Setting up RSS Feeds for YouTube & Google Plus
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or better known as Really Simple Syndication.
RSS uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information like blog entries, news headlines, audio and video.
RSS Feeds are great because they are updated when new content arrives.
So each time you create a Hangout Video, it is automatically posted to your YouTube account and Google Plus page.
Since we will be pumping content to YouTube & Google Plus regularly, we need to know their corresponding RSS Feeds.
How to get your YouTube Channel’s RSS Feed
This tutorial is updated June 18, 2015
Recently, YouTube shut down their old API and moved to a new API. Because of this, the old way of getting a YouTube RSS feed no longer works.
Here’s the latest way you can get your RSS feeds for YouTube.
There are 2 RSS feeds we can get for YouTube:
• https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME
• https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID
For Hangout Millionaire use, we just need to retrieve the Channel ID.
1. To do this, let’s log in to YouTube
2. Then click on your Profile icon > click on the cogwheel icon to go to YouTube settings
3. Under Account Information, click on Advanced
4. In the Advanced page, under Account Information, you will see User ID and Channel ID. Copy the YouTube Channel ID in a text file as we will use this to create your rss feed.
5. Now that we have the Channel ID, let’s go back to the template.
So here’s the YouTube Channel ID and here’s the template.
So we need to copy the Channel ID and replace this code in the template.
6. To test if it’s correct, open your Internet Explorer browser and enter your YouTube Channel RSS feed.
Please note that if it’s a brand new channel and you haven’t uploaded a video yet, you will surely get an error page. To solve this, please make sure you upload a video and wait for a couple of hours before checking the RSS feed.
It doesn’t mean that you get the 500 error, it’s no longer working. All you need to do is upload a video in order for the RSS feed to be generated.
Let’s now get the RSS Feed of our Google Plus Page.
1. First, let’s get our Google Plus ID by logging in to plus.google.com
2. Then, go to Profile.
3. On the browser address bar, you will typically see a random set of numbers listed. Highlight and copy this. This is your Google Plus User ID.
4. Next, go to plusfeed.frosas.net then paste the User ID then click Get the Feed button.
5. You now have your Google Plus RSS Feed. Document this on your text file for future reference as we will be using this later.
Once you have your RSS feeds, you can then post these RSS feeds to as many RSS Aggregators as you like. The Rss Aggregators host your feed on their site, meaning, you get a bunch of backlinks to the content inside your RSS Feed, being your new Hangout videos. This helps them index faster and rank even higher.
Here’s a list of RSS Aggregators where you can post your RSS Feeds to:
feedage.com
goldenfeed.com
blogdigger.com
rssmicro.com
rssmotron.com
icerocket.com
feedagg.com
rss2.com
html2rss.com
Some of these sites require you to register a free account while others do not.
Post your Google Plus RSS feed to these sites to generate a lot more powerful backlinks to your HangOut Video and at the same time get some traffic in the process.
Other than posting to the RSS Aggregators, you can also use these RSS feeds in IFTTT, OnlyWire & Dlvr.it.