Using RSS Feeds and Curating Content

Brush up on the Doctrine of Fair Use before jumping into aggregating and curating content. Doing it right can be extremely valuable to your site for SEO purposes, but doing it wrong can lead to problems with copyright infringement.

If you've never been introduced to RSS feeds, it's definitely time to take notice. If you have, brush up on how they can help you in creating fresh content for your website, or even just keeping up with real estate industry news. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Every blog and many websites have an automated process to release portions or complete articles every time a new one is published. It's a little like a press release, but totally automatic.

You can use it to keep up with the business and your competitors. However, in this article we want to talk about using RSS feeds to gather content from around the web that you find interesting and would like to share with your visitors. You're going to subscribe to feeds at sites you find interesting and deliver snippets of the content you like to your visitors. It's called "aggregation," as you are aggregating several small quotes from multiple sites and publishing them on yours.

An example would be a great article from a major real estate portal site about a resurgence in vacation home buying. If you're in that type of market or it's your niche, you may want to take a small snip of that content that's relevant and link your visitors to the full article. Most feeds provide that snippet for you, so it's easy to just copy/paste it and the link into your article or blog post.