There are many ways to increase content on your site, from manually creating it to purchasing software which will auto generate it for you.

While I highly recommend you stay away from anything which is automatically generated I also understand that many people don’t feel comfortable writing.

Therefore, in this article I look at another way to make your site appear as if its changing. That is, incorporating feeds into your site to improve return visits and build your brand.

Feeds have been growing in popularity for some time. In fact, there are people who measure such popularity.

While feeds are not the sole property of blogs, we can gauge how popular feeds are simply by looking at the “state of the blogosphere.”

According to Technorati, the blogosphere is doubling every 5 months or so. That means that 5 months from now there will be twice as many blogs (and feeds) as there are now.

In many cases, the only way to access that content, aside from regularly visiting a site, is through their feeds.

But that’s not the only use for feeds. Many services have sprung up which allow you to search and aggregate those feeds. Services such as Feedster and even Google News allow you to search for phrases and output an RSS feed which could then be imported into a feed reader.

In other words, if you wanted to get the most recent news about Google from Google News you could search for “Textlinkbrokers” in Google News and then copy the RSS feed URL into your favorite news reader.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Well that’s great news, but how does that help with my site?”

Well now that you know how to auto generate feeds for virtually any topic you want, you can then import the feeds into your site using various methods.

Inserting Feeds into your site

Obviously you can’t just link to the feed, or paste the XML output into your pages. It wouldn’t be readable. What you need is some tool to convert the feed into something that is readable. And there are many out there to do just that.

So let’s look at the easiest – a Javascript from a hosted service like FeedRoll.

Using a service like FeedRoll you can input the URL of the feed you want, make some basic style changes and it will provide you with a Javascript you can then install on your site pages that will display the feed within your page content. One problem I have with FeedRoll is that you are limited to the list of feeds they provide. There was a time when you could use any feed URL but they’ve since changed it.

The only other way to use FeedRoll with your own feed is to buy their software package which will allow you to export the feed into HTML code that you can paste on your site.

However, if the feed you do like is in the list, then you could simply make the style changes you want, copy the Javascript code onto your page(s) and you are done. Once you’ve saved the page, load it in your browser and voila – you have regularly updating news headlines on the page.

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