Why You Should Consider Syndicating Your Blog

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why you should syndicate your blog

The term syndication may bring up alarm bells for sound, as many people associated with duplicate content or spammers attempting to gain traffic off of your good writing efforts. However, syndication can be a great way to get more traffic and exposure to your blogs, as well as your social media profiles. As long as your syndication outlets give a link back to your blog where the original post was published, in most cases Google will not counted as duplicate content.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to choose high quality partners that are going to syndicate your most well-written posts and will give you more traffic in return.

[Read more…]

Sadness. Google May Have Just Killed TwitterFeed (And Bit.ly Too)

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twifeedgoog

Update: Corrected Title.

Love them or hate them, whenever the Google Gorilla jumps into the web pond, they are bound to make waves (drowning out rivals big and small).

Not too long ago, Google announced that FeedBurner (a service they bought a few years ago) has launched the ability for bloggers to tweet their feed links directly to Twitter using Google’s new URL shortener, goo.gl (hat tip: TechCrunch)

(Google AdSense for Feeds) Many of our publishers who have tried our Google Analytics feed item link integration have already noticed that their most popular feed items have been shared many times on Twitter.

We’re now taking our distribution and analytics a step further by enabling the ability to automatically publish the feed items that meet your criteria to Twitter, using the Google URL shortener at goo.gl.

Despite being a Google fanboy, I am saddened by this move as it certainly means the death of Twitterfeed, one of my favorite tools outside of world known as Google. [Read more…]

Finally, A Decent FeedBurner iPhone App! (Stat Fever)

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I know, there are several other FeedBurner apps out there, such as Ego and FeedCount App. But Stat Fever is not only selling for $1 (instead of $2 like its rivals), but also boasts a nicer user interface (with graphs on the side).

Created by Paranoid Ferret Productions, Stat Fever allows bloggers to see how many readers are subscribed to their RSS feed or email posts (via FeedBurner of course).

With a tap of your finger, you can check out feed stats over the course of a week or a year, as well as see how many feed clicks you received. [Read more…]

Should WordPress Buy Pheedo.com? (Or Build Something Similar)

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wppheedrss

One feature that I love about both Blogger and WordPress.org is that I can redirect my default RSS feed over to FeedBurner in order monetize my blog feed.

While this option is available via plugin for WordPress.org fans and baked in for Blogger users (ever since Google purchased FeedBurner), WordPress.com users seem to be left out in the cold (unless you are part of the VIP Hosting club). [Read more…]

Newsie: The gReader App For Impatient Bloggers (iPhone)

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newsiecool

After spending a couple weeks in Apple’s purgatory, it looks like Newsie has received Apple’s blessing and is now available for the masses.

Created by Instant Voodoo Magic, Newsie seems to be created for bloggers interested in reading their news NOW rather than waiting for the rest of their feeds to sync first (which can be a pain if you are subscribed to over 300 plus feeds).

Priced at 399 pennies, Newsie’s introduction may seem a little pricey to RSS geeks (both newbie’s and veterans), so if you are wondering whether or not this app is worth it, here is the good, the bad and the buggy about this app. [Read more…]

Why I Quit RSS and Why I Might Restart

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google-reader-logo

Sometime recently I gave up. After making RSS reading part of my nearly-daily routine for the past four years, I stopped logging in.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. I had noticed getting through my Google Reader was taking longer and longer, becoming a serious time sink, and I even converted to using Fever to lessen the time needed to go through my feeds, but it wasn’t enough.

I started skipping days regularly and it eventually got to where there was often over a week of backlog waiting for me. Then, I just stopped going. Though Fever and Google Reader are both great apps, I just stopped.

I haven’t logged into an RSS reader for several weeks now and I don’t feel as if I’ve missed anything. I’ve used a hodgepodge of Twitter, Google News and following a few select sites closely to keep on top of everything and, for the most part, it has worked well.

However, I may not be rid of RSS for good, I may be coming back. But if I do it will be for a very different reason and with a very different approach in mind. [Read more…]

SimplePie Ceases Development

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13FCDAEE-C159-4B3C-8BBD-C5A0D14C31DC.jpgSimplePie is a RSS parsing script used all around the web, for showing content from RSS feeds and sometimes to mash them together. It works standalone, but is also shipped with some publishing platforms, like WordPress for example.

Unfortunately, the lead developers Ryan Parman and Geoffrey Sneddon have decided to cease development of SimplePie. The project will be moved to GitHub and hopefully someone will pick up the reins, since this is one of the best solutions for working with RSS feeds available.

Read the announcement post for more on why this came to be.

How Do You Get RSS Subscribers To Visit Your Blog?

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Oh look, VentureBeat rebranded itself a bit. I hadn’t noticed, despite glancing through all the updates from this blog on a daily basis. I read it through my RSS reader, and that is a problem for the publisher.

We already deducted that the massive footer ads will get you nowhere, unless you can sell them from a fixed price (don’t accept that, media buyers!). That means that you probably want your RSS readers to pop in on your site every now and then.

How do you get your RSS subscribers to visit your blog? Share in the comments.

The Ad Heavy Feed Footers

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It was bound to happen, ads hitting the RSS feeds. It’s not even anything even remotely new, popular services such as Feedburner (pre-Google) offered advertising solutions for your feed, and does now too, thanks to Adsense. Other players in the feed sphere did it too, and don’t forget the publishers themselves – adding something at the end of the RSS feed isn’t even all that hard. And I’m not even mentioning the fact that if you put an ad in your blog post, it’ll go right along in your feed.

It makes sense. A lot of us like to read, or at least glance, stories in the feed reader. We might not visit some sites in weeks, despite being regular readers.

Enters the ads in the RSS feeds. Problem is, where there is plenty of opportunity to make it look splendid and great on a website, the feed doesn’t have the same possibilities. Which makes it ugly. [Read more…]