Publish Aggregated Content Relevant To Your Customers

Apparently it was the folks at Google who were the first to realise that content is not king. Aggregation is. Obviously, King Aggregation doesn’t sound half as snappy as King Content. However, Google has proven that the ability to source third-party content and deliver this content through aggregation is very profitable. Without any editorialising whatsoever, Google can profit from advertisements that appear alongside content that is relevant to you.

So how can we use similar systems to benefit our business? The best example I can give you appears on this very website. On the front page, you may have noticed a new feature – YABOYA News. This feature displays the 5 most recent news stories related to my business – Web and Business Consultancy. And if you click “Read More??, you are brought to a page that has a potentially limitless amount of News Stories – Sourced, Evaluated and Delivered by me.

Before you either start patting me on the back (or judging me for my lack of modesty), let me tell you how easy a process it is for me to publish up to date, relevant and interesting news on my site.

Up until recently I used Google’s iGoogle to display links to recent posts from blogs, articles and news that I subscribe to. To do this is as easy as getting the RSS feed from a blog (usually shown somewhere on the page of the blog), and then adding the RSS feed to my iGoogle pages. You can even create tabs in order to categorise the blogs, articles and news that you read. This is a really convenient way to browse through your favourite content and keep up to date.

However, I have recently moved all this content to a different platform – Google Reader. Google Reader could be compared to your own online magazine, or content directory. You can easily start subscribing to content, and Google Reader has plenty of fancy ways of storing, displaying and optimising it for you. One feature that stands out for me, and provides me with the relatively easy method of being a one-man publishing machine, is the Share feature.

Google Reader allows you to browse through your content with ease. It provides a Share button at the bottom of each news feature, article or blog post that is delivered to you. When you click this, the post is automatically added to your own Google Reader Page, which is viewable by the public. Mine is viewable at:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/10991308523833790681

And to complete the process, you can choose to put a widget (small application) on your website that displays the most recent content that you chose to share. This is what I have done and what has made me into the editor that you were so impressed with from the start (sure!). You can also subscribe to my feed, and stay up to date with all the news I source.

The neatest thing about this system is that it is putting real value into something that I was doing every day anyway – browsing, reading and analysing Blogs, News and Articles. Now I can provide an extra service to the people who visit YABOYA. I can publish content that I feel is relevant to YABOYA visitors and that saves them a lot of time by not having to do it themselves.

If you want you can go even further, you can even start having multiple shared RSS feeds. I have done it with our site Diddlyi Dance (check out the front page and the news section). I will let this guy tell you how to do that.

No related posts.