Blog Assist: How to set up news feeds for re-blogging content on the web

Don't know how to get a blog post started? Add value to your site with piggyback trending topics on the web

Blog Assist is a feature we've added to our Agentfire sites that's there to help you find articles that you can essentially re-blog with your own unique content.

The model is similar to LifeHacker.com and HuffingtonPost.com, where a lot of the articles published on these sites are actually summaries of articles or posts elsewhere, where a writer writes a summary, description, or opinion of the piece and then links back to the original article in question.

So with our blog assist, you can add Feeds, to your website similar to a Feed reader. Examples of feeds would include New York Times Real Estate, Inman Real Estate, Home and Garden TV's blog, etc. As long as the site has an rss feed, which most news / blog sites do, we can take that feed, and feed it into your back-end.

In your admin dashboard, head over to: Settings> AgentFire Settings> Blog Assist

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This will open up the window with the existing connected feeds, and as well the ability to add new ones. You will need to expand the panel before you start working in it.

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All you need to do is to give your feed a name, paste the URL of the Feed and press "Add Feed".

How to use Blog Assist

Once we've got some other sites feeding into our blog assist, you can navigate to General Content > Blog Assist > Add New Blog Post post to scan stories from those feeds, again very similar to a Feed Reader

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A new window will open with the scanned posts from the available feeds.

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You can click the title of any of the stories that interest you to open the story in a separate window. If you decide you want to blog about a particular article, go ahead and click Blog About This next to the article 

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This will create a new post, with the attribution to the original article at the bottom of the visual editor.

Above the attribution, you should write your own title, unique description, summary, or opinion of the article.

As always, don't forget to categorize your post and set a featured image!