RSS Feeds and Two Cool Uses!!!

[Celeste Stewart]

If you haven't checked the CC blog lately, go check it. We now have RSS feeds that can be customized based on category, license type, price, author, etc. Way cool!

While feeds are an excellent tool for customers, they are also pretty neat for us. Here are two ideas for using your own recently published articles: auto post to Twitter and monitoring your work for plagiarism. Yay!

First, create an RSS feed by going to your profile page and clicking on the RSS icon. Now, you can use this feed in your blogs as well as via Twitterfeed to automatically "tweet" your work. I set one up with the prefix "Article for sale" and now as new articles get accepted at CC, they are posted to Twitter via my Twitter profile. Might be a little spammy though, so I'm playing that by ear. But it's an idea that may drive traffic to CC and I'm willing to give it a try.

Next, you can add your feed to Fairshare.cc and this service will monitor your feed for copies on the Web! How cool is that? Plus it's free. I've been manually entering my work into Google reader and tracking it that way via Fairshare, but now, I don't have to! It will be automatic and I love automation. I've been using Fairshare to monitor AC feeds and it's been great. Sometimes Fairshare is picky about the feed type, so you may need to create a Feedburner feed based on the CC feed in order for it to work. Hopefully not. I'll let you know as I've set up both. It takes about a day before Fairshare starts monitoring the feeds so I don't know yet if it will accept the CC feed.

These are just a couple of ways that you can use RSS feeds. Any other ideas? BTW, if you're new to feeds and use Outlook Express, consider upgrading to Windows Live Mail, it has a feed reader built right into it.

[geniuswaitress]

Thanks Celeste. I didn't know there was a blog!

[Sarah81]

Thanks, Celeste! I had no idea that we could do a feed now.

[vjlenin]

yes, fairshare.cc is such a great service. I also recently signed up with it. Before, I was using copyalerts.com.

But it's now just a broken webservice, the website showing only ads. Sad!

[Celeste Stewart]

Update on Twitter and RSS feeds. I was feeding my CC RSS feed periodically, feeding one new post per day max. That seemed okay along with my other tweets. But then some of the private request links were fed and that just looked obnoxious. Why would I want to tweet a "look at this - you can't buy it" type of thing? So, I pulled the feed from my personal account.

Then, I had another idea. I created a totally separate account with the idea of promoting CC articles from different categories and authors. Every so often, a feed post will show the latest offerings. Right now I have the Technology and Arts & Culture categories feeding as well as a few different writer's feeds. They're prefixed with "Article for Sale:" and will contain the title of the article and a link to it on CC. I plan on following Web developers and hopefully getting people that need content to follow this account. So, who knows? If anyone's searching for web content on Twitter, maybe they'll find us.

Also, Bitly is tracking the number of clicks, so hopefully I'll be able to see if this generates any interest in the Twittersphere and will keep you posted. I was getting clicks when they were posted on my personal account, but there's no way to tell if the clicks were from people I know or from people who might actually need content. Hopefully with this other account, the clicks will come from a more targeted audience.

[MediaMaven]

Creating twitter accounts for the CC categories is genius promotion!

I also use Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com) to automatically tweet my new articles. I created a special twitter account just for my writing persona and I have my articles and blog posts automatically tweeted for me. I also use TwitterMail (www.twittermail.com) to send tweets - it has a great "time delay" feature that lets me write my tweets in advance.

I've only just started with Twitter and RSS, but it will interesting to see what kind of impact it has on sales.