A daily feed is the cheapest way to become the place people check. This course builds one end to end — three items a day, real sources, published automatically, reviewed by a human, and distributed to social and email without you writing from scratch each morning.
⏱ 7 min read
A content feed is a short, dated, repeating piece of content published on a fixed schedule — typically three items a day, each a few sentences, each linking to a real source. It is not a blog, not a newsletter, and not a news site. It is a habit you offer other people: come here each morning and you will know what happened in this corner of the world.
CLIKT publishes Daily Founder Fuel — three startup items a day for founders, on clikt.com. The shape is deliberate and worth copying: a fixed count, a fixed audience, a fixed time, each item summarised in a few lines with a link to the original. Nothing about it is clever. The value is entirely in it being there every single day with nothing filler in it.
| Daily feed | Weekly blog post | |
|---|---|---|
| Effort per unit | Minutes, mostly automated | Hours |
| Reason to return | Daily habit | Occasional |
| Indexable surface | Grows every day | Grows slowly |
| Newsletter supply | Writes itself from the archive | Needs separate work |
| Social supply | Three posts a day, ready made | One or two a week |
| Weakness | Low value per item; dies if it stops | Each piece can rank on its own |
Four things, in rough order of how fast they arrive. It fills your social calendar, immediately. It builds an email list, because a daily feed is an easy thing to subscribe to. It accumulates indexed pages on a topic, which compounds into topical authority over months. And it makes you the person who pays attention to this subject — which is, in practice, how small agencies get known for a niche.
Two to six hours to build, then five to fifteen minutes a day of human review forever. That last number is the one people underestimate and the one that determines whether the feed survives. A feed with no review step will publish something wrong, dull or embarrassing within a month, and the damage to the habit is worse than the time saved.
It stops. The commonest ending. A feed that publishes for six weeks and then goes quiet is worse than one that never started, because the archive advertises the abandonment. Before you commit, ask honestly whether you can do five minutes every weekday for six months.
It becomes filler. Three items published whether or not three items deserved publishing. Readers detect this quickly, and the fix is a prompt that is allowed to return two.
It gets something wrong. A wrong funding figure or a misattributed quote, published under your name. One is survivable and correctable; a pattern of them is the end of the feed's usefulness. This is what the review step exists to prevent.
⏱ 7 min read
The two decisions in this module are the only ones that are expensive to change later. Spend ten minutes here rather than fixing it in month three.
Three tests, all of which must pass. Is there enough daily material? If you cannot find three genuinely new items on a random Tuesday, the niche is too narrow — try it for a week before committing. Do you care about the audience commercially? A feed read by people who will never buy anything from you is a hobby. Can you hold an opinion? The thing that separates a feed from an aggregator is one line of your own judgement per item, and you can only write that if you understand the space.
Narrow beats broad. "AI news" has a thousand competitors and no identity. "AI tools for small agencies" has a specific reader who will recognise themselves. The niche should be describable in one sentence that names the reader, not the topic.
Three items is the standard for a reason: enough to feel worth opening, few enough to read in ninety seconds, and achievable on a slow news day. Five is sustainable only in a busy niche. One is a tweet.
Fix the anatomy of an item and never vary it:
Publishing time, item count, maximum length, and what is out of scope. Write them down, because they become instructions in the prompt and the thing you check in review. A feed that drifts from three tight items to seven rambling ones has lost the only promise it made.
Give it a name that works as a heading on a page, a subject line and a hashtag. Put it on a subfolder of your main site — yoursite.com/feed-name/ — rather than a separate domain. The subfolder inherits your existing authority and feeds it back; a new domain starts at zero and has to earn trust all over again.
Spend one week collecting candidates by hand, without publishing anything. Ten minutes a morning, a note of every item that would have qualified. At the end you will know three things: whether there is enough material, how long the gathering actually takes, and whether you still find the subject interesting after five consecutive days of it. That last one matters more than people expect.
If the week produces fifteen or more genuinely usable items, the niche supports a daily feed. Eight to fourteen suggests three days a week. Under eight, widen the subject or pick a different one — that is a far cheaper correction now than in month three with an archive to be consistent with.
⏱ 7 min read
The feed is only as good as what goes into it. Garbage sources produce confident, well-formatted garbage — which is worse than nothing, because it looks credible.
