RSS Cross-Promotion Widget Can Boost Your Traffic FREE!

I have been a long-time fan of http://www.rss-include.com for some time. They *had* a free tool that would allow you to capture the contents of an RSS feed and output it to a web page as machine-readable content.

The only problem was that at times, Dax (the owner of the site) wouldn’t pay his hosting bill or something and all of a sudden you would find porn links or huge PHP errors stringing across your website – not pretty!

Now his website seems to be offline, so I started looking for a better solution. I found an awesome tool called the MuseStorm Widget and decided to use it. I went to their website to create the code only to find that they will be discontinuing the widget today 🙁

Designing the RSS Cross-Promotion Widget

I can’t be the only person on Earth looking for something like this, so I decided to grab one of my Schrock Innovations coders and give him a “day project.” I asked Adam if he could code a widget like this in a day and he thought he could.

I outlined what I wanted in basic detail so he could get a concept rolling and then I talked to a few bloggers about what they wanted in a widget.

Like all “day projects” they tend to suffer from poor planning and feature creep. When the dust settled at the end of the day, we had a widget that exceed the original scope of the project but was AWESOME for bloggers and forum owners who wanted to cross promote their content across multiple websites.

What the RSS Cross-Promotion Widget Does

The RSS Cross-Promotion widget is designed to capture items from up to 5 different feeds and display the titles of those items in a clean sidebar widget. The idea is to use the widget to move traffic between web properties that are related or commonly owned.

As a side benefit, the content, including links, is all machine readable. That means that Google will follow the links, index the content and pass page rank between the websites.

Where can You Get the Beta Widget?

That’s the cool thing! The widget is free, and I even had Adam create a page that lets you craft your own custom widget with background colors and options to make it blend nicely with your website. Click here to create your own free Cross-Promotion Widget.

NOTE that this is BETA!! It has display issues in IE that we wll work out (but works fine in FireFox and Opera). Let me know what you think – I want some feedback if you have it!