until I get the how to market with rss guides up and maybe some lightbulbs will go off.
I have a very BASIC understanding of what RSS is… but very little knowledge of how to take advantage of it for a website.
I now have 132 websites that simply parse rss feeds, store the results in a mysql database, use a cron job to do this once a day.. and then display those updated results on my sites. I make my entire living off of AdSense using this method (and it’s a pretty fat monthly check). The trick is finding the right ‘niche sites’ that allow you to combine rss feeds in a manner that the site itself doesnt present. In this way, you have unique content, that’s not available anywhere else. RSS is the best.