Using Feeds as Content

Most of the sites I see use either results from the serps or a generic technology feed which doesn't match their theme for some additional content. While this is a good start if you're including rss feeds on your sites as an additional source of content, I find it's worth spending an extra 10 minutes or so to gather some feeds that are more relevant to the keywords you are targetting.

There are many sources for feeds out there, and depending on the niche you are targeting, some are better than others.

For example if I'm creating a niche site on a product (i.e. iPod's) I might include feeds from Yahoo Finance, CNet Reviews and various news sites and product sites like Nextag and Alibaba.

Non-product based niches like hobbies (i.e. Scrapbooking) are sometimes a little trickier to find depending on their popularity. Usually about.com has a good feed or two and then a Google search for "keyword rss" will find the popular sites for your niche, some of which will provide feeds.

Here are some other sites to find rss feeds:

• Moreover
• Complete RSS
• Feedster
• RSS Feeds
• Yahoo News
• Syndic8.com
• Amazon
• Topix

Generally the more pages I'm creating the more feeds I will use. Also I recommend the caching of feeds (I use a week or so) to reduce the load on the feed providers.

KWA Thoughts

A couple people commented on my joining KWA post so I thought I'd share my thoughts on it as it's been a month since I signed up.

For the most part the forum is pretty good. There are a lot of tips and tricks and examples that I have not seen anywhere else and people are usually more than willing to help out. Also there are a number of video tutorials that can get you up and running pretty quickly. The only thing I don't like are all the commercial products being offered. I doubt one could actually follow any of the tips/advice successfully without spending $500 on software and there seems to be a new product every week. Also half of the discussions seems to be on how to use the commercial products.

The keyword lists you get are not bad either. I've actually made some $$ off of the ones I've used which surprised me as at least 499 other people have the same lists.

Is it worth the $57 month? If you're a beginner and have a bit of $$ to invest, joining KWA is probably the best thing you can do to get started. However if you know how to code a bit and understand the internets nuances (ftp, dns etc) then you'd probably be better off spending the $$ on domains and hosting and reading burts blog.

March roundup

My Adsense hasn't really increased since february, coming in at $70.55. However this month is starting to look pretty good - I'm almost at last months total and it's not even at half the month yet. This seems to be due to the new sites I launched in March reminding me once again to build build build.