Are You Monetizing Your RSS Feeds?
I first heard about “RSS” back in 2005, with all the hype about how RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds are the future of online marketing. I admit I had no idea what it was and bought into the hype as well, figuring what was good for the masses was good for me. Fast forward a few years, and although I use RSS feeds on my main blogs and other sites, the truth about “making money” with RSS feeds has come one full circle.
The truth is simple. Let me lay it down for you:
- Readers love RSS for it allows them easy access to your content via “feed readers”, mobile devices and even directly from their Firefox browsers.
- RSS feeds eats blog traffic as once someone is comfortable reading your blog content via RSS, there’s no real reason for them to visit your blog.
- RSS feeds eat potential revenue since not all blog advertising programs work for feeds, and if your readers are accessing your content via RSS will mostly see an ad-free version of your blog. Good for them, not too good for you.
- Content thieves love RSS too, as they can easily grab your entire blog content and post it to their spam blogs. Your unique content is duplicated while they pocket all the revenue from “borrowing” your content.
While RSS is a great tool for blogging, it’s notoriously hard to monetize. As most CPM / CPC ads depend on page impressions or clicks, they are largely limited to your blog pages and not your RSS feeds. Because of the ad-free content feeds, you’re leaving lots of money on the table.
I’m not suggesting that your “block” your RSS feeds in any way because if you care about your reader’s experience, you have to give them what they want. Forcing them to visit your blog pages instead of accessing your RSS feeds can alienate a vast majority of readers.
On the other hand, affiliate marketing is perfectly suited to RSS feeds, since any link in your actual blog post will also appear as links in your RSS feeds. Therefore if you write a good post and promote an affiliate product, response from your RSS readers are likely to be just as effective (if not more effective) as readers finding your blog posts via search engines.
Plus, anyone stealing your content now becomes your “friend” of sorts because your syndicated and duplicated feeds usually contain your affiliate link. Thieves are too lazy to remove them, so you benefit from your stolen content as well. It’s more than just a consolation – it’s sweet revenge as a sure-fire way to get more affiliate sales.
MBP Ninja Affiliate allows you to automatically convert keywords in your content to affiliate links that you can cloak, track and manage from one central location.
This takes affiliate marketing via RSS feeds one step further by automating the entire process. That leaves you with total freedom to write great content while knowing that your specified keywords will be automatically converted to keywords, making money for you for months or even years to come.
All you have to do is enter an affiliate link, give it a name and redirect URL, then click on “Convert Keywords to Ninja Links”. Then, you specify your keywords and everything else happens automatically. The keyword-to-link conversion happens for both previous and future blog content. If your blog already has a few thousand pages, this is incredibly powerful. Plus the fact that you can change keywords and affiliate links any time you want without any hassle makes it any affiliate blogger’s dream weapon.
Remember that in-content hyperlinks work far better than any contextual ad program out there. Readers see in-content links (even if they are affiliate links) as related content and are more likely to click on it. Just make sure you’re tracking everything so you’re never in the dark about which affiliate programs are working and which ones to dump.
Great for the reader, and great for you. I love win-win situations, don’t you?
TweetThis
|
Digg |
Stumble
|
Sphinn |
Del.icio.us
|
“RSS feeds eats blog traffic” thats right. I think its dangerous for blogs. Everyone wants to read Feeds, but no blogs…
That’s not right. from feed we read the topic. And from the blog we read the full content. Its will blast your traffic.
see http://videoblog.patromax.com
It all depends on your Word Press CMS Settings. You can set your feed to publish the post in full, or just as title. Go under “Reading” Settings in your WP Admin Screen, and select “Full Text” or “Summary.”
With the Advanced Excerpt WP Plugin, you can even determine exactly how many keywords or characters you want to be displayed in your feed summaries.
If you have set your reading settings to “Summary,” then yes, people will click the “Read more” link or Title permalink (if set)to get to the rest of the story.
Otherwise, if you set to “Full Text,” the reader will just read the full post from their own reader. Both have benefits, and it all depends on what your initial objectives are.
Summaries drive traffic from directory type websites; whereas, full text drives traffic from other websites looking to publish feeds with full text content. Both have equal benefits and disadvantages.
