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Using RSS for your Bonanzle store ( or other purposes )

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RSS, what it is, and ways to use it to promote your online store

My focus with this lens is how to use the RSS functionality built into Bonanzle.

Topics include what RSS is, how Bonanzle provides RSS feeds, how to customize the RSS feed provided by Bonanzle, and how to make use of an RSS feed to get the word out on your store.

As a matter of course, I will link an example from my own site as well as show how to display your RSS feed in a squidoo.

Contents at a Glance

Really Simple Syndication - RSS : What i...
Liberty Unchained's Bonanzle Booth - Def...
Showing your Bonanzle feed on a Squidoo...
Silver Age Comics from Liberty Unchained
Adding your store RSS to your blog or we...
Show off an RSS page you have setup.

A powerful tool if used correctly.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

It is a method for publishing information to other places on the web or even directly to people who are interested in what you have and decided to subscribe to your RSS feed.

A lot of people find it a little confusing because the uses of it are not typically spelled out very well, even though you can find it on blogs, stores ( such as eCrater or Bonanzle ), news sites, or pretty much anywhere else where information is added randomly.

Used properly it can, to an extent, take the place of a newsletter.

The Bonanzle Feed
If you go to your Bonanzle booth and view it as other people do, you will find your RSS feed on the right side under "Booth Toolbox", listed as "Items RSS Feed".

The format in bonanzle is http://www.bonanzle.com/booths/rss/BOOTH_NAME where BOOTH_NAME is the name of your booth.

Click the rss icon for your booth and you will see the default display of your RSS in your browser. Depending on your browser, you might see a link at the top which reads something like "Subscribe Now" along with a choice of readers to use.

Programs to read RSS
Personally, as I run windows on this machine, I use a standalone, free program called FeedReader (pictured above) to keep up on sites that I am interested in...though any feed reading program will work just fine. Some people prefer online feed reading sites so they can keep up on things from anywhere. When I feel like looking into certain things, instead of maintaining a large list of bookmarks or trying to remember where I saw certain things, I just open my rss feed program and browse over whatever I feel like.

Getting people to subscribe to your feed
If you are running a store, then anyone who subscribes to your feed will see any and all items that you add to it.

If you are running a blog, then anyone who subscribes to your blogs feed will see whatever articles you put up.

Personally, I have found the better route to be to run a blog and, in addition to writing about whatever relates to a store, adding notes in whenever I add a lot of new items, unusual items, or am having a special...or bonanza.

The hard part, of course, is getting people to subscribe to your feed. As a lot of people are unfamiliar with them ( or feed reading programs ), it can be helpful to link an overview of feeds for your customers or write up a description yourself, explaining the use of rss. I put a quick explanation up on one of my blogs here.

Liberty Unchained's Bonanzle Booth - Default RSS

This is what you see using the default RSS setting for your booth

Notice that it shows the most recent items added to your booth, regardless of category.

Below I will show how to get your RSS feed to display on a squidoo lens and how to get it displayed on your own web site with freely available tools.

I have the list below setup to show everything in my booths rss feed. You can also set it up to show a bit less information or even just the title.

Showing your Bonanzle feed on a Squidoo Lens

See the example directly above this.

If you do not have your own web site or blog, you can still put RSS to work for you in a variety of ways, two of which I will cover here.

RSS to Squidoo
With Squidoo, displaying a RSS feed is quite trivial.

To do so, simply create a lens ( or edit an existing lens ), and add an "RSS: Add your blog" module.

Fill in the url to your feed ( which can be gotten by clicking the RSS icon ), set how much information you want displayed for each items, and how many items you want to display, and you are good to go.

One thing to notice is that using rss inside of a web page slows it down a bit as when the page loads, the rss module has to load the feed page, parse it, and then render it...so if you want snappy pages, you might want to either avoid displaying feeds on such pages or do some research on more advanced feed topics such as caching feeds on a regular basis ( which consists of grabbing a feed, parsing it, and storing the results as a file on your web server to serve up directly...and then automating the process to occur once per hour, day, or as often as you want ).

A problem
One problem with using the default feed is that it will only display those items most recently listed to your page or Bonanzle store...including every item from every category.

If you sell a variety of types of items and your lens deals only with one particular type, then you might want to display only that kind of item.

While there is not currently fine grained control over feeds from Bonanzle, you can limit the feed to a particular built in category ( sorry, no use of custom categories yet ).

To do so, all you need to do is take the default feed syntax and add the category id to it like the following (X is the category id):

http://www.bonanzle.com/booths/rss/BOOTH_NAME?category_id=X

Getting the category ID
Getting the category ID is fairly simple, though non-obvious to those who are not familiar with how web pages and urls work on the web.

Go to Bonanzle.com

Select "Buy" at the top.

You should see a "Browse popular categories" box on the left side.

If you want a category displayed there, either right click the category, select properties, and look for category_id=Y OR place your mouse over the category and look at the url displayed along the bottom of your browser for category_id=Y. Y will be the category_id to use.

If you want a different category, select "See all categories" at the bottom of the "Browse popular categories" list, and find the category you are looking for.