Three layers, in descending order of trust:
| Layer | Examples | Use for |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Company blogs, official announcements, regulator and government sites, filings, research papers | Facts. Always prefer these when the story exists in both places. |
| Trade press | Established publications in your niche | Context, analysis, things primary sources don't announce. |
| Aggregators and social | Industry newsletters, forums, a curated list of practitioners | Discovery only — then go find the primary source. |
Most blogs, publications and even many company newsrooms expose an RSS feed — usually at /feed or /rss. An RSS reader or an automation platform's RSS trigger gives you a reliable, structured list of new items without scraping anything. Assemble twenty to forty feeds you trust, and your daily raw material arrives on its own.
Supplement with search for the stories your feeds miss, scoped tightly: your niche terms plus a recency filter. Treat search as the second pass, not the first.
A large share of what circulates in any niche is public relations with a news shape. It is not off-limits — product launches genuinely matter — but say what it is. "X announced Y, which they say does Z" is honest; "X revolutionises the industry" is you doing their marketing for free. Readers notice the difference faster than you would expect, and that noticing is exactly what builds or destroys trust in a daily feed.
One sheet listing every feed and search you draw from, when you added it, and whether it has produced anything useful in the last month. Prune quarterly. A source set that only grows ends up as noise, and noise is what makes a daily feed take an hour instead of ten minutes.
Many sites still have an RSS feed without linking to it. Try /feed, /rss, /feed.xml and /atom.xml on any WordPress or publication site; most will respond. For sites with nothing, an email newsletter sent to a dedicated address can serve the same purpose — the newsletter becomes your source, and your gathering step reads that mailbox.
Start with about fifteen feeds you are confident in rather than forty you half-trust. It is much easier to notice a gap and add a source than to work out which of forty feeds is producing the noise. Review monthly for the first quarter: any feed that has not contributed a published item in four weeks is a candidate for removal.
⏱ 7 min read
This prompt runs every day without supervision. It needs to be far more explicit than something you would type into a chat, because every ambiguity becomes a daily annoyance.
Summarising news in your own words and linking to the source is ordinary, long-established practice. Reproducing paragraphs is not. Three rules keep you clean: write the summary in new sentences, never lift a passage wholesale, and quote sparingly and attributably when exact wording matters. Scraping full articles into your own pages is a different activity with different consequences — do not let the automation drift into it.
Adjectives alone ("friendly, professional") produce the same mush everyone else gets. What works is a short sample of your actual writing included in the prompt, plus a list of specific prohibitions — no "game-changing", no "in today's fast-paced world", no rhetorical questions as openers. Prohibitions do more than aspirations.
Free-form prose has to be parsed before it can be published, and parsing is where daily automations break. Specify the exact keys you want and insist on nothing outside the JSON. Your publishing step then has predictable fields to drop into a template.
Whatever you pass in as candidates should already carry the title, the source name, the URL and the publication date. A model asked to infer a date from the body text will sometimes get it wrong, and a wrong date on a daily feed is a credibility problem rather than a cosmetic one. Structure the input and most of the invention risk disappears before the prompt even runs.
Include recent headlines in the prompt context so the model can avoid repeating itself. Without that, the same story resurfacing on three outlets across a week will be selected three times, and nothing erodes trust in a daily feed faster than a reader recognising yesterday's news in new words.
Before scheduling, run it against yesterday's news — a day whose stories you already know. You are checking selection quality more than writing quality: did it pick the three you would have picked? If it consistently picks differently, the selection rules need the fix, not the voice instructions.
When output is bland, the usual causes are a voice description made of adjectives and a missing "why it matters" instruction. When output is wrong, the causes are a window that is too wide, sources that are too loose, or a missing instruction to prefer primary sources. Diagnose which of the two problems you have before changing anything — they pull in opposite directions.
⏱ 7 min read
Two routes, both solid. Pick on where the rest of your site lives rather than on technical preference.
Register a custom post type for feed entries rather than using regular posts — it keeps the daily items out of your main blog archive and lets you template them separately. The two settings that matter are show_in_rest => true, which exposes it to the REST API, and has_archive => true, which gives you the dated listing page.
For authentication, create a dedicated WordPress user with the Editor role and generate an Application Password for it — a feature built into WordPress core. Your automation authenticates with that, which means you can revoke it without touching your own login. Never put your administrator credentials in an automation.
