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RSS feeds are much more than just a brilliant way to publicize your website and spread the word about your great content.  You can also monetize your RSS feeds and use them to directly target your regular blog followers with ad text and affiliate marketing information.

Consumers are increasingly reading website content without actually visiting publisher’s websites, using feed readers, widgets and personal start pages.  The downside is that when people follow your blog in this way, very often the format blocks out your contextual or banner ads.  Monetizing your RSS feeds is an excellent way of solving this problem, ensuring your website reaches its full income generating potential wherever your content is consumed.   

This article will tell you exactly how to monetize your feeds, making sure you tap into the income potential from your regular subscribers, without alienating or turning away these most loyal readers. 

Only Simple Text Will Do

It’s important you don’t overdo it when placing ads or affiliate links on your RSS feeds.  Keep the sales copy extremely simple and use only one ad per feed.  You’ll also need to use simple text ads as many feed readers are not compatible with JavaScript.  Finally ensure you choose your ads and affiliate links carefully, making them relevant to your post, your readers and your content. 

Choosing the Right Affiliate for Feeds

If you create a website that uses affiliate marketing to monetize your content it’s a good idea to put some affiliate links into your RSS feeds.  However you’ll need to choose an affiliate program that allows you to use your own text to promote the product so that you can write simple text to place in your RSS feeds.  There are a number of programs which allow you to do this, including ClickBank and 7DollarOffers. 

Feed Monetization Plug Ins

The easiest way to create a website with monetized RSS feeds is to manually add the text yourself using plug ins.  Most of us don’t have the knowledge or skill to write html and these plug ins take the hassle out of the process.  They are available to download for free from our resources page: 

• RSS Footer: a very easy plug in to add simple text ads to your RSS feeds.  This allows you to display any content at the beginning or end of your feed, which is the perfect opportunity to insert your ad text.  Even better is that this plug in allows you to rotate up to 10 different footers, which means you’re not continually sending the same link to your subscribers.
• Feedvertising Plug in:  this plug in allows you to tap into the free Feedvertising technology to place text link ads in your RSS feeds.  You have great flexibility with this software because it allows you to use your own ads, affiliate links or readymade ads from the Feedvertising ad network.  This plug in is compatible with WordPress 2.0 and above. 

Feed Advertising Programs

Alongside Feedvertising there are also a number of other advertising programs which place ad text in your feeds.  Usually these programs require you to have a minimum number of subscribers, but they really do take the hard work out of creating feed ads.  Plus most programs regularly rotate ads, which are specifically chosen for your niche content to ensure your loyal subscribers are kept happy.

Pheedo is a specialist feed advertising program that allows you to create a website with maximum monetization potential.  Wherever your content is consumed, placing Pheedo ads into your feeds (even if they are created by Feedburner) allows you to generate income using ads from corporations such as Ford, Microsoft, Dell and Adobe. Kanoodle and MediaFed are other popular RSS advertising networks. 

You can also use Google Adsense to monetize your RSS feeds.  If you create a website that uses feeds to promote and distribute your content, your loyal subscribers may never see your strategically placed ad units as they are lost on a feed reader.  Yet you can embed Adsense into your feeds by simply logging into your Adsense account, clicking “Get Ads” and then “Adsense for feeds”.  You’ll find a whole host of ads suitable for monetizing RSS feeds. 

The popularity of RSS feeds is soaring, with more and more people using them to keep in touch with their favorite websites.  If you’re not capitalizing on this group of loyal followers you could be missing out on a really good source of extra income for your website.