One of the first things you want to do when starting a new blog is find the neighborhoods that you will hang out in when you are working on your blog. These will be the blogs you comment on, get news from and reference when writing the posts on your own blog.

Google Reader

I am a Google Reader junkie. I use it in the browser, in the sidebar, in iGoogle, and on the phone when I am bored in waiting rooms. It is fast and a very useful tool. And I found it a necessity to use someone else’s processing power after the feeds in my OPML file grew to the size of over 700 individual feeds. Live bookmarks just isn’t going to do the job. And this was just my reading list for this blog and Digital Products Review.

Both of these blogs are pretty closely related. While this is mainly about the machine behind the money making, my other blog is about the actual techniques of making money online. I can browse this list of feeds for either.

New Blogs

But how would I go about adding the feeds that will be the reading list for a blog that is not as closely related. I could use the folder system of Google Reader, but that seemed sloppy to me. The feeds in the reader currently are those I would read whether or not I had a blog on the subject or not. I would rather keep those feeds by themselves, completely separate.

Another reason not to use Google reader is this: if I want to run a related news widget, I couldn’t put that information from Google Reader. I would have to find a more open place to store my feeds.

Many Feeds into One

The way you read your feeds depends upon the purpose. I like the river format so that the newest stories from all my feeds float to the top. This gives me a jump on commenting on new stories in the niche I am currently dealing with.

Another method would be to search the feeds to find very closely related posts to comment on. But I find this has it’s ups and downs. You might find the perfect post but it may also be over a year old. I find a quick browse of a river will sometimes work just as well and put your comment on a more current post.

RSS Mixing Services

FeedHub – After a lot of looking, I came up with this one. You can create unlimited custom feeds by either adding feeds manually or using an OPML file. You simply add your feeds and then subscribe to the resulting feed. Not only that. Feedhub tracks meme’s in your feed as pictured below:

And you can customize the meme’s it tracks by dragging and drop each one to each section. Click on one of the meme’s and it brings up the posts from that day, week, or month that match the meme. So Feedhub gives you a river format and a meme format. You can take your feeds and create your own personal Techmeme or Megite for each of your niche blogs.

You can also customize just how much content you get from your mixed feed. You can set it based on percentage and popularity. A great function if you only want the top stories out of your feeds.

FeedRinse – Between the time I was searching for a RSS mixer and the time I wrote this post it seems that FeedRinse made their premium service free. This was my first choice until I found out the free account limited the feeds you mix to 500. It seems that this is not the case any more. You can add unlimited feeds and filter them by author, tag and keyword.

I still like FeedHub’ filtering system better. It involves putting a bit more trust in an algorithm, but that is better than coming up with a list of tags and keywords to filter.

Yahoo Pipes – Yahoo Pipes is sweet. You can do just about anything you want with a feed except through a huge OPML file at it and expect it to give you a RSS output. I tried. Small ones work. Forget the big ones.

FeedBlendr – I put my OPML of 700 feeds into FeedBlendr and watched it load for about an hour. Then I gave up and forgot about it. Not sure if my feed is still there somewhere or what. I didn’t create a login. So who knows where it is. So, try it for small feeds and tell me what’s up.

xFruits – As far as out of the box mixing and mashing, xFruits probably has the most features. This one has also been around for a while. I remember checking it out in the past. Their service features an RSS aggregator, RSS to web, RSS to mobile, post to RSS (I guess for creating a blog that only has a feed?), RSS to mail, RSS to OPML, OPML  to mobile, mail to RSS, RSS to voice and finally RSS to your blog.

feed.informer – Another feed consolidator I have yet to check out. There seems to be a focus on republishing the content.

Google Mashup Editor – Haven’t used it yet. I am guessing something along the lines of Yahoo Pipes.

What Do You Use?

I never say something is the best of the best on the internet, because I know it is only a matter of time. I pick the best for the moment, but if something that does it’s job better comes along, I am all about jumping ship. So if any of you have found a great RSS mixer that missed my list, be sure to leave a comment. Or if you have found a whole new method of dealing with a mass of feeds, let me know. I am always on the lookout.

I have been trying to start another blog lately. At least, that’s what I am telling myself.
It’s a clean slate right now and that’s a good place to start. I have started many sites but it is hard to make the first move. Is that the right amount of categories? Did I cover everything? Will I have to bolt something on down the road to make sure the site’s complete?
You see, I don’t want new blogs to turn into the mess of categories and tags that this one turned into. It’s fine for this blog. I cover everything here and I’m not too worried about it being perfect. But I know how restructuring a blog after it already has content can go. I did it once. I do not want to try it again.
I have also been trying to build a smart system to interlink blogs. Profit-ware was going to be the first test case. But I think now, I will begin the blog to get the traffic going. The system I am building needs to plug in seamlessly anyway, whether or not the blog has content.
The new blog is going to be about Ebay. A lot of the links pointing to the domain fit. I used to make money on Ebay. I wrote shareware for Ebay sellers once. I still sell products for my day job there. I have even spotted a few niches lately that would not require all the shipping and tracking. This, for those Ebay sellers who just had the bottom drop out of an income stream when Ebay banned downloadable products.
What I saw could make a person about $200 for about an hour’s worth of work. Easy work. So that has me excited to get started. And I’m sure I’ll find other niches there. I always do.
I stopped doing anything on Ebay for a while because it was eventually just easier to be an affiliate marketer. Downloads on Ebay sell for pennies. Shipping products out takes too much time and energy compared to writing a blog post or article and making commission from an affiliate sale.
But I guess now it is my mission to pull some less time intensive niches out of Ebay and write some posts. That will keep me on task and coming back. Plus who knows, I can use the extra cash also, from my test cases. I might even need to test reselling liquidated products, because we need some new electronics. One thing I learned from my Ebay Powerseller past was never to pay retail for anything.
I have some Private Label Rights articles on Ebay also. Now I think I will be just leaving them in queue for the days that I do not want to post my own content. I will use then to flesh out the boring parts. Finding a way to make money = fun. Telling someone step by step how to sign up = boring.
So now it is time to head down that road and see where it goes. There is no time like the present. It will be a case study. Now the domain gets about 5 visitors a day and has a Pagerank of 4. I want to see how fast, with my limited time, I can hit the 200 visitor a day range .The plan is still a little vague, but I can deal with that. Nothing is every perfect. And there is no better way to test it than in the wild.

Been developing for a while, and haven’t made it back here. But I added a new list of sites to study trends or find niches. I have been working really indepth with Filemaker and plan on cleaning and/or adding to each of my site lists.

Lists I plan on adding

• Video sharing/submission sites
• Seo and webmaster podcasts.
• Best WordPress Addins for SEO
• Best Drupal Mods for SEO and ease of use