Using RSS for Promotion
- Previously Published in Klixxx Magazine!
So you've heard all of the great things about RSS - but you aren't quite sure what you need to do in order to take full advantage of this useful technology. This tutorial is geared toward affiliate webmasters who are interested in using RSS to promote paysites and products. You will learn what to look for in RSS feeds, typical and out of the box uses for RSS feeds, how to encourage your surfers to make use of RSS feeds, and everything else that you need to know to make RSS work for you.
Uses of Promotional RSS Feeds
Before I get into the technical implementation of RSS feeds, I want to start the brainstorming process over the ways you can use feeds to enrich your site, help to automate building, and add value to the user experience. Many of these are tried and true ideas that help to directly increase your bottom line, while others encourage your traffic to stick around, giving you more time to sell them on a membership or product.
Blogs
Blogs are the first obvious choice for implementing promotional RSS feeds from your sponsors. There are quite a few ways you can work these into a blog site. The first (and easiest) choice is to use the sponsor feed in order to populate and update the blog. It is likely, if this sponsor is one of the larger programs, that hundreds or even thousands of affiliates might be using the same feed. I'll get into the duplicate content penalty later on, but you will need to make a few tweaks on most feeds to get them unique enough for the search engines to notice you.
The best way I have found to make things simple is just to mix up three or four different sponsor RSS feeds in order to get a good mix of content. While you will still want to tweak the posts on the individual post pages, this gives you a much easier time in generating the SE traffic that you are after. Plus, if one sponsor stops updating their feeds, your blog will still get fed by updates from all of the other ones you have added in.
You can also mix in hand written posts and use the sponsor feeds to keep daily updates going. If surfers see that you have updates all the time, even if it's just from a RSS feed, they are much more likely to bookmark your site and keep coming back. I've personally seen the most growth out of putting up two posts a day (one from RSS and one hand written), but you can do whatever you are comfortable with.
If you want to take advantage of sponsor feeds but don't want to add them into your blog (possibly because of a writing style or personality that you want to keep for your surfers), you can utilize a space on your sidebar to display mini posts off to the side. There are quite a few plug-ins and scripts that allow you to integrate RSS feeds into your site without running them through a parser, which I will get into later.
Many sponsors with RSS feeds also offer hosted blogs - so if you didn't want to syndicate their content, you could just add them into your blogroll. You would be surprised at how many clicks your link trades / friends section gets, so why not work in a few sponsor blogs in order to make some money off of it?
This might seem like a lot of work at first, but once you are used to working with RSS feeds you will be able to pump out a ton of blogs. They might not all generate huge traffic at once, but all of those hits will be golden since the traffic is entirely from search engines.
TGPs / MGPs / Link Lists
Looking for a way to make your TGP or Link List a bit more appealing to those surfers who are all about Web 2.0 technology? You always have the option of adding a blog into the site and feeding it full of sponsor RSS feeds. You wouldn't have to touch it, and your modernized surfers will be rather happy.
If your scripts support RSS or XML imports, you can easily automate the entire process of gallery importing. There are a fair number of sponsors out there now offering RSS feeds for gallery and freesite imports. They consist of a short description, a link to the gallery, and the thumbnail. The way this makes everything easier is that it allows you to be completely hands off with the update process. When the sponsor adds in new galleries, the feed gets updated. Your script will check the feed for updates, and then add in the new galleries.
Even if your script can't pull data from RSS feeds, you can always make use of the gallery or blog RSS feeds in your sidebars (if you have them) or other bare sections of your site. This gives the SEs more text to spider, along with adding value for your surfers. You might be surprised how well it works.
Personally, I'd lean towards the onsite blog with sponsor feeds instead of sending them off to a sponsor hosted blog, just because it's easier to get them to come back to your site if they associate your blog with all of the hot content.
SEO / Landing Pages / Minisites
If you do any work with static landing pages, one page wonders, or all of those interesting Hub page style services out there, you will find that sponsor feeds can provide you with a nice content source. For the first two, you can use RSS integration scripts to work the feeds into the page itself, adding a nice touch of dynamic content to an otherwise static site.
For Hub page type services, you often have access to a RSS feed module. As with the static sites, this allows you to have a self-updating piece of content that will give the search engines something new to chew on every time they check back.
RSS Etiquette
If you don't want to use your sponsor feeds, but would rather pull in various feeds you find from other sites, be careful. Just because a site publishes a RSS feed doesn't mean that it is useful for any purpose. If you are intending to use a feed for commercial purposes (which includes advertising in the sidebar) and there aren't terms of use on the feeds, contact the site owner.
Another bit of common RSS etiquette is that you do not change the feeds in any way if you are going to be republishing them on your site. Adding in your own links to someone else's hard work is, in a nutshell, stealing. For someone like me that spends a hell of a lot of time writing unique, original content for my sites, this kind of thing drives me crazy. I don't have a problem with someone republishing a post (since I use partial RSS feeds anyway) and giving me a link back. I always enjoy back links. But when they decide to use my text and add in their own affiliate links along with other rather unsavory practices, it gets rather annoying.
So just use your common sense - if something doesn't seem like it would be very fair to the feed owner, then chances are it's probably not. When in doubt, just ask - it's the safest way to avoid problems down the road, as the feed owner can easily DMCA your host or registrar and cause you a lot of headaches.
This is the main reason it's much easier to stick with sponsor feeds - you can edit and alter them to better match your site, and they already have your codes in them.
What to Look for in a RSS Feed
Not all RSS feeds are created equal. Since using sponsor hosted feeds for blogs is a relatively new type of promo tool, not all of them have things down exactly right. Most of them look more like gallery RSS feeds, which is great for all of the TGP owners, but not so great if you're going for an automated RSS fed blog empire.
