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Using RSS Technology to Create Custom Content

John Jantsch Founder, Duct Tape Marketing Recent Posts

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April 2, 2009

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You can do a lot with this technology called RSS, even if you don’t know a thing about it.

You may not be aware of it, but you consume content via RSS everyday. RSS technology is the plumbing that runs a great deal of blog, search, and application content.

With just a basic understanding of the tools, you can aggregate, filter and automate the creation of all kinds of content to use on your website.

One of my favorite RSS tricks is to use it to create dynamic content for web pages.

Let’s say you want to track and publish all the positive mentions of your business in the press. Here’s one very simple, and by the way free, method of doing this:

1) Search Google News and twitter.com for mentions of your brand – you can set this up so that it comes to you on a daily basis 

2) Visit the page that mentions your brand and using a service called del.icio.us tag the content with something like “ourbrand” (you can also get toolbar extensions that make this even easier) 

3) This tag on delicious produces it’s own RSS feed, so copy this feed URL – just look for the little RSS button, right click and Save As the URL 

4) Burn the feed using Google’s Feedburner tool 

5) Enhance the feed with Feedburner’s Buzz Boost tool 

6) Paste the code where you want the content to show up 

7) Once steps 4-6 are in place, you can simply tag any content moving forward and it will magically appear on your page.  Assign the duty to anyone in your office, no technical experience required.

You can use this same technique to create all kind of personalized content for things like news pages, industry pages, or event pages.

John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award-winning publisher and author of “Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide”

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