Automatic Blogging from a database

[Steven1976a]

Whilst playing around on www.blogger.com i did a search for "Silver Earrings"

The results that were returned can be seen at this

url http://search.blogger.com/?q=silver+earrings&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg

You will see the second result down is by JewelryTelevision

When i clicked through to their link i noticed that in the url search string it references RSS_TOH-TEXT

http://www.jewelrytelevision.com/index.aspx?tid=14582&R=2528938&bca=BLC065&N=0&ptid=7362&cm_ven=RSS&cm_cat=Daily+TOH+Specials&cm_pla=YahooRSS&cm_ite=BLC065&up=RSS_TOH_TEXT

On our new website which is being created at the moment we have a nice feature for our RSS which will automatically generate rss feeds everytime we add a new product to our database so that our customers who want the newest products first will receive it in their newsreader with a description and picture.

Looking at the result returned on Blogger, I presume that JewelryTelevision are doing the same with this blog?? Im not a programmer so i would appreciate it if anyone can confirm this.

Also if this is the case do people see it as a good marketing tool and anyways that you think it could be improved?

[Andy Beard]

What you will find is that in most cases an affiliate has taken a datafeed from a merchant, and using a custom application or script is feeding the items from the datafeed one by one into a blog.

There are loads of applications that can do this, or you can create a custom application.

Datafeeds are normally is a flat file csv format, so converting them to a blog post isn't very difficult.

Obviously it is better to do this things on your own domain, as many such blogs will be shut down as being splogs.

Also it is better to add a few twists to the mix of content you are supplying to the blog, to give it a unique feel, improved usability for readers, and unique content for the search engines.