This is probably the part that requires the most work - sorting through all of the RSS feeds in order to find the best ones is a pain in the butt. Here's a quick list of what sets the great RSS feeds apart from the rest. This is for blog RSS feeds only, as for gallery RSS feeds all you need is the URL, the description, and the thumb.
The Blog RSS Feed Checklist
A keyword rich or descriptive title - You want to have something enticing for the search engines, and since most blog software puts the title in H1 tags that will be one of the most important things that the spiders will pick up on.
Pictures - The formatting of a picture is something that everyone can agree to disagree on. Most bloggers that I have dealt with enjoy one larger thumb linked to either a gallery or the tour (of course, you can change the linking yourself to the type that you would like). Either way, make sure there is something to keep the post looking pretty.
The text - You will want to look for feeds that have a nice balance between the picture size and the text. A line or two of text is more suited to a gallery description - you want to aim for 50-200+ words for the ideal sponsor blog post so that you have plenty of text for the surfers and spiders to enjoy. You also want to go for text that is sexy, enticing, and really drives the surfers to buy. Don't go for horrible outsourced posts - it's easy to tell those a mile away.
Minimal formatting - Some sponsors go really overboard with coding their posts. I really hate having to take out tables, breaks, and all sorts of other formatting because they decided to completely control the look of the post. The most I go for are posts with paragraph tags in them - anything else has the potential to screw up the blog severely. For example, one RSS fed blog of mine had a sponsor that decided to put text formatting into the post, and then neglected to end the format tags. So now I have a blog full of 5 pt font that is impossible to read. That was a major pain to deal with.
Links within the text - Many sponsors, used to gallery style RSS feeds, only put a link within the title of the post. The problem with this is Wordpress and other common blogging software will always make the title of the post the permalink. If the sponsors do not link the image or other phrases in the text, then there is no way you can make sales with the RSS feed.
Implementing RSS Feeds
Now that you know what RSS feeds can do for you, here are a number of scripts and plugins that you can use to add RSS feeds into your site. Some of these I have used personally, while others come highly recommended from clients and colleagues.
Wordpress Plugins:
- Feedwordpress (LINK) is probably the most well known among free Wordpress plugins. This is a very basic RSS parser, allowing you to syndicate feeds from multiple sites into your blog. You can set posts to certain categories, bring them in as published or unpublished posts, as well as several other features.
- WP-o-Matic (LINK): I have tried this feed, but ran into some issues, so I do not have much first hand experience with it. However, I have had people recommend it that use it extensively on their sites, so I felt it deserved a listing here. In addition to having the same features as Feedwordpress, it also offers relinking and rewriting (which I will get into in the next section).
Scripts:
- RSS Feed Reader (LINK) is a free php based script which allows you to add in SE friendly RSS feeds to any type of site. This works well for integrating RSS into TGPs and other sites that don't typically have the ability to use a RSS parser.
- Magpie RSS (LINK) is for those of you with a programming bent who would prefer a more flexible script to display RSS feeds on your site. This is also a RSS parser.
- RSS to Javascript (LINK) allows you to display RSS feeds on your site with a bit of javascript.
- BlinkBits (LINK) offers a similar tool.
- Autoblogger Pro Standalone (LINK) is a paid script, but it is a very robust RSS parser and traffic generation script. It offers rewriting and relinking, as well as a plethora of other features that make it one of the most talked about script that bloggers use. I won't go into all of the features here, but if you are intending on making extensive use of RSS feeds for a blog network, this is definitely a script you want to check out.
Services:
- RSS 2 Anywhere (LINK) is a freehosted feed parsing script that allows you to post out to Thumblogger, Blogger, Wordpress, and any blogging software that works with the blogger api. They have rewriting features as well as a user friendly set-up.
Avoiding the Duplicate Content Demon
There is a very large debate going on about duplicate content in Google, and whether there is an actual penalty for it. Without going into the point and counterpoint of the entire debate, let's just say that you would be far better off with having as much unique content as possible. This will set you apart from people that use unaltered sponsor feeds, and will help you to get much more SE traffic instead of getting ranked in the 100s because you are an exact mirror of other affiliate sites. Do not believe someone that tries to tell you that you will be banned for duplicate content. Given the number of spammers flooding the search engines, if they could get sites banned by taking their content don't you think they would be all over that? Banning is just a Google myth, although you can have pages end up in the supplemental index. The supplemental index is one that doesn't get used by Google for many searches - so you want to avoid getting pages into there whenever possible. If you do have posts end up in the supps, just change a few things around to make it unique text or add additional back links directly to the page.
The first way you can do the feed editing is hands on - just have the scripts pull in sponsor RSS as drafts and edit it yourself. You could add a few sentences here and there, switch up some phrases, and, most important of all, change the title on the post. However, if you are looking to add a ton of traffic generating RSS fed blogs into your network, you don't have the time to do everything by hand.
That is where relinking and rewriting (sometimes known as content morphing) come in. Several of the scripts and plug-ins listed above can actually alter the RSS feed as it comes through, both by linking certain keywords to certain URLs and by altering the text itself with synonyms and related phrases. Both of these help to add unique content to your site, increasing your chances for good keyword positions in the search engines. Some sponsors are starting to use scripts and services that will deliver a different post to every affiliate, but these are few and far between at this point. If you want to keep it original, you will need to set up a script to handle it or do it by hand.
Now that you have all sorts of ideas on how to use RSS, as well as everything you need to add it to your site, what are you waiting for? Get out there and build your empire!
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