RSS Custom Feeds: Custom News Feeds, Hub Feeds, and Twitter Feeds

RSS feeds are a fantastic tool that can be used to display current, relevant information on your website or hubs and when used correctly can also increase your traffic and earnings. By creating and using custom feeds, you can automate some normally time consuming tasks, including adding current content and back linking.

The first type of custom feed I will tell you about is the Google news feed. I noticed early on that one of my hubs was receiving an enormous amount of traffic from Google and I didn’t understand why it was doing so much better than the rest of my hubs. From the first week I published the hub it showed up on the first page in a Google search out of millions of results. So I went back through it to try to figure out what was so different about this hub. The only real difference I could see was that I had a RSS feed from Google news on the site displaying relevant ads so I decided to add the news feed to several other hubs and see if I got the same results.

The Google news feed did make a huge difference in my traffic and my page rank with Google search. I can’t say for sure, but I am assuming this is because Google would rather we use their news feeds than a news feed from say CNN.com or something. Creating a custom feed from Google news is easy and can be done in a just a few simple steps.

First, visit Google News.

At the top of the page you will see a search box. Enter the topic of your hub and press “Search News”. Let’s say you have a hub about baking cookies. You would simply enter “baking cookies” in the text box, hit “search news” and then you get a list of relevant sites. Now, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will see a RSS feed icon and link.

Once you click on the RSS icon, you will be taken to another page that gives you the option to subscribe to the feed, as seen below.

You can subscribe if you wish to save the feed to your favorites but it is not necessary. All you really need to do is copy and paste the URL at the top of the page and then add it to your hub using the RSS capsule. The link to copy in this example would look like this:

http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=baking+cookies&cf=all&output=rss

Now, this feed will update automatically with relevant, current articles on your hub!

Other feeds that I have found very useful are the ones that are supplied by Hubpages. When you look at your profile, you will see your hot, best and latest hubs. All three of these categories can be used as feeds to link to your hubs. Simply use the URLs listed below and replace my profile name with your own.

• http://hubpages.com/author/cblack/latest/?rss
• http://hubpages.com/author/cblack/best/?rss
• http://hubpages.com/author/cblack/hot/?rss

These feeds can be used within your hubs to link out and drive traffic to your other hubs or it can be used on your website or blog. Check out my blog by clicking here for an example. As you can see, I have feeds to my best and my latest hubs along the right side of the page. These are updated automatically.

The third amazing use for feeds I have found is an automated Twitter feed. A lot of hubbers  tweet their new hubs to get backlinks using the tweet button at the top of the hub. This requires you to go the Twitter website and log on and click on the “Tweet” button.

Instead, go to Twitterfeed.com. Register as new user if you haven’t already and click on “Create New Feed”. You will be asked to enter a name for the feed. I used “Latest Hubs”. Then, underneath, you will add URL for the feed with your latest hubs as seen in the instructions above. Here is a screenshot.

Under the advanced settings tab, you can change the frequency of feed to every 24 hours. This way, if you publish a hub a day, it will update everyday and tweet your newest hub. Leaving it on a smaller time interval can cause it to tweet the same hub over and over again unless you publish several hubs a day.

On the next page, you configure where you want the feed to appear. You can add it your Twitter here by clicking the Twitter tab. The feed can also be configured to work with your Statusnet, Ping.fm, Hellotxt, and Facebook accounts. Click done and that’s it! Your new hubs will automatically be tweeted on your Twitter page with the custom feed!