However, if full text is selected on your WP CMS, it will depend on the actual content and how interesting it is to the reader, as to whether they visit your blog afterwards. Or just follow the links within your post altogether.
Think of summaries as a teaser to get people to click on your story back at your blog. And full text as a method to acquiring website partnerships for publishing your content on a continuous basis. Both are equally effective, but cater directly to two completely different demographics.
If you use your primary blog feed for rss submissions,it really doesn’t matter, because when your post is read in a rss reader, the reader will click on the links just as if they had visited your blog.
Whether they click on your links in a rss reader or on your blog will give you the same results. RSS Feeds were created partly to combat the need for site visitors to constantly bookmark every page.
With a RSS feed, the reader can get all the site content in one place, without worrying if they are missing anything. In a busy world, push technologies such as RSS feeds are very convenient sources for information.
There is some good food for thought on this post. something that I will have to give consideration too.
Walt AKA All Sports on the Web
All Sports on the Web
I too admitt that I don’t know much about RSS apart from the fact that I know it’s a quick way for people to read and they often subscribe to my feed via Feedburner!
Making money from it? Had no clue until I read this post! Interesting!
“Readers love RSS for it allows them easy access to your content via “feed readers”, mobile devices and even directly from their Firefox browsers.”
i think the only reason why people love to read rss feads is, because there are no anoying advertisment.
but, what do I care?
This is real good informaton and for me, it puts Ninja Affiliate in a totally new and different light. Looks like I’ll have to put it on my “Buy Now” List.
samDman
http://urfortuneshere.com/makemoneyonline
I also was not aware there are ways to make $$$ thru the RSS - seems like a really good idea - hoping to learn more about this.
Not only can you insert your own links, but you can also insert your own banners, and other ad networks, such as Google Adsense. What ever is in your feed goes everywhere the feed goes.
This includes inserting registration forms to newletters, free giveaways and such to get people to directly optin to your email list while reading your feed on some other website across the globe.
Think of RSS Feeds as a method of packaging your complete website content and sending it to other websites all over the world. RSS Feeds allow you to unobtrusively publish your content and ads to other websites; without having to directly ask and bother otherwise very busy website owners.
RSS Feeds started to take off in 2005 as a vehicle for Internet Marketing. And today, they are a very welcomed method of populating other websites. Also, your RSS Feeds are monetized by other websites, by placing ads with in your feed. And on the sidebars of other blogs relating to content within your feed.
There are a whole host of methods to monetizing RSS Feeds, and not just your own. If you want to see how it is done, publish your feed in RSS Directories. Then give it about two weeks and do a search in Google to see all the places your backlinks show up. Visit each site and see how they are using your feeds.
Then you’ll be able to duplicate some of the better methods and see how it works for you.
>Readers love RSS
I think this depends on your blog readership. Many low tech newbies just haven’t caught hold of using RSS feeds yet and prefer reading blog site pages and emails feeds.
Your plugin looks great for affiliate links and I can see how these links would be great in RSS feeds. One of my problems is discovering good/profitable affiliate programs to try out for the equine industry. Any pointers on affiliate searching?
I think RSS is the way to go. I get a ton of great traffic and loyalty from mine. Just my two cents.
Duke Daley
I am still very much a newbie and am learning something new every day.
I was not sure about RSS feeds, as I wanted my readers (when I get some) to visit my site. Now I can see some benefit for using RSS feeds.
I am using a plugin called alinks which is a free open source plugin for the WordPress blogging platform that automates the task of creating links in your blog posts using keywords of your choice.. available from http://alinks.headzoo.com/
I like RSS feed very much;
1.my blog get regular contents from established bloggers and marketers that my readers can benefit through my site
2.i use RSS feed to syndicate between my various blogs-i just need to enter once and it appears in all other relevant sites.
cheers
[…] Are You Monetizing Your RSS Feeds? […]
In Internet and Affiliate Marketing, one uses many strategies to increase traffic, to pre sell and lastly monetize. RSS feeds is one of the many strategies one uses to do all the above. To monitor exactly how much RSS monetizes would be a tedious thing to do manually.I am sure if there is a software designed for that purpose,the answer would be easy.
cheers
Want to know how much your RSS Feed is making you? Here’s one method:
1.Use WP Blog. (duh?)
