I found a website that would provide some great content that is related to the service I offer on my website. I am wondering if consuming an RSS feed will drive traffic away from my site though. Should I create my own RSS feed to increase traffic? My overall goal is the do what it takes to increase MY traffic.
I can't tell what you are asking. Are you wondering if pulling another sites RSS feed will drive your traffic to them?
What do you mean "consuming RSS feed". If you mean creating RSS feeds for your site, then yes, it could help increase your site traffic once you start submitting these feeds to RSS directories.
When I say consuming, I mean taking somone else's RSS feed and displaying it on my website. The feed are links to some valuable artices that are directly related to the service I am offering on my website.
When I try to decide this kinda stuff I do my best to err on the user value side. Sure, pulling an RSS feed of, let's say, blogger jobs, like I do on my forum, may send people away from my site in the short term. But because I have great content and constantly updating jobs being pulled in the sidebar, my visits are increasing, not decreasing. Yeah, someone else's RSS feed may send them to their site, but if your other content is good, this will just be seen as another great addition to a site they'll come back to tomorrow. I would hesitate to pull a feed from one place though, because 1-some people don't like to have their feed pulled w/o permission and 2-you are a competitor with that one person and they may NOT come back. Consider pulling a search feed or a consolidated feed (of let's say, this feed you like and 5 others, mashed together). The mashed feed is how I make the blogger jobs feed work for me. I use 2 search feeds and then a mashup of several job feeds, so the result for me is a comprehensive feed of jobs rather than a feed that might induce my viewers to defect. See, this way they only find this particular feed at my site, as only I know all the feeds and search terms I'm pulling. Did I ramble too much or was that clear?
I think I understand. Basically you are saying users would be more likely to come back to your site because you have conviently compacted the feeds from one location (yours). If they want to search different locations, you provide the ablity from your location. Am I right?
well, it's almost like I am giving them an original feed. in essence, there are very few places that you can find all blogger jobs on the net. If I just pulled, say, Problogger's job boards then when they figure out that's were they are going everytime, they'll cut me out as the middleman, you know? With a mashed feed, I am giving them something they can't find elsewhere (because noone knows all the feeds I am using or the search terms, etc) and they HAVE to come to my site, or at the bare minimum, subscribe to my feed from my site, to see it.
I just started a site and have been trying to figure out how to use RSS to generate new content. Is there a thread or site somewhere that can help me set this up? Thanks.