Customizing Sponsor RSS Feeds For Your Blogs
With blogs becoming more and more popular many sponsors are now offering their affiliates RSS feeds that they can use to automate posting to their blogs. This both good and bad. The good is that is automates everything and once you have it up and running your blog will update and run on its own without any help from you. The bad is that most RSS feeds from sponsors suck and if you just use those feeds as they are you can get hit with duplicate content penalties from Google. This article will show you a simple way to import the feeds and use the pics and videos from the feeds, but customize them and make them original, unique content for your site.
MOST RSS SUCKS
Some sponsors might not be very happy about me saying this, but it is true. Most sponsor’s RSS feeds are made up of posts that are simply a picture or two and a sentence with a link to the site. It’s pretty lame. Even when the RSS feeds are good and the posts are nice, look good and have a lot of nice text in them, you are still sharing them with potentially hundreds if not thousands of other blogs so you can get hit with the duplicate content penalty.
A brief word about duplicate content: Basically Google has said that content is king and original, unique content is the best thing a website can have on it to help the rankings. Search engines love blogs because they have some nice plug-ins that make SEO easier, they are easy to spider and people that run blogs tend to update them regularly. If you run a blog with unique posts and I run a blog with nothing but RSS feeds and we are both competing for the same keywords, chances are you are going to get much better rankings. If my blog has the same RSS feeds on it that hundreds of other blogs have Google is very likely to just ignore me and not rank me well at all because they will see that my site has nothing new or different to offer visitors.
Getting back to RSS that sucks, most sponsors’ RSS have crappy, non-seo friendly titles, little or no text and are just boring. Our job is to take them and turn them into nice, original and unique content for our blogs. Using these RSS feeds can save you a lot of time because they will already have pics and links codes in them so you don’t have to go searching for these and spend time uploading and linking to images.
IMPORT THE RSS
There are several ways to import RSS feeds into Wordpress. We want to edit the posts once they are imported so here is the easiest way to do it.
Step 1. Pick the RSS feed you want to import then copy and past the url into your browser. Once the feed has fully loaded view the source of it, copy all of the source code and paste it into notepad then save it as a .TXT file. Name it whatever you want, like rssimport.txt.
Step 2. Log into Wordpress and click on the “manage” tab. From the manage menu select “import”. Here you will see a variety of different options. You want to select “wordpress” from the list. You will be asked to find the file you want to import from. Just hit browse and locate the .TXT file you created from the RSS code and hit the import button.
Step 3. Depending on how they have the feeds setup you may be taken to a screen that wants to you to create users or assign the posts to users. Whatever username you use to log into your blogs is what you want to assign them to. There will be a pull down menu that will give you a list of all the users you have for your blog. If you are the only one that writes posts, there will only be one option here. Select your username and hit the OK button and it will import the feeds and assign them to you so you can edit them. All of the posts from the feeds will be saved as drafts. If you click Manage then Posts you will see all of the posts from that feed listed here at the top of the page as drafts.
CUSTOMIZE IT
Now that you have all of your posts imported you are ready to customize and use them. All you have to do is click on any of the drafts listed and it will load in the box where you normally write posts. From here you can edit it any way you want.
Customizing a post means several things. I like to have a uniform look to all of my posts so I would change the locations of the pictures so they are in the same place on every post then I add my text above or below the pictures (sometimes both). I like to write text that tells a little story about what is happening in the picture. You want to draw the visitor in and entice them to click the pics and the links. Use keyword rich text, but don’t over do it.
You don’t have to be Hemmingway here and each post doesn’t have to be a 500 word opus. A nice 100-150 word post will work great. Tell people what is going on in the pictures and sell them on the site. I tend to not cover what the site will offer them in terms of movies and pictures, but more of what they will experience in the site. Invite them to the party. If you are doing an amateur hardcore blog then you can write posts about how these two hooked up and why they are fucking in front of a camera. Be explicit and dirty, turn your readers on then tell them they can see every sweaty second of the movie by visiting the site. If you say, “This site will give you 50,000 pictures and 5,000 videos etc,” that might be boring. Instead say, “SITE NAME invites you to the party, grab a hot chick and start pounding that wet pussy now!” Think of it in this way: if a friend invites you to a big party and they say, “There is going to be 12 cases a beer and some vodka and rum and a case of Jack Daniels etc.” you might be interested, but not overjoyed. If they say, “There is going to be a ton of booze and that hot chick you like that works at the store is going to be there and I hear she is a horny drunk, “ you sit up and pay attention immediately.
When writing you posts using your keywords 1-2 times in a 100-150 post should be enough to get you noticed by the major search engines.
Once your text is written go through and use the bold on keywords and italics on the really dirty stuff. Again, don’t over do it, you want to draw attention to the hot stuff. Some people will just skim the posts so you want their eyes to go the key parts of the post. Don’t be afraid to link keywords or dirty words. This is an impulse business, if someone is turned on you want them click right then, not five minutes later.
MAKE A GOOD TITLE
Many RSS feeds will have titles that suck too. They will say something like “SITE NAME episode #56” or something like that. You want to change this to an appealing title that also includes your chosen keywords. As an example if you are optimizing your blog for the keyword term “amateur sex” your title might say, “swinger couple hooks up in a club for amateur sex” or something like that. Make it pertain to the post, but make it keyword relevant.
PUBLISH IT
Once you have your post customized, with a nice title, and ready to rock you can either publish it right then, or publish it later. What I like to do is knock out a bunch of these at once then use the time stamp feature in Wordpress to have it post them later. For example I might want to update the site every other day. So I customize 15 feed posts and for each one I check the “edit time stamp” box that is on the lower right hand side and then set the date and time I want the post to be made. Once you have your time stamp date and time set you can click the publish button and it will save the post and publish it to your blog on the date and time you have selected.
My 15 posts will spread out and posted one every other day so will last me a full month. By then I can import some more RSS feeds and do it again. Once you get the hang of it you will find that you can import the feeds, customize the posts and save them all with the correct time stamp in a few hours. You spend 2-3 hours one day and you have all the posts for your blog done for the whole month. These posts go faster than normal because you already have the images and link codes in the post, you just need to move things around a little and add some cool text and maybe another link or two. Better than any of this is that your blog will now be updated with fresh, unique content that is keyword rich, appealing to visitors and eaten up by search engines. Using RSS feeds to make custom posts can aid you running a large network of blogs without getting buried in posts and forgetting what sites need posts and when. All you need to remember now is what day of the month you need to do you import and customization.
Reader Comments: (3 posts)
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Ingrid says: This article acihveed exactly what I wanted it to achieve. |
November 28th, 2012 at 2:37am EST Rating:  |
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Cannon says: A million thanks for ptosing this information. |
June 30th, 2011 at 12:10pm EST Rating: |
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Darold says: I'm out of league here. Too much brain power on disaply! |
June 30th, 2011 at 7:56am EST Rating: |