2.Use NAP (double duh?)
3. Use WP Plugin: http://perishablepress.com/press/2006/08/07/category-livebookmarks-plus/
4.Create separate child categories for each affiliate campaign. ie. Product Name RSS.
5. In NAP set up a new campaign. Read the manual.
If u look at the ad results and your own log records, you will be able to see how many clicks are being made on the links in each rss feed.
The first question that comes to your mind is ,”How do I know if they clicked the link on my blog or the rss feed link? Easy, don’t list the category as a link in your blog. You can search for the WP Plugin that does this, which excludes whatever categories you do not want showing up on your blog.
When you either use NAP or your own log records, you will see clicks from these categories not displayed on your blog. Therefore the only way the clicks happened and the page visits counted are only coming from links in the rss feeds.
Now you want to know how much you made? Go to your Affiliate Account and there should be a record of all page referrers. You will be able to most likely export this information as a csv file and sort it in Excel to determine precisely how much you made from all the clicks in each rss feed.
Pretty good stuff to know and an excellent insightful question Hamid!
I dont know much about RSS, Can someone please clarify for me to maximize my earnings?
Hi Kuborite, same as you, i am unsure about RSS…anyone care to enlighten?
Real easy Pohheng & Kuborite. RSS is a push technology, meaning if you have a blog, otherwise known as a Content Management System, they all are programmed to display a xml file. This is a database file which can be retrieved automatically on any web page on another website. Simply by inserting the url address of the actual feed from your website blog.
So you don’t have to do anything, WP already has this done for you. All you have to do is copy the feed url and submit it to as many RSS Directories as you can.
Other websites, you don’t even know about have automated scripts which look for keyword specific content geared towards their own content. This keeps their visitors happy with fresh new relevant content. This way the webmaster doesn’t have to worry about creating content all the time.
In order to keep the ball rolling, the webmaster of the other site will place a url of the RSS directory which has in it to only publish on his website keyword specific content from that RSS directory.
So if you are talking about learning Spanish on your website for example and you have submitted your blog feed to that RSS Directory; then automatically, your content will be displayed on every website that subscribed to have published on their website with content about learning Spanish.
And along with your content comes your links which can direct all the visitors of these other websites directly to the Parent website which is selling “Learn Spanish. That would be the site you signed up as an affiliate.
So visitors don’t even have to visit your website for you to even make a sale. They don’t even have to know you exist, or how ugly your website is. Because they won’t even be visiting it.
All you have to do is keep writing and publishing on your blog. Once you have the feed submitted to each RSS Directory, every time you publish just one post, it will automatically appear across hundreds and even thousands of other websites.
Cool hey? And if you look at my above comment today, you can see how to set up many RSS feeds on your blog for each product and campaign. You can then submit hundreds of RSS feeds from just one blog.
Start thinking HUGE! If you have 20 different products and feeds and make 20 short one paragraph posts a day, you will be able to stop your day job asap.
To conclude: Read my above post, get the plugin that causes you to have an automatic feed for each category. Submit each feed url to each RSS Directory. Use the NAP and set up many campaigns.
Watch your Affiliate Accounts start filling up with mass referrals, all without EVER visiting your own blog! How’s that sound? Get excited, because once you see what happens, you’ll never stop!
i don’t think feeds are that popular yet. I still think people like to visit an actual blog rather than a feed, because a blog offer a better user experience.
visit sri lanka
What about blogs that have lot’s of images and image galleries? Can these too be effectively monetized?
Visit Sri Lanka
Hi Everybody - This is a great forum
Just registered and wanted to say hello.
Do the math. ShoeMoney isn’t the only Internet Marketer being wealthy right now. Here’s two good examples of high Cost Per Action earnings: Bira earned $17,273.27 last month with 12,333 leads and 89,762 clicks. Originator earned $882.64 yesterday with 188 leads and 3,117 clicks. I read this blog and I know you’re marketers. Follow my URL link, consider the site, research, consider yourself lucky and sign up.