Tag Archives: RSS Feeds

Using RSS Feeds To Generate Traffic

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Using RSS Feeds To Generate TrafficOne of the promotional tactics I’ve been working on lately is RSS. While I know RSS has been around for a long time, I’m just starting to get into it. Here are a few of the ways that I have been using it lately to generate traffic to my sites.

1. RSS Combiners (or Mixers)

There are many different sites that will take multiple RSS feeds and combine them into a single XML feed. The benefit of this is you can combine your RSS feed with other related RSS feeds and promote that RSS feed somewhere (blog, twitter, RSS feed engines, etc) and it will be a totally unique feed. My favorite RSS Mixer is RSSMix.com.

2. RSS to Twitter

Whether you have one RSS feed or 100, you can use different services to post your RSS feed updates to Twitter. This in turns will create a link back to your site. The amount of traffic you generate will depend on your Twitter account as well as your posting frequency. I’ve found that posting updates every 10 minutes doesn’t get much traffic and will cause you to lose followers. Posting 10-20 times per day seems to be the sweet spot for generating quality traffic from people interested in your link. My favorite RSS to Twitter site is Rss2Twitter.com. The site works great, but their traffic stats are WAY off.

3. RSS to WordPress

If you want to syndicate an RSS feed to your WordPress blog, then you’ll need a special plugin. There are a couple different plugins that I’ve tried, but one stands out clearly as the best, WP-O-Matic. It hasn’t been updated in nearly two years, but it still works great. This plugin will take an RSS feed and create a post (or draft) out of each item it pulls from the RSS feed. Duplicate content doesn’t usually rank well in the search engines, but if the info is relevent it can be of benefit to your readers it is worth considering.

4. Getting Links Indexed

One of the most difficult thing you’ll do as a webmaster is building links. After you start building links, you’ll realize that unless search engines know about those links, they’re useless for anything but direct traffic. One of the ways you can help search engines find your links is to bookmark them, and use that RSS feed.

Delicious offers RSS feeds for your bookmarks, so just start building your links, bookmark them at Delicious and send that RSS feed to a blog or Twitter. That’s thinking outside of the box! Here is an example feed of Delicious’ last 15 hot bookmarks. I use this method to get deep links from high PR sites indexed. Works especially well with sites like Ezilon and BOTW since the root domain is an authority, but some of the inner pages need to be indexed.

While link building is still #1 on my list of priorities, the way link building happens is beginning to change, and it’s getting easier!

Brandon Hopkins is a professional link builder who works with small and large sites to achieve #1 rankings. If you want to rank #1, contact Brandon today!

AlertThingy Review – Social Media desktop software and friendfeed all in one

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I came across AlertThingy while browsing the web looking for a way to centralise all my social media profiles into a single interface.  Of course my first port of call was FriendFeed but I much prefer desktop software where possible.  For Twitter Im currently using Tweetdeck, whihc is great for staying in touch with followers on twitter but really left me wanting for updates on all my other social media profiles.  Sure it has a FaceBook feed in but I still have to login to FaceBook directly to reply and comment on walls and such.

AlertThingy – Your Social Desktop

Launched on April 16th 2008 the standard install of AlertThingy supports quite a few social media networks including:

  • Amazon
  • Basecamp
  • Digg
  • FaceBook
  • Tumblr
  • Flikr
  • Hundle
  • Ping.fm
  • TinyURL
  • Tumblr
  • TwitPic
  • Twitter
  • Twitter Search
  • Yammer

AlertThingy promises to be adding more networks as development continues.  The interface is what we have come to expect and is similar to TweetDeck,  with multi or single columns and information segmented into the various feeds and groups you have imported while also being associated with the logo of that feed, for example the Twitter t against all tweets.

One very cool thing that this tool does it also allow you to also import news feeds and blog feeds to a separate column and comes with a range of different RSS feeds already prepared such as the BBC, WallStreet, TweetMeMe and Techcrunch but you can choose specific feeds to add yourself so its really quite flexible.

Pretty easy to use all in all but I will spend more time with it to see how it holds up against the likes of TweetDeck.

AlertThingy FriendFeed

Interestingly enough, if your a FriendFeed User and would like desktop software for Friendfeed but don’t want to add all your profiles individually, they also have a version of AlertThingy specifically catering to Friendfeed.

Installing it and adding in your Firendfeed account details starts pulling in information from your established FriendFeed Accounts (although I’m not sure at the moment if this includes things like Youtube, or only the list mentioned in the alternative version, I’m still checking it out at the moment).  As Comments come in you can “like” them or “comment” back directly via the interface directly from the desktop.

Its still in the early stages, even though its been about for over a year, and looks a bit ugly with an all black interface and white writing but I’m assuming its in the early stages of development and am hoping it will expand in the near future.

Give them a try by downloading them from:

AlertThingy

AlertThingy – FriendFeed

Let me know your thoughts on how it works, good or bad and if you think its a serious contender as a social media desktop application. For me the Jury is most definitely, still out.

**Update**
Just came across this video by bwana.tv about AlertThingy, might help to describe it better!