Is it just me, or do most sponsor feeds totally suck?
 

It hardly seems to make sense to put them into a blog, even if it's really a splog.

Stupid repetitive text, no keyword imagination involved in the writing, hell, barely any text to speak of...

Other than slickcash, which we've all seen, are there any sponsors that make halfway decent feeds?

A lot more suck than not. Lotza Dollars are pretty good and you can check out these http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...ad.php?t=38849. I haven't taken a moment to look them over closely but at first glimpse they don't look to bad.

It is kinda fascinating to watch a splog make page after page from feeds.

It seems to me there's a clear risk of getting banned if you let the splog ping. I've disabled pinging as I test various feeds. But what do you think is workable - could a blog doing syndication of feeds like this ping pingomatic and not get banned?

This is not meant as factual information, just my personal observations and research. Pingomatic is more like a simple relay system, passing your ping from place to place so they would actually not figure into the equation when it comes to banning.

But that does not mean that those receiving your ping via the relay (Pingomatic) could not ban you for spamming them. Although I do believe that since these places do live in the blog environment they would not typically ban over a single day of excessive pinging only if a pattern of excessive pinging evolved.

As a precaution, I will always disable pings while initially loading the feeds and then do a manual ping though pingomatic.

After that initial "blog loading" I have yet to see even a group of feeds (3-5) that would cause an issue.

If I am just evaluating feeds for their fitness, I use a desktop feed reader rather than an actual blog. I determine which feeds I think will work well together and compliment each other and then build a splog around them.

Since I get more social bookmark action on a couple of my splogs than I do on my real blog, it seems the only issue may actually be the SE's and duplicate content....but you could evaluate that much better than me.

They are terrible, really terrible. Not just the bad writing you mentioned but badly formed xml, incomplete items and more. And that's just actual errors; when you also include missed opportunities -- like for example having a decent set of categories embedded in the feed.

Very sad.

I have to assume that, like the mess of HFS's we've seen in the past year, sponsors are trying to jump on the bandwagon without know what the fuck they are doing.

...and yes, you will be seeing me in here a lot from here on out as I'm getting my personal blog ready & I'll have a ton of newbie questions to annoy people with :D

There are a couple of reasons why sponsor feeds suck. Firstly, there are so few people in this industry who can produce sensible text content. Writing is hard work. Effective writing is even more difficult. Also, the value of the traffic being produced by hosted blogs/feeds is very possibly not as grand as bloggers may think. If the profit:cost of production ratio is crap, then you can't expect sponsors to produce great feeds.

Now, I'm not saying that blog traffic is crap. Far from it. ALL hosted content produces poorer ratios than other types of marketing. Hosted Free Sites and Hosted Galleries don't convert as well as other internal marketing efforts and affiliate-created free sites/galleries. So, one can only expect that hosted feeds don't convert all that well either. However, the effort required to create QUALITY blog posts is, in my opinion, greater than that of free sites and galleries. So, is it really worth the effort and cost to create wonderful feeds? Maybe. Maybe not. Keep in mind, there are very few blogs that have enough traffic to make sponsors even consider the effort.

That sums up my opinions perfectly. |thumb

Aww shit there goes the neighborhood ! :D

You make a very good point but when a very high percentage of the porn bloggers produce even a lower quality of sites than the sponsor provided feeds, how could anyone reasonably expect any better.

I wonder how hard it would be to write a little php scriptlet that would take a delimited list of free hosted galleries and convert that to an rss feed?

Heck, there might already be some tool out there that does something similar, I'll have to look around a bit.

Are there editors that one could feed a sponsor rss feed into, so that you could edit the feed, then output it as a new rss file?

gallery scraper: input the urls with description if you are lucky enough to have a description output to your blog and you have a new rss feed. You can virtually automate it as well as edit descriptions insert text delete unsuitable galleries and it eliminates duplicate urls so you find those 1200 hosted galleries are really 400 also includes thumbnails for you to review for each post from the user interface before export to your wp. I will have to say it is not as useful as some other scripts I have tried though since like in blog feeds the sponsors use the same template over and over and you use only 10 of the 400 galleries and they don't use many words you gotta supply your own and a decent post even a small one will take a little bit of time.
blog organizer: it will take a sponsor feed and or feeds and post to your own blog or blogs where you will have that new rss feed you spoke of. You can not edit it before it reaches your blog however what I do is to schedule the feeds and then go into WP on the remote blog being fed and edit my little heart out. It is far more useful however you don't have a preview option in the interface. Contains the ability to limit the number of posts per rebuild. Can be used on your own blogs thus producing a new feed or used with the templates which are ok nothing special and for me presented a whole new learning curve. Holds any number of feeds and allows you to select and or change the ones you will use for each blog. also has the ability to time your rebuilds and crawls of the sponsor feeds. Again a good thing and a time saver but you won't be able to save time in the end on posts. To make a decent blog post is going to take you time and I guess that is what seperates people like Walrus from the herd.

