SAQ #6 – Can I Use RSS Feeds To Automate My Blog?

We’ve discussed what an RSS feed is and how great it can be if and when people subscribe to your RSS feed. The right question to be asking ins’t just what is an RSS feed, but can and how do you use them to automate the work you do on your blog?

Today’s video will walk you through using other people’s recourses and their RSS feeds to help automate your blog. As always, please leave me your thoughts, comments and questions by posting them here. I look forward to the continued conversation.

Bye for now,

Brian J Devine

If you prefer to read, here is a copy of the transcript from the video:

Welcome back, its Brian Devine here, your online marketing consultant. We’re going to cover question number six of the should ask questions today. Question number six is “how do I utilize RSS feeds to automate some of my online marketing efforts?” So you might remember in the frequently asked questions we did talk about RSS feeds and what do they mean. Feel free to go back and take a look at that video because I don’t want to completely go over that information again, but this question is different. This is about utilizing RSS feeds to automate your marketing. If you remember in question number five we talked about utilizing blogs to really build your online presence and promote your practice and start getting new patients that way. With an RSS feed, you’re able to do- well there’s a tremendous amount you can do, but let’s talk about one thing that if you set up today will have a huge impact on your ability to market yourself online. So you already have your blog setup, you have already set up your WordPress.

Now, what you can do is use a plug-in in WordPress that’s called Freeburn and it is allowing you setup RSS feeds, those Real Simple Syndications, that automatically pull into your blog. So whatever it is that you are interested in, whatever it that you want to talk about on your blog, You set up these RSS feeds based on the key words that you want to have pulling to your blog.

What I recommend is that you pull them into your blog and have them automatically set up a post, but don’t automatically publish the post. So then once a week, or really this is the best way to do it, have somebody on your team, at least every other day, go into your blog, look at what’s been pulled in your RSS feeds. Maybe it’s fishing and you want to talk about fishing because you love it, maybe it’s skiing and you are an avid skier and you want to talk about skiing on your blog. Even though as an orthodontist you want to talk about orthodontics, you still want to talk about some personal stuff.

Then let’s pull in orthodontics. Let’s pull in some feeds that are specific to orthodontics. Then, when this person on your team goes in there and looks at your blog and looks at those feeds that are coming in, they can scan through everything that’s coming in, delete all the junk, the things that you don’t want. Then, the things that seem interesting, either have this person on your team that is looking at it make a comment on that particular feed and post it live to your blog and instantly you’ve got new content to your blog, even though you didn’t need to write it, you just commented on it.

If it’s really fascinating, maybe its something that you as the doctor might want to go ahead and comment on. So that gives you the ability to hopefully have some controversy. Maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll see another doctor’s information come across your RSS feed and you can say “I completely disagree for these reasons…,” slay a little bit of mud and you do what’s called a “trackback” so that whoever wrote the original blog knows that you above posted it on theirs. If they’re any good at what they are doing, they will know what you did that and read it.

Hopefully, that will cause a little bit of concern for them and they’ll respond, and they’ll link back to your site. Now, what that’s doing is its building up your links and is building up their links. So this has a very positive effect, even if you’re disagreeing, it’s still going to give both of you a positive effect.

So when you can disagree and you can create that back and forth, now everybody that’s been reading your blog now has the ability read that other person’s blog; however, everybody that has been reading the other person’s blog is reading your blog. So if those people are more in tune with whatever it is that you’re saying or how you are stating that situation, they might become fans of yours and eventually come into your office.

So, I want you to really think about how all of that works. The RSS feed allows you to automate that process so that you can just maybe once a week take a look at what’s come in, anything that catches your interest so that you can go “yup, here’s a little comment on it. Here’s my two cents on this particularly subject, ” hit publish and you have brand new content on your blog and it took you about five minutes.

So that’s how you utilize RSS feeds to automate your marketing. I hope you found that interesting. If you want to know exactly how to do it, let me know, shoot me an email, give me a call. Whatever is easiest for you, always feel free to go to brianjdevine.com and contact me from there or go to www.orthovideosnow.com and see what we’ve got going on over there. I look forward to talking to you next time for question number seven, until then, bye for now.

3 Responses to “SAQ #6 – Can I Use RSS Feeds To Automate My Blog?”

1. MrBarns says:

   February 2, 2010 at 5:05 am

   There is obviously a lot to learn. There are some good points here.
2. Designer Purses says:

   April 5, 2010 at 9:56 am

   I have to say, every time I come to orthovideosnow.com there is another interesting post up to read. A friend of mine was telling me about this topic a few weeks ago. I think I will send my friend the url here and see what they say.
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