By now you’ve heard all about RSS and maybe even started using it in various ways to subscribe to blogs or offer your blog content to others. Today I’d like to take you on a little tour to show you how, without knowing much about RSS and how it works, you can do some very powerful and useful things to aggregate, filter and republish content.
Track mentions of a certain product
Look for mentions on technorati.com and other blog search engines.
Tag each mention with the del.icio.us bookmark using a tag like DTMbook
Take the feed that del.icio.us automatically produces.
Just for fun, take the feed to Feedburner and save the feed
Set up and republish the feed with Feedburner’s Buzz Boost option
Take the code to any web and show a dynamic update in real time (some CSS styling can help here)
Sit back and look great – see the feed displayed on the right sidebar here
You can also do this through email alerts by setting up Google or Yahoo News alerts for specific search terms.
If you’ve ever wanted to easily publish a calendar of upcoming events, deadlines, or even birthdays as a dynamic list instead of a calendar-style page, here’s an RSS trick for you to use. (This can be done on a public or private page)
Create a free Google Calendar account and enter all the dates in the calendar (any shareable calendar will do)
Google automatically creates an RSS feed for your calendar – take this URL and create a free Feedburner account
Optimize the feed with Feedburner’s Event Feed option
Publish Feed Using Feedburner’s BuzzBoost Option – Lots of Options to Display
Paste the code that Feedburner produces for you on the page you want your list to display
Using this formula produces a dynamically changing list of events that will run from first to last, automatically remove past events, and automatically fetch future events based on your settings. Now anyone with access to a web browser and your Google Calendar account can update and edit your event listing.
I use it for my upcoming speaking events. Bonus: You can easily set this up so others can also subscribe to this event list.
Sending personalized information via RSS
Just when you thought you were learning how to use RSS as a research tool, someone comes along and tells you that it’s not enough.
It is now very easy to use RSS technology to create individual sources of information and provide them to your best customers. You know they want to solve this RSS issue, but they can’t seem to. So do it for them.
This is what I would suggest. Go to http://www.mysyndicaat.com and create custom, search-specific RSS feeds, combine them and deliver personalized information to your customers on a daily basis. The current trendy name for this is news radar.
Syndicaat allows you to easily combine multiple fonts to create a very focused and personalized font. (Yahoo Pipes does this too, but my results have been spotty)
So let’s say you have a customer that produces tents for active outdoor people. You can search for very specific terms and phrases in Google News, Yahoo News, Bloglines, Technorati, Google Blogs, Outdoor Forums and anything else that produces an RSS feed and mixes all the content about your client, your competitors, the industry, words specific key. and phrases, you name, in a digestible, personalized newsfeed that changes daily. (Don’t tell your client how easy this is, just do it and invoice it, they’ll thank you.)
Talk about a great way to gain a competitive advantage. It’s like creating custom posts for each customer or each marketing segment you serve. What if you did this for your prospects as a way to show them what you can do? You can make all of this content public or create password-protected private feeds. You can also republish the RSS feed and data on any web page on your site using plain javascript or even Feedburner’s Buzz Boost and then put it on your client’s private page on your website. So now they visit your website for industry news every day; You must like the sound of that.