How To Create Buzz-Targeted RSS-Based Niche News Sites

Creating profitable buzz-targeted niche news sites (shooting stars sites) is an additional route expert newsmasters and RSS news geeks can take to further diversify and extend their income streams.

Leaving to you the breadth and range of possible topics that can be covered by this approach, the interesting issue is to understand how such sites can be built with extreme simplicity, while becoming rapidly very relevant on major search engines due to the very high ratio of relevant links to content that these types of sites are able to achieve.

Once you identify a current buzz, issue, person or event that is very hot in the world news now, you need only to identify the best online blogs and RSS-based news sources that cover those topics. Syndic8, Bloglines, Feedster, PubSub, Daypop and the RSSTop55 all offer great starting point to get to them.

By then selectively aggreating and appropriately filtering that set of RSS feeds you are creating the ultimate meta-resource of breaking news on that very buzz-topic.

If properly set up, your resource can be easily indexed by the major search engines and given much higher relevancy than more established sites, thanks to the high frequency of new content appearing on it and to the comprehensive representation of outbound links to relevant and highly ranked resources on that topic.

Complemented by one of the growing number of contextual advertising services such as Google AdSense and by related Amazon Associate books/CDs/DVDs, this niche news site can provide an impressive return for the effort required to set it up (1-3 days).

Here is Stephan Miller reporting on how he accidentally discovered this approach as he was experimenting with finding related keywords to the top most popular ones.

"...shooting star types.

A key phrase, a name, or a term that becomes a buzz very quickly.

I created a site just to test how many hits I could get related to the top 200 search terms from Wordtracker.

I expanded these terms using Overture's keyword tool and then gathered related RSS feeds and place them on my site.

I then just sat back and watched mainly because I had no idea what would happen.

What happened was I received no less than 2000 hits from the search engines containing the term "Kari Ann Peniche" this month. You know, the pageant winner that lost her crown by appearing in Playboy.

Now this is something that I didn't expect from a website that was just an experiment.

I couldn't have expected it. I just picked up news feeds that contained her name.

She created a buzz.

A buzz that my RSS feed based site caught a week before anyone else did."

Technique excerpted from:"Nuthin' New Except Search"
by Stephan Miller
October 25 2004