News feed automation

For a while we have had free news feeds on our site that people can view in their RSS readers or other web site owners can use on their web sites. They have generated a lot of traffic but it is not targeted traffic.

I had the feeds set up as individual pages on the site and this was a pain in the &$@. For each feed it had to be created in the News Feed Admin, then the page that displays the feed on our site had to be created along with the language file, the XML page had to be created, the filenames.php file had to be updated, and it had to be added to the list of feeds. This process took about 30 minutes per feed.

Rob123 did the work the first time and he did a great job so I went back to him again to automate the process. The work he did is nothing short of amazing. Now when a feed it added to the News Feed Admin, it is automatically added to the list of available feeds in the appropriate category, the page that displays the feed on the site is automatically created, and the XML feed is automatically created. This is still using the same URL's as they have always had. The entire thing runs off 3 php files located on the site. With this process automated it takes about 15 seconds to add a new feed (instead of the 30 minutes).

There is another new feature he added. Before when looking at the XML pages in a reader it always had the same boring ad for Java Roasters at the bottom (Courtesy of Java Roasters). With this new version it has (or will have when I finish making up all the pages) a different "catch phrase" for every day of the month linked to a different page of the site. So on the 1st of every month it might say "What is our best selling coffee" followed by the description "Urban fix has alway been our best selling coffee. Find out what everyone is talking about" with a link to a page on the site that is built specifically to promote Urban Fix. On the 2nd of the month it will have a different message about our company. This was a very important feature for me to have because I think people tend to ignore the "Courtesy of Java Roasters" part after awhile because it is always there and never changes. Also only "new" articles are downloaded onto news readers so by having it change every day they will always have a unique message about our company in their RSS reader.

I was also looking at the Microsoft site the other day and IE7.0 is in beta testing now and it has a built in RSS reader. I really think RSS feeds are going to take off as soon as IE7.0 becomes available to the general public as they will be known by the general population.
Currently we have about 100 feeds generating traffic of about 16,000 views per month. The goal is to have 3,000 feeds by the end of this year. That should give us about 480,000 views per month. When IE7.0 comes out I don't see a reason why that should not increase by 10 times the number giving us 4,800,000 views per month. Now if 1 in 10,000 of those views generates a sale that will give us 480 sales per month. Once all the work has been completed and set up, tested, refined I think these goals are reachable and this does not include any work that we do to increase traffic to our site from feeds that are displayed on other sites.

If we reach our goal then this whole process might pay for itself.