You can’t argue with the stats:
Videos are an important marketing strategy that most marketers want to do even more of. But if you don’t have a huge marketing budget to create your own unique videos, how can you take part in video marketing?
One way is to curate videos on your site. Just like curating other types of content, curated video websites are a great way to help your readers find better content (and maybe make a little money yourself).
You might be under the impression that it’s going to take you a ton of time to curate videos, though. Thankfully, with the right tools, that’s not the case at all.
And in this post, I’m going to show you how MondoPlayer and WP RSS Aggregator can help you curate videos on autopilot. Yup! Once you set up your targeted video feeds, you can bring in juicy new video content without any manual work. Keep reading to learn how…
What Does MondoPlayer Do?
MondoPlayer is a freemium service that takes the form of an iOS and Android app (MondoPlayer has since released web-based app that works on your computer, as well) that helps you quickly discover and curate quality video content. You can browse by categories or keywords to find videos from a whole range of sources not named YouTube, which is especially important because the creators note that “70% of web videos are not on YouTube.”
All that means that if you want the best selection of videos, you can’t necessarily just head to YouTube and start plugging in search terms.
At the time of writing this post, MondoPlayer searches out videos from over 6,730 different sources.
Once you find some keyword terms or categories that produce quality videos you want to curate, you can create something called an Autopilot. As the name suggests, an autopilot puts your curation process on…well, autopilot.
That is, it automatically curates new videos at specific time(s) that you can choose. You can send these curated videos to a variety of different services. But the one that we’re especially interested in is the ability to create your own RSS feed from your curated videos.
Which brings me to my next point…
How Does MondoPlayer Integrate With WordPress?
Because MondoPlayer lets you create your own custom-targeted RSS feed, you can then easily import those videos into your WordPress blog as actual posts using WP RSS Aggregator and its Feed to Post add-on.
In the following tutorial, I’ll show you exactly how to get the whole setup working.
Pulling it Together: How to Automatically Curate Videos With MondoPlayer and WP RSS Aggregator
Ok, before we get started, let me quickly lay out everything that you’ll need to put your video curation on autopilot. Here’s the rundown:
- A working WordPress site. It goes without saying, but none of this is going to work without WordPress.
- WP RSS Aggregator plugin and the premium Feed to Post add-on
- MondoPlayer Pro plan. While MondoPlayer does have a free plan, you need the Pro plan for its autopilot feature. You can get a free 14-day trial to check it out, though.
- The MondoPlayer app on your smartphone. You need this to actually choose what types of videos you want to curate. The app itself is free for both iOS and Android. You can also use the new MondoPlayer web app. The interface is fairly similar to the smartphone app, so you should be able to still follow along with my instructions below. The web interface offers an easier approach for those who don’t like working on a smartphone or tablet.
Once you’ve got all of that squared away, here’s how to get everything set up.
Step 1: Create a New Autopilot Inside the MondoPlayer App
Before you create your Autopilot, I recommend playing around with MondoPlayer’s search feature to get an idea of what types of videos your soon-to-be-chosen keywords will actually turn up.
Once you narrow down the keywords that you want to use for your feed, you need to click on the Add Autopilot button on the homepage of the MondoPlayer smartphone app.
On the next screen, you can choose all of the details for your autopilot:
In the Selected Search Terms section at the top, you can add one or more search terms from which to curate videos. Make sure to add each term separately.
Below that, in the Schedule Posts option, you can choose how often you want to curate new videos. You can choose every day, specific days, or multiple times per day at different times.
In Send Posts to This Service, it’s important that you choose the RSS option so that WP RSS Aggregator can import the posts from your custom RSS feed.
Once you select that option, you’ll need to add a new Feed for the autopilot to add videos to. These feeds are specific to MondoPlayer and allow you to create different autopilots that send videos to the same feed (if you want).
I also recommend checking the box for Only Videos With Thumbnails, as it will make your curated feed look more polished.
Once you’re done, click Save. In addition to displaying the Feed URL in the app, MondoPlayer will also email you a link to your feed:
Step 2: Tell WP RSS Aggregator to Import Your New Feed
Now that you’ve got a working video feed, you’re ready to tell WP RSS Aggregator to import your brand new feed of video content.
To do that, head to your WordPress site and go to RSS Aggregator → Add New.
At the top, enter the RSS feed URL from MondoPlayer in the URL box. I’m choosing my Celebrity video feed so that I have tons of examples for my test site.
You should also make sure to turn the Link to Source option On so that you give proper credit to the original creator:
Scroll down to the Feed to Post – General box. Here, you can choose whether you want to automatically publish new videos or save them as a draft (that you’ll then need to manually approve before a video gets published).
You should also make sure to check the Allow Embedded Content box so that you can embed a variety of videos:
Further down, in Feed to Post – Images, you should check the Remove featured image from post content box to avoid duplicate featured images:
And below that, in Feed to Post – Taxonomies, you can assign a default category for your videos. For example, I created a Videos category to house all of my imported videos:
You can configure some other settings about authorship and appended/prepended content. But none of those settings are necessary to the functioning of your feed.
If you need more detailed instructions, MondoPlayer has a whole Bootcamp course that goes through the process with video explanations.
Step 3: Check Out Your New Curated Video Feed!
Once you publish your new feed, your curated video feed should be good to go! If you chose to save new videos as drafts, you’ll need to manually approve videos before they show up on the front-end of your site.
Once that’s done, you’ll see a feed of your videos. Depending on how your theme handles excerpts, visitors may need to click through to view videos (like on my test site):
As new video items come in from your MondoPlayer RSS feed, WP RSS Aggregator will add them to your site according to the settings that you selected.
Wrapping Things Up
Once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to curate videos with MondoPlayer and WP RSS Aggregator. If you want to take things further, you can set up multiple RSS feeds with MondoPlayer and import them to different categories on your site with WP RSS Aggregator. It’s up to you!
Just remember, to get up and running, you’re going to need these four things:
- A working WordPress site
- WP RSS Aggregator and the Feed to Post add-on
- MondoPlayer smartphone app for iOS or Android, or the MondoPlayer web app.
- MondoPlayer Pro plan
If you have any questions, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to help out!
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