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 I love my RSS reader. I have a
gazillion website, blog and news feeds set up in there,
and I get the latest information from all of my favorite
sites. That means I can be one of the first to share it
with you. And RSS Reader 1.0 has a doorbell sound effect
that rings when there are new feed entries to read. So
wherever I am in the house I hear it and take a look. I
also get the additional bonus of six barking dogs to
announce the new feed entries.
As an aside, I noticed something very interesting. Because
of my RSS reader I was one of the first to cover
adsenseblacklist.com, a terrific new web site that will
help you screen out the cheesy AdSense ads. Because I was
on it first, I popped up in the first five Google search
results for this keyword for a while, which drove traffic
to this site. So watch your RSS reader.
All that being said, we are beginning to see RSS used as
auto update feature for websites and blogs. The first
application was RSS feeds that automatically update your
site with articles in your subject area from a free
article site. The rationale is that this will give you
fresh content that search engines will eat right up. They
call it spiderfood. I call it a dumb idea. Have you read
some of these articles? There’s a wide disparity in
quality from one to another, and I would never allow
articles to be put blindly on my web site without my
approval. For crying out loud…you spend hours and hours
of time getting your site to a certain level of quality to
build a certain level of trust with your visitors, and
then you’re going to allow some hack to put his content
on your site without your approval, just so maybe a search
engine will come a few extra times? That’s just stupid.
Need more content? Turn off the football game and write
some.
Seriously…if you want to use articles as supplemental
content, hand pick them. Just like famous Internet
marketer Willie Crawford did on his blog when he picked my
article Chitika - What Went Wrong (a little humor there).
I have at least 20 - 30 articles in an Outlook Folder that
I’m going to post on the site as soon as a I get a
chance. That’s the good news — the bad news is I went
through 500 or so articles to get those.
 Closer to home, affiliate merchants
are starting to get into data feeds, which are sort of
like file-based RSS feeds. Datafeeds provide direct access
to merchant products using text files. The file contains a
list of products, services, special offers, coupons or
other information that you can display on your site. You
then upload that information to your server and use some
kind of tool or script to display the different items in
that file. There are programs on CJ, LinkShare and
Shareasale that have data feeds.
While others are absolutely gaga over this, I look at it
with the same jaundiced eye as the whole article thing —
it all depends on your niche, the level of trust you want
to maintain with your customer, and how technical you want
to get.
If you have a niche that has a well-matched affiliate
program, you might try a product feed. If you want to put
up an occasional coupon or special offer, you can probably
do it by hand rather than going through all of this mumbo
jumbo.
We are starting to see products that convert merchant data
feeds to RSS, allowing you to auto-display products from
affiliate programs. Again, if you can maintain relevance
across the entire affiliate line, it’s a good idea. If
not, you’re not going to get conversion anyway, so
you’re wasting your time. Personally I want everything
including the advertising, to have relevance to my
visitors.
There’s always a shortcut — in this case you’re
shortcutting the time and effort involved in finding
relevant offers for your visitors. That may work with some
sites.
If you want to know more or give it a shot, here are some
resources:
1. FiveStarAffiliatePrograms - They love the idea, but I
think they’re plugging their own tool.
2. Smartsville has a nice synopsis. Oh…they also have a
tool.
One last thing — while I was out looking for links and
information, this is what someone said about using data
feeds:
Soon, I will let you know how I put this all on autopilot
and never have to think about the blog again after I spend
a few hours setting it up!
How do you think that blog is doing?
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