Jamdo Marketing Blog

RSS2Blog is a piece of software you may have heard about. It has gotten quite a lot of press over the last few months for both good and bad reasons.

One of the bad reasons is that it can be used to create Splogs which are effectively rubblish blogs filled with RSS feeds and scraped content designed to draw traffic, The visitors then click on ads. In fact some people put up thousands of these Splogs and make a handsome sum of cash doing it. The downside is that the search engines are devoting quite a lot of resources to delisting Splogs so Sploggers are in a race against time. In fact I would say it’s a pretty short term strategy to make money and it makes a lot of people angry.

A longer term strategy is to use RSS2Blog to create commercial blogs using affiliate datafeeds. I spoke in a previous post about using datafeeds for blogging. Well now I am going to tell you how to automate the whole process.

The primary selling point of RSS2Blog seems to be that you can post rss feeds on your blog and never have to worry about updating your blog manually. In fact it is pretty useful for doing that if you like - just make sure that the rss feeds are available for this use first (ie not copyrighted).

However, I think the most powerful part of RSS2Blog is that you can use it to post text to a blog. That may not seem great, but if you combine it with an affiliate datafeed it is!

All you have to do is find an affiliate datafeed from a merchant you want to promote (I use ShareaSale.com to find Merchants with free datafeeds). Then you use MSNotePad to alter the datafeed into HTML (just use “find and replace”)with the markers used in RSS2Blog (”#TITLE” to mark the title and “#BREAK” to show where a new post begins).

Basically a row of the datafeed would look something like this:

#TITLE#Product Name#/TITLE#< a href="http://youraffiliatelink.com">Product Description< /a>< img src="youraffiliateimage.com/image.jpg">$ 29.95#BREAK#

You can alter it to read however you like, include more information (supplied by the merchant), include less information, include an image (hyperlinked from the Merchant’s server) etc etc. The possibilities are endless.

The fact that it is so easy to alter the way in which the information is presented on your blog also means that you avaoid any search engine penalties for duplicate content.

In fact the search engines seem to like these blogs - I guess because you set them up to post a few extra products each day so there is always new content on your blog when they return. You can also use RSS2Blog to ping various pinging services for you so the search engines know to come calling.

Basically, this method of site creation is automated and allows you to spend you time promoting and marketing your sites.

RSS2Blog along with SEO Elite are probably the only two pieces of software I regard as “must have.” I do own and use other software, but I regard the other software as luxury rather than necessity. These two programs are at the core of what I do to make money online.

The downside of RSS2Blog is the price tag. To be honest, if you only plan on setting up one or two blogs then this is not the software for you. If you plan to do this gig fulltime then you will have many sites and the software will make your life very much easier.

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