RSS Feeds getting Aggrigated!

RSS feeds, or as they are sometimes technically called aggrigators can really enhance your business. You can even make your own feeds from pages that don’t offer the service by using google feed burner for free. You can then use an RSS to Blog robot for WordPress, and have multiple pages of your WordPress site on a bookmark on your smart phone like a stock ticker scouring the entire world in your markets and delivering the data right into the palm of your hand in real time. For instance, if you buy cars and resell them, you could have the search results from all the top classified sites sent by RSS to your own WordPress blog. Any time a car comes up for sale within a hundred miles of you on Kijjiji, yesbackpage, Olx, Craigslist, or Buysell.com, you would know about it in minutes. The only cars your competition get to buy, are the ones you don’t want. Not only can you cherry pick by being first in your markets, but you also get to dump the problems and basket cases on your competition, allowing you to take long business strides while your competitors wade through quicksand of problem customers, scammers and garbage you quickly ruled out and put behind you.

Your competitors can keep trying to make a silk purse out of a pigs ear, while your company walks away every single hour of every single day with a basket of cherries. You can of course be doing this with any market and every market you’re into, real estate, antiques, furniture, etc. That’s the power of RSS, and the benefits of staying in the loop! We are using a free plugin called RSS in Page. Its very simple to use, this is a great free fast alternative to RSS to Blog, which can be a little complicated for beginners. All we did to manage this, is install WordPress on our server. This takes 5 minutes, its free and automatically done by the Godaddy website. Then we added the plugin RSS in Page, this took 60 seconds. Then we visited Craigslist, performed a search of cars and trucks between $450 and $500, and copied the URL from the bottom of the page. Then we published a new page on our blog (actually, we just dropped it into this one already made for this tutorial) and dropped this short-code into the page, and clicked publish.

This can be done very fast. You can substitute any RSS URL in the short code, and it will show the RSS feed in your page, on your site instantly. You can add as many more as you want, from different searches, different sites, different markets. You can also create one per page, and add all of those pages side by side in a multi tabled html page as iframes. Then you just access your new conglomerate of RSS feeds in one spot. With the swipe of your thumb, you can scan all your markets from a smart phone and cheek the current RSS. Who remembers Willow? The wizard had asked him which finger controls the world. Yours does if you put the smart into your smart phone and develop this simple app for yourself.

We used 8 different WordPress blogs on the same shared server. In each blog, we removed the navigation links, and all the other stuff that was not part of our interest. These blogs were only for this example, only for one market we put up there. You don’t need to do 8 blogs, you can use 8 pages on one WordPress site instead. We used 8 blogs so we can configure each one to display exactly the number of posts we want to look at or each section. We changed the entire theme to black with bright text. The reason for this is to conserve your iPhone battery if you’re checking this app every 5 minutes. We set this up to cover 2 different cities and a variety of markets as an example of strategy. We have also set the page to auto refresh every 60 seconds so you don’t need to do this yourself to see the fresh content. We have left all 8 of the blogs posting on their own and unattended for a year.

We made you a zip file containing the code to make this iPhone app that consolidates all 8 blogs along with the css files. Just replace the RSS URL’s with your own needs, and drop these 3 files on any server. We call it a bird-feeder. You can then access your bird-feeder from any device to grab a quick look at all of your RSS interests at once! Some of the RSS feeds have not been updated very often as you can see. Each website has their own standards for that. Remember, if you don’t like the feed, or lack thereof coming from a site you need information for, go to google feedburner etc.. and you can get them to actually generate you a custom feed from a site that doesn’t have it’s own RSS feed, or if the one they do have is not updated very quickly. (these burned feeds don’t always work, but a lot of times they do) Then you just drop the RSS feed url generated for you by the google feedburner into your short code as shown above, and you’re off to the races!

We mentioned RSS to Blog earlier. We made our bird-feeder app with RSS in Page. So, what is the benefit of RSS to Blog then if its extra complicated? Michelle the head programer and creator must set it up on your server herself quite likely because the source code is encrypted, (thanks Michelle!) Well the difference is, this robot posts to your blog. As your feeds come into your RSS to Blog robot, it will post them to your blog one at a time. There is first of all, an SEO advantage to this. More importantly though, you can use the awesome Wordfilter Plus plugin, and re write the all posts as they come in, before they are posted to your blog. A world famous restaurant chain employed us to build a yelp review scraper that would convert reviews from any Yelp URL into an RSS feed. (google feed burner didn’t work on Yelp, so we made our own feed burner)

The scraper would scrap the reviews for any URL in Yelp’s database, for any restaurant. It would then convert the reviews into RSS feeds. The URL for these custom feeds was put into RSS to Blog, and auto posted on a regular schedule to their WordPress blog page under their reviews. As each review got posted, it was rewritten. The restaurant name was changed, certain dishes were changed. Certain words were replaced with synonyms etc. Certain phrased were converted to links that would also back link the other page in the site. Reservations would become a link to their reservation page, etc. This way, the world famous restaurant chain has a blogin their website that constantly gets reviews, back links, and unique content added every time someone makes a review on Yelp. This principal can be also used for advertisements. We use our competitors advertisements, get the feed from those web pages, and use RSS to Blog to re post all of their ads on the applicable WordPress sites that we own. Wordfilter Plus replaces all their company names with ours, and back links the applicable websites that we own. It also changes their phone numbers to ours of course. We go into this more on our Blogs tutorial.