Then POST the JSON from module four to the REST endpoint for your post type, with status: "draft". Drafts, not published — module six explains why that single word is the most important setting in this course.
Describe what you want in plain language: a daily feed page listing dated entries, each with headline, summary, why-it-matters and an outbound source link; an archive by date; and an RSS feed. Enable its database so entries persist, and have your automation write rows into it. You will get something presentable faster than theming WordPress, at the cost of being a separate property to maintain.
WordPress gives you one automatically; on a custom build you add one. Your own RSS feed is the pipe that feeds your newsletter and your social scheduler later, so it is not optional plumbing — it is the connector between every remaining module.
Whichever platform you use, build the item template once and leave it alone: headline as an H2 or H3, the body, the why-it-matters line visually distinguished, and the source as a named outbound link. Consistency is part of the product — a reader skimming the archive should be able to find the source link in the same place every time.
Mark each day's entry up as an Article or BlogPosting with an accurate datePublished, and show the date on the page. A dated feed is one of the few content types where freshness is the entire proposition, so make it unmistakable to both readers and crawlers.
The archive is the part that compounds, so give it a usable shape: reverse-chronological, paginated, with the date visible on every entry and a month or tag filter once you have a few hundred items. An archive that only shows the last twenty entries wastes the asset you spent a year building.
Link generously to sources and do not fear sending people away; a feed that hoards attention reads as an aggregator trying to be a destination. Open source links in a new tab, and keep them as plain links rather than redirects, so readers can see where they are going.
⏱ 7 min read
Everything so far can run unattended. This module is about the five minutes that must not.
| Time | What happens | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 5:30am | Sources gathered, candidates assembled | Automation |
| 5:40am | Prompt runs, items drafted as JSON | AI |
| 5:45am | Items posted as drafts; you get a notification | Automation |
| 6:15am | Review, edit, approve or kill | You |
| 6:30am | Published; social and newsletter follow | Automation |
The gap between draft and publish is deliberate. Give yourself a comfortable window — thirty to forty-five minutes — so a slow morning does not mean publishing unreviewed or missing the slot entirely.
Hallucinated specifics. A funding figure, a date, a job title that is subtly wrong. This is why checking numbers against the source is the single most important line in the checklist.
Aggregator links. The model cites the site that reported the report. Follow through to the primary source; it is better for your reader and better for your credibility.
Repetition. The same story resurfacing under three headlines across a week. Keep the last seven days' headlines in the prompt context so it can check.
Thin days. Some days there are only two real items. Publishing two with a line saying so is far better than padding to three, and readers trust a feed that admits it.
It will. A source changes its feed URL, a token expires, an API returns an error at 5:40am. Build two small defences: a notification when a run produces zero items (silence is the dangerous failure, not an error message), and a short note on the page saying what the feed is and when it publishes, so a missed day looks like a missed day rather than abandonment.
Daily is a commitment. If after two months the review is a chore and the numbers are flat, moving to three days a week is a legitimate decision and far better than a feed that limps. Say so on the page when you change it.
Five minutes means the drafts must be somewhere you can approve from a phone in bed or at a kitchen table. On WordPress that is the mobile admin or app; on a custom build it means an approve button rather than a database edit. If reviewing requires a laptop and a VPN, the review will be skipped within a fortnight and the whole safeguard evaporates.
Kill it. Do not rewrite a weak item into a passable one at 6:15am — that is how a five-minute review becomes twenty and then stops happening. Two strong items beat three with a filler, and the prompt in module four already permits returning fewer.
Once a week, spend an extra ten minutes looking across the last five days rather than at one. Are you covering the same angle repeatedly? Has a source started dominating? Are the why-it-matters lines saying anything, or have they drifted into restating the headline? Drift is slow and invisible day to day, which is exactly why it needs a weekly look.
⏱ 6 min read
Publishing is not distribution. The feed should produce your social calendar and your newsletter as by-products, not as additional work.
Each item is already a post: the headline, the why-it-matters line, and the source link. Three items a day is three posts, which on most channels is a full schedule without any additional writing.
Two approaches. Manual-but-fast: paste the day's three items into Zoho Social after review and schedule them across the day. Automated: have the publishing step also push each item into your scheduler, through an automation platform if there is no direct integration. Start manual — it takes four minutes, it keeps a human eye on what goes out publicly, and it avoids debugging a social pipeline in week one.