If you want a sub-category, just click the category you want ( say you want Toys and Hobbies -> Games -> Roleplaying Games -> Horror ) then keep choosing the further sub-categories at the left side where it reads "Filter Categories" until you find what you are looking for.

Once you have your category, mouse over it or select properties as described above to read the id for the category.

Once you have your category ID, you can then show those specific types of items only. For example, below is a squidoo rss feed for only silver aged comics in by booth ( category id 73 )

Silver Age Comics from Liberty Unchained

By way of tagging a category_id to the rss feed

The URL used:
http://www.bonanzle.com/booths/rss/LibertyUnchained?category_id=73

Adding your store RSS to your blog or web site

A bit harder, but it can be very nice.

Typically, simply displaying items on your blog or web site is better left to the Bonanzle Widget, covered in more detail on my Bonanzle Marketing Basics lens.

However, if you setup a custom page ( or are running your own site with WordPress or some other locally installed blog software you have control over ), you can keep a display up of the latest items you have put up or, alternately, the most recent items of a particular type on pages related to them.

If you have a splash page on your site ( an initial page people reach before hitting your blog or news ), you might setup a piece of that page to display your most recent additions.

If you have a blog and publish articles related to different types of things you tend to sell, you might customize the template for the blog and setup a space containing a short rss feed...however you should remember that doing so will slow down load times. A better way to go ( in my opinion ) is to only place an rss display on static pages.

When I setup rss on my sites or blogs ( I run my own, rather than relying on third party services being offended or closing shop without notice ), I use a nice little utility called rss2html, available from FeedForAll.

With rss2html, you simply follow the included instructions to get it setup. You will want your feed in xml, so if your feed does not have such an option, you will need to use a third party tool such as feedburner.com to claim your feed and have it export xml.

Fortunately, Bonanzle does put the feed out as xml.

Then you find the location on a page where you want your feed to display and:

Specify what feed to pull

Specify what template to use for your feed
. see below for template information

Specify the number of items you want to show

Call the rss2html.php file to make it load on your page.

In your page (provided your server supports php), you would enter the following:

$XMLFILE = "http://www.bonanzle.com/booths/rss/YourBoothName?format=xml&category_id=X";
$TEMPLATE = "./mytemplate.html";
$MAXITEMS = "7";
include("./rss2html.php");

The above assumes that your template file and the rss2html.php script is in the same directory as your page...as that is the simplest method for those unfamiliar with such things.

The template
Depending on the information provided by your feed, you can setup your templates however you want. Instructions are provided with rss2html.

The first thing to do is to go to your feed on Bonanzle and view the source for the feed page ( typically by right clicking the page and selecting view source, selecting "View->Page Source", or something similiar ).

Doing so will show you the xml format output...and all of the fields you can use to create a template. The fields for each template are inside of the ITEM tags. For bonanzle, the following fields are provided by the feed:

title

link

description

price

price_type

quantity

enclosure

The instructions for rss2html were fairly decent. Just remember to start small and then play around with things once you have them working properly.

An example
As I am currently working on setting up a second domain, instead of leaving a blank site or a cheesy "under construction tag", I opted to setup a feed to my bonanzle booth as the main index.

I customized the display using style sheets in the template, but this should give a good idea of what you might see. You could set it up inside of a table, using a style defined section of the page, etc. As I have no site there at the moment, I simply have it displaying the entire page.

Final thoughts on RSS display via a blog or web site
As you can see, you can use your rss feed to keep lists of items on your own site.

Combine that with the category_id=X bit and you could easily setup a few pages on your own site displaying the most recent items from each category in your store.

If you run a WordPress blog, I know for a fact that it has the ability to add rss widgets...but as I generally prefer to use the bonanzle widget at this point, I do not make use of that functionality yet.

Show off an RSS page you have setup.

Bonanzle, eCrater, or otherwise

Show people the types of things you can do with RSS on your own web sites or blogs.

Please, no default feeds. Just pages that you have embedded rss feeds into to display different things.

And if you have a web site and would like such a page setup, look me up on Bonanzle and maybe we can work something out.

I took my example page down as I am in the middle of a domain switch. Sorry!

Using RSS for your Bonanzle store ( or other purposes )

RSS, what it is, and ways to use it to promote your online store

Contents at a Glance

Contents at a Glance

Really Simple Syndication - RSS : What is it?

A powerful tool if used correctly.

Liberty Unchained's Bonanzle Booth - Default RSS

This is what you see using the default RSS setting for your booth

Showing your Bonanzle feed on a Squidoo Lens

See the example directly above this.

Silver Age Comics from Liberty Unchained

By way of tagging a category_id to the rss feed

Adding your store RSS to your blog or web site

A bit harder, but it can be very nice.

Show off an RSS page you have setup.

Bonanzle, eCrater, or otherwise

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Please pick your widget size and display. Then click "Make the Widget" to get the code that's just right for you.

Voila! Just copy and paste this code into your own site. Have fun!

Oopsey! Please login to Squidoo in order to add this module to your lens.

Adding Bonanzle items to Explorz

A mirrored venue to display your items

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by LibertyUnchained

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