Content is king, as always, in the blogging world. Without it your blog will whither and die a slow death. Bloggers are always looking for something new to write about, report on, and inform their readers about. But, sometimes you need content and you are fresh out of ideas.
One way to get new content into a blog is to piggyback onto RSS feeds. If you don’t have anything original to blog about, or you just want to get the latest scoop from news sources, then you can pull in content from RSS feeds, and even automate the process of creating posts from them.
Be careful! Do not abuse this method. Do not simply copy blog posts from other Websites. It should be ok to post snippets of content from other sites, along with a link back to the original article so the author gets full credit for his or her work. However, if you want full articles without upsetting anyone, you can always pick up RSS feeds from article directories like eZineArticles.com – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s first look at some options to pull RSS feeds into WordPress: below are plugins you can use with WordPress to accomplish this.
WP-o-Matic
Download from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-o-matic/
- This free plugin allows you to add and import RSS feeds, and sort them into campaigns and categories. You can then automatically generate posts from the feeds. This plugin also allows you to relink specific words as well as rewrite words within the new posts.
- One major problem, as of this blog post: it does not work with WordPress 2.7
AutoBlogged
Buy from: http://www.steveatwal.com/recommends/autoblogged.php
- This is a more polished plugin that does what WP-o-Matic does and more.
- Has numerous pre-defined searches to locate articles via Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! News, Flickr, YouTube, and others.
- They have a new version that is supposed to work with WordPress 2.7
YAAB-Autoblogger (Yet Another Autoblogger)
Download from: http://www.psypo.com
- This free plugin is still in Beta, so you may experience bugs. But it tries to do what WP-o-Matic does. Try it and see if it works for you.
- It is supposed to work with WordPress 2.7
FeedWordPress
Download from: http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/
- This free plugin is similar to the ones above and works with WordPress 2.7
So, once you decide which of the above plugins works for you, you will want to decide which RSS feeds to pull content from. There are many RSS feeds out there, so just pick the ones you like the best – Google is your friend in this respect. Below are two Websites with RSS feed listings to get you started:
- Yahoo RSS Feeds: http://dir.yahoo.com/rss/dir/index.php
- Top 150 Media and Marketing Blogs: http://adage.com/power150/
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
These are great tools for any blogger, at times, blogger does face bottleneck to find interesting topics. Will this be violating the piagiarism?
They should be used with due care to ensure you don’t copy the entire article and also to give credit to where you got the snippet of news or information from. I’ve seen some sites that use these tools a lot but are careful to not post the entire article, with a link back to the source. I guess use your discretion…but definitely useful tools.
Nice! Didn’t know these even existed…thanks for the warning about using these wisely…good advice. cheers
If you want to post multiple snippets together, to escape content duplicating, Yaab Autoblogger is the best choice.