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Rss To Blog Pro - A 6-Month Review
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By Will Lee
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Background Search engines are particularly interested inwebsites with constantly updated, relevant content. Websitesthat appear static without a supply of fresh content may beviewed as dormant and in their drive to provide the latest, mostrelevant search results to users, search engines may rank such awebsite lower than a website that is updated regularly.
What Is It? RSS to Blog Pro is a fully automated blog postingtool offering self-updating websites. It's a PHP script that isinstalled on a single web hosting account. From this centralisedinstallation, multiple blogs can be maintained with freshcontent from various sources. Also available is an earlier,non-pro version, which has the same basic functionality, butrequires a separate install for each blog it maintains.
What Problem Does It Solve? Adding fresh - and importantly,relevant - content to websites can be a resource consuming task.Either you spend time finding and creating new content or youpay someone to do it for you. Without fresh content, yourwebsites can appear stagnant and drop off the search enginesradar. This impacts your website rankings in search results andultimately has a detrimental effect on any free traffic comingfrom the search engines. If your websites rely on search enginetraffic then this can mean their downfall.
What Are The Benefits? RSS to Blog Pro tackles the problem ofneeding to regularly update website content by automating thewhole process from finding relevant content based upon keywordsthat you provide through to posting content to your websiteblog. In the eyes of search engines, updating a website withirrelevant content isn't nearly as good as having relevantcontent. The tighter your niche, the better chances you have ofranking higher as you'll be competing with a smaller number ofwebsites. Using a scattergun approach to website content canmean you end up competing with websites across a large number ofniches.
If you're building content websites with the aim of earning anAdSense income then you'll know that the ads shown are dependantupon the surrounding content on your webpages. Irrelevantcontent results in ads that are irrelevant to your websitevisitors, which means they'll have no interest in clicking onthem and your generated income will be poor.
Features
* Supports multiple blog types including WordPress, BloggerBlogs, Movable Type, Type Pad, Live Journal and MSN Spaces. *Keywords and RSS feeds can be specified for automatic contentgeneration or you can supply your own content. * Posting to yourblogs can be scheduled at random intervals e.g. once or twice aday so that posting appears natural. * There are no 'footprints'to identify the content as being automatically generated. * Logrecords are kept so you can see exactly what has been posted andto where. * Built-in ping functionality for blog and ping. * Asingle installation will post to an unlimited number of blogs. *Regular updates. * User support forum. * Two tier affiliateprogramme offering 40% commission to the top level and 10% forany sales from affiliates you recruit.
My Experience With RSS to Blog Pro Since August 2005, I've beenusing RSS to Blog Pro on an increasing number of blogs invarious niches. I'm pleased to be able to say that my incomefrom AdSense has increased month upon month since then. With thesoftware installed on my virtual private server (VPS), Icurrently manage around 50 blogs, posting relevant new contentevery day or two. I'd recommend that you don't install RSS toBlog Pro onto a shared server because if you're updating a largenumber of websites or you're running the script frequently(every couple of minutes) then your host is likely to take a dimview on it. Considering how inexpensive and how much morereliable a VPS is to operate there just isn't any reasonablejustification for risking a shared server. A VPS is like havingyour own server, completely isolated from any other peopleswebsites so you can't affect them and they can't affect you.There is the exception of disk IO, but that isn't something thatshould be of any real concern.
The issue of relevancy is really what makes the differencebetween an effective auto content generation tool and one thatwill never do anything for your bottom line. I can't stress itenough; without relevant content, search engines won't be ableto categorise your niche and won't be able to rank you fairlyamongst your peers. That means you won't do well in searches inyour subject area. It also could mean your website will serveads for tennis equipment when your niche is dog care. Visitorslooking for information about dog care are highly unlikely to beinterested in tennis equipment when they come to your websitebecause it's not something which is relevant to their needs atthat time.
There's no doubt that this helps to keep those websites lookingfresh and my website stats show a constant stream of visits tomy blog pages each month. And of course, lots of targettedvisitors and lots of targetted content means a lot of clicks ontargetted ads!
Support-wise, Michelle (creator of RSS to Blog Pro) has answeredmy email queries promptly and there's an active user forum forpeer support. Michelle also visits the forum to provideassistance although some queries can take a couple of days for aresponse, however the user base, support forum and software ismature enough to be able to cope with almost every commonquestion a new user might have.
Fortunately, the software is easy to install and set-up so youcan expect to be running within an hour or two.
One feature that I haven't used is the ability to ping blogdirectories from within RSS to Blog Pro. The reason for this isthat if I pinged these websites for every post made to each ofmy blogs then I'd actually end up pinging up to 50 times a dayfrom the same domain (the domain on which RSS to Blog Pro isinstalled). Rather than risk being blacklisted for pinging toomuch and hogging the resources of the directories, I use theping facility from with my WordPress blog software instead sothat the individual pings come from the individual domains.Again, this will appear to be a lot more natural and it alsohelps RSS to Blog Pro to work more efficiently by decouplingsome of the work away from it.
Conclusion After 6 months of constant usage, I'm pretty happywith RSS to Blog Pro's performance. and would definitelyrecommend it to anyone who is wanting to have self-updatingwebsites that attract targetted traffic. Care needs to be takenwhen selecting a host for the script, but once installed,operation of the script is simple and reliable. An excellentscript in the toolbox of AdSense earners and affiliate marketersalike.
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