Good thing about your RSS news feed is that your blog content gets consistent and loyal readership.
Bad thing about your RSS news feed is that the typical RSS subscriber reads your content within the newsreader without visiting your blog. This can result in lower number of visits to your blog, lower number of ad impressions and decreased revenue.
This article will look at what you can do to start earning revenue while giving your readers option of reading your blog posts in a RSS newsreader.
So what do you do?
Some bloggers are concerned that subscribers to their RSS feed would never visit their blogs, so they have their feed to show only partial. This means giving a teaser of the post in the RSS feed, and letting the reader click on it to read the rest of the story directly on the blog.
As a regular RSS user, I prefer to have the full content feed in the newsreader. In case of an interesting post I regularly do visit the blog as I want to post/read comments, add the link to social media etc. You cannot do this directly through a newsreader.
Partial blog feeds are annoying and can turn visitors away from subscribing. Full RSS feeds gives the subscriber the choice of reading in the feed or visiting your blog. So I would recommend having a full RSS feed.
How do I earn revenue if I let readers get full content in RSS?
The simple answer is to monetize your RSS news feed. Your RSS news feed can be your new, alternative source of revenue. Here are some ways that you can monetize your RSS news feed:
1. You can now use AdSense to place ads in your RSS feeds. Google lets you easily move your FeedBurner feed to your Google Adsense account and will automatically start serving contextual ads on your feed posts. Google also lets you customize the RSS ads by giving you option to:
• Set how frequently ads will appear in your feed posts: every 1, 2, 3, or 4 posts
• Choose whether to show image ads, text ads or both
• Chose to display ads at either the top or bottom of each feed post
2. Use Better Feed. Better Feed is a plugin for Wordpress blogs that allows you to enhance your RSS news feed. This plugin will allow you to add anything below each entry in your RSS feed, so you can insert any text link / banner advertisement that you wish.
3. Another way to monetize your RSS news feed is to include text links within your blog article content. Affiliate links are perfect for this. When writing your next blog post, include some relevant affiliate links into your article content. These will then show both on your blog and in your RSS feed, potentially increasing your revenue.
Image by: Pandemia
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
definitely good ways to monetize your RSS. I have seen many ways to do this and yours are just as good.
Nice tips. Although, I am not a fan of publishing the full feed just because it makes it even easier for people to steal content. I regularly have articles stolen, but I have at least a small bit of satisfaction knowing that they had to visit my site to get it… lol.
Yeah I see what you mean. I would suggest including some inbound links to your older articles in your content, and also add one of those copyright lines to your feed. Then whomever steals it will feature your links. I have seen this happen with my guest article at ProBlogger. The articles was “copied” to several sites but each of them had links back to me as I included links in the content.
I’m so lost. I hate being computer illiterate. I added adsense to my blog bc I’d heard such great things. In 2 months, I’ve made a whopping $3.46. I suppose I’m headed to Twitter next! I love reading your tips, just don’t know how to incorporate them into my blog.