Allow me to introduce you to my friend, the comma: , :D

Or money. Hiring writers is a valid option, and one I use a lot.

True. However, I am sure you are aware that is not an option for many who read this board.

Well if they don't have the cash to pay for writers they could get their writing done for free from me. ;)

Thank you very much for the compliment :)

I'm making more sales off of Sponsor hosted feeds than sponsor hosted galleries.
Sponsor hosted feeds are in their infancy and the quality will eventually improve, look at the evolution of hosted free sites
For now don't even bother looking for a decent BBW feed.

Using a blog as an editing tool to make unique rss feeds for other blogs is a very good idea, Chimera. I'll have to try that.

Those tools you mention look kinda good too. I'm always a little nervous about buying untested scripts from a source without a lot of good reputation, but, they're not that expensive, I might give them a try.

I'm also looking at existing rss editors like rssbuilder to see if they can do the job equally well.

Making one's own rss feeds has got to be considered a wave of the future. Relying on sponsor output as anything but source material just isn't sustainable. (Too much duplication)

You will notice I did not spam an affiliate code with the information I gave. I did this so that you could take what I said more or less as an attempt to help as opposed to making a buck. I adore Blog Organizer, and if I did more splogs I would probably adore Gallery Scraper. Both scripts are very cheap and well worth it if you blog a lot. The author also provides some excellent support for Blog Organizer.
If you can ignore my eternal warfare with the infernal comma , I can usually write decent text for my blogs. All the sponsors have to do is give me some content!

I agree 100%

In time you will see more and more quality sponsor rss feeds, i think eventually the income they generate will surpass HFS (if they haven't already).

I did notice that you didn't try to profit from the reference, Chimera, and I appreciated it significantly.

What do you like about Blog Organizer?

Having bought plenty of scripts and software over the years, I'm pretty skeptical of the claims made for a script on a sellers page...

Bill - just a quick note to say that Kaktus, the author of the Blog Organizer script and others, is pretty well-known to some people here on the board, and is generally thought to produce very good product. He did write some custom scripts for me that I'm still using over a year later with no complaints.

I own a copy of BO and am mostly satisfied with it.

The blog portion of it isn't anywhere near as flexible as WP. There are a couple WP plugins that I feel are a must and BO doesn't do an adequate job addressing those...yet.

But I do use it as a post schedular for some of my blogs and find it very handy for that and, as has been said, kaktus has a good reputation with some folks around here.

For what I use it for...is it worth the purchase. I would say so.

Yeah, what Walrus said. The templates are ugly and not really flexible BUT if you run a few splogs you can use it to import the feeds and bounce them right over to your maintenance free wordpress blogs.
Bill, when I read that sales page I felt exactly the same way you did. It looked like something produced by one of the get rich quick net companies. I actually had it recommended to me by a couple of people I trust before I purchased it. I must admit the learning curve is a tad steep (at least for me). To get the best use from it takes some time. However for the small price I can run my few splogs with only occasional real posts from me.
I still don't believe it is the answer to all your money worries and that you won't make 1000s of dollars a month except by hard work and knowing what you are doing. No software will do that. However, it is a very handy tool for a busy blogger. Gallery Scraper was nice, but you must realize also that for those 1000 galleries they scrape the majority have no text, and are the same template and all too often the same content or way too similar to use. So you have to import a lot to get a few. However it too has it's uses and I feel was worth the investment.

Something more like a central administration client for multiple Wordpress blogs would be a lot more useful for me. And I mean a native client (for me that would mean Windows) -- there are quite a few native windows clients for wordpress or blogs in general (microsoft even makes one http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/) but they seem more focused on one blog at a time not managing a bunch.