Adapt per channel rather than blasting identical text everywhere: LinkedIn takes the why-it-matters line as the hook with the link in the first comment or the post body, X takes the headline, and a weekly carousel of the best five items is a different and often better-performing asset.
Brevo has an RSS campaign integration: you point it at your feed's RSS URL, choose a template, and it builds and sends a campaign automatically on the schedule you set, or when new content appears. That is why module five insisted on having an RSS feed — it turns your newsletter into configuration rather than work.
Three practical notes from Brevo's own documentation. It pulls a maximum of ten articles per campaign, so a daily feed suits a daily or weekly digest rather than a monthly one. Publish at least an hour before the campaign is scheduled, or new items will not be picked up. And if there is nothing new in the feed, no campaign is created — which is the behaviour you want.
| Cadence | Suits | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Daily send | Fast-moving niches, high-intent readers | Higher unsubscribes; must be genuinely short |
| Weekly digest | Most feeds | Less immediate, much easier to sustain as a habit |
| Both, as a choice | Once you have a few hundred subscribers | Two lists to manage |
Say on the form exactly what arrives and how often — "three items, every weekday morning" or "the week's best five, Fridays". Mismatched expectations are the main driver of early unsubscribes, and they are entirely preventable with one line of copy.
Each item lives in three places: an indexed page on your site, a social post, and a line in an email. One piece of work, three surfaces, and the archive keeps earning after the news is stale. That is the whole economic argument for the format.
Point every channel at the same canonical page rather than republishing the full item text elsewhere. The social post carries the hook and a link; the newsletter carries the summary and a link. Pasting entire items into LinkedIn or Medium creates duplicate versions competing with your own archive, which is exactly the asset you are trying to build.
After a month you have roughly sixty items, which is raw material for things that outlast the daily cycle: a monthly "what actually mattered" round-up, a trends piece built from your own coverage, a reference page on a sub-topic you have returned to repeatedly. These are the pieces that rank and get cited, and they cost almost nothing because the research is already done and already yours.
⏱ 6 min read
A feed earns in one of four ways. Most never try, and most that try start too early — the sequence below is roughly the order these become viable.
The simplest and, for an agency, usually the largest. The feed demonstrates that you pay attention to a subject, and the people who read it daily are exactly the people who hire you for it. The mechanics are unglamorous: a clear line on every page saying what you do, a visible way to contact you, and one relevant call to action in the newsletter footer. No audience threshold required — fifty of the right readers can be worth more than five thousand of the wrong ones.
If your niche involves tools, software or books, affiliate links produce modest, steady revenue. Two rules: disclose every affiliate link plainly, and never let the commission decide what gets covered. The moment a reader suspects item selection is for sale, the feed's only real asset is gone.
The classic newsletter model: one sponsor per send, a clearly labelled block, sold by the week or month. You will need a simple media kit — subscriber count, open rate, who the readers are, what a slot costs, and a screenshot of where it appears.
Free daily feed, paid weekly analysis or a database. Only works when you have something genuinely scarce — your own data, your own judgement, access people cannot get elsewhere. Summarised public news does not become premium by putting a price on it.
Months one to three: publish daily, build the habit, grow the list slowly, expect no revenue. Months four to six: lead generation starts producing conversations, affiliates trickle. Months six to twelve: sponsorship becomes sellable if the niche is right. Anyone promising faster is selling you something.
One page, honest numbers: subscriber count, open rate, who the readers are (role, company size, region), publishing cadence, where the sponsor block appears, and the price. Include a screenshot. Resist the temptation to round up — sponsors who buy on inflated numbers do not renew, and in a narrow niche word travels.
Consistency plus judgement. The automation supplies consistency; you supply judgement, one line per item, five minutes a day. A feed that is merely consistent is an aggregator competing with free tools. A feed with a recognisable point of view is the thing people subscribe to, quote, and eventually pay for.
⏱ ~6 min
Answer all ten, then score yourself. Explanations appear after scoring.
All consulted October 2026. Search, AI and platform products change fast — check the primary documentation before acting on anything time-sensitive.
We build and run these end to end — sourcing, prompt, publishing pipeline, review step, social and newsletter distribution — and hand you a feed that only needs five minutes of your morning.
Setup takes days, not weeks, and the retainer covers the part nobody enjoys: keeping it running.
CLIKT.com: Northeast Ohio web, SEO & AI since 1996.