How to Set Up Blogging Content Automatically
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The goal of everyone who starts a blog is to find a niche market that they are really interested in, provide quality content that people enjoy, create a huge following of these people, and then make money via advertising and sales conversions. Of course, this takes quite a bit of time and you might not have hours every single day to spend working on content. If you don't provide a constant stream of quality updates to your blog though, people will stop coming back to see if you have published something new. Well have no fear because I've done a little work to see what tools and options are out there to help you keep your readers interested without putting in as much work and effort.
Embedded RSS Feeds
If you want automatically updated blog content without having to write it yourself, then set up an embedded RSS feed from someone else's site. The easiest way I have found to do this is to rely on Google's AJAX Feed API. It's simple to set up as you can enter a keyword or name of a site that you want and hit generate code. I should note that you do not want to rely entirely on embedded RSS feeds for your information, because why wouldn't the reader just head over to that site to check the new content instead?
News Related Content
Not only does Google do RSS feeds, but you can also add news-related content to your site that covers your niche. Head over to the News bar wizard to cover the expressions that your site deals with. This allows you to cover a lot of different websites with the topic that you are intersted in, rather than just a single website and listing everything they put up like with the RSS feeds.
Free Article Directories
If you are struggling to think up a topic to write about and want to just use something that someone else has already published then check out the free article directories on the web. I like using EzineArticles since it has quite a few different topics. Not all of the articles are of a high quality, so you have to search through them a little bit before you find something that is worth posting and you have to remember to keep the authors byline included so they get a little link love. Articlesbase is another free article directory that I use, and there are countless others out there if you want to do your homework.
How to Increase Your RSS Subscribers
A great way to increase interaction with visitors is to have an RSS feed for readers to subscribe to. The feed is similar to a newsletter in that you can push your content to the reader instead of relying on the visitor to come back to your site for updates. A lot of blogs also display the FeedBurner widget with the number of subscribers they have, so it's a badge of a blog's popularity. Let's take a look at a few simple steps to increase your RSS subscribers.
Make Your Signup Button Big and Obvious
The visitor needs to be able to quickly and easily find your RSS button. If I come across a great article and I want to be able to sign up for the blog's feed, I don't spend a long time looking around the site for the button or subscribe link. If I don't find it quickly then I move on thinking the site doesn't provide one.
Offer a Full Feed
Don't just offer short excerpts of all of your posts, but instead provide a full feed. Some people think if they offer only a short piece of a post with a read more link that will drive readers to the actual site where the advertisements are, but instead it just pisses people off enough to unsubscribe.
Subscriber Count
This is the cool little widget I was talking about from FeedBurner. People like to follow the herd, so if you have more than 50 readers, display this next to your RSS symbol and it can actually increase the chances of someone subscribing. If you don't have at least 50 readers already then do not post the number on your site. People will think, "Well since nobody else subscribes so I guess it's not worth it for me either."
Subscribe by Email
I have already talked about how much I like Aweber in my post on how to get more email subscribers, but here is another reason, Aweber counts all of your newsletter subscribers as RSS subscribers so you can build your number up quickly (remember the 50 limit mark before displaying the FeedBurner widget). The reason for Aweber including the newsletter subscribers as RSS readers is that they will send your RSS feed out to people via email, updating them of all the subscriber of all of the new posts. You can set the frequency to whatever you feel comfortable with, but I currently use once a week and the email comes in list format.
Do you have any other techniques that you use to increase your RSS subscribers? If so I would love to hear about them in the comments.