How can I make the best use of sponsor RSS

[LD]

Originally Posted by Lemmy

While there are quite a few free plugins for WP that will allow you to fill up your blog with sponsor feeds, I prefer Kaktusan's Blogs Automater. It's not that hard to set up (Kaktusan is one of the good guys and will help you if you get stuck). Once everything is working all you have to do is sit back and collect checks.

Seriously, 90% of sponsor feeds are crap and if you plan on setting up a fully automated blog you'll just be one among 1000s who all put up the same shit. As with everything else it's all about getting qualified traffic.

I've been dabbling with blogs for a couple of years now. I'm not making a lot of money off of them and traffic is down, so take my advice for what it's worth.

Yes, Lemmy you are right. You, Walrus and T Pat all helped me get hooked up with BA a while back. I've only got one blog for now, but couldn't imagine managing the feeds without it. I tried some of the free plugs with WP for rss...the ones I tried were seriously fucked up, or very limited. BA is one of the more useful things I've spent money on. I also just got Link Organizer up and running, it to is an amazing script.

I too am dissapointed in sponsor feeds. A picture and a text link...wtf?? I try to hand post a few entries, wish I had time to do it all by hand.

[walrus]

Jester, that is really an excellent question because there is unlimited numbers of ways you can use a sponsors RSS feed and I guess this post should move me to write a RSS tutorial. Soon, I promise.

Building an auto-updating blog is one of the possibilities. Finding hosted feeds that are really blog quality is a difficult feat in itself but the advice about blog automater is right on.

You can also build feed directories and social bookmark sites, although you would probably need to spend some time researching RSS formats before attempting either. (or read the promised RSS tutorial when I get the time to write it) The scripts for these follow the mainstream approach to how an RSS feed should be structured and don't always give the desired results when using adult feeds.

You can also add information from a sponsors feed to any website page. Lets say you have a hub with a Raven Riley page. I know Jayman Cash has a RSS feed for all the tour updates. You could build your page around the most recent feed item to show your visitor what the most recent update was as well as having links to freesites / galleries that you have built or are hosted.

If you sponsor offers FHG feeds, you could use those to update pages on your site as well.

Basicly, once you learn the ins and outs of RSS, you can use it to help keep fresh content on your websites or create websites completely from RSS.