Squeeze More Money From Your Blog
January 11, 2008 Posted by Nick B.If you’re like me, you use an RSS reader to quickly and easily keep tabs of your favorite blogs and websites. With a list of roughly a dozen blogs, I would have missed roughly 250 posts in the week and a half that I took for vacation recently and without the aid of an RSS reader (such as Google Reader), I would have lost out an a lot of valuable information in addition to some interesting posts.
If you’re not like me and don’t even know what an RSS reader is, it’s time for you to catch up. 🙂
As a blogger, my main focus is to write good quality articles that resonate with my audience. Additionally, since my blog is about teaching you how to make money online, I try to write articles that make my readers come back because they know they’ll end up learning something from my posts.
A secondary goal of mine is to, well, make money online with my blog. There are many ways to make money with your blog (selling ad space, paid reviews, affiliate posts…), but the one I want to focus on today is the often forgotten, hardly talked about RSS-only footer links.
What are RSS-Only Footers?
As the name suggests, RSS-only footers are text boxes or hyperlinks that appear only at the bottom of your RSS posts. These hyperlinks or text boxes are magically injected into your RSS feed and will not appear anywhere in your website. As with anything money related, the more traffic you have the more money you will make. Remember, traffic is the new gold! So, if you have a substantial RSS readership you can really use this space for secret promotions, to communicate specifically with your RSS readers, and even to make money by placing affiliate links or selling ad space on your feed.
How To Add RSS Footers with WordPress
At present, I use a WordPress plugin called FeedFooter by Sherief Mursyidi. As stated by Sherief,
“Feed Footer is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add footers under all your blog posts in your RSS feed. With this nifty plugin, you can:
1. Copyright Your Feed!
Add copyright notices under all your Blog Posts in the RSS feed2. Monetize Your RSS Feeds.
Show and rotate ads under your blog posts in the RSS feed (maximum of 10 ads can be rotated.)3. HTML Enabled Footers
Any HTML code can be shown in your footers! You can snazzy up your footers with banners and images! You can make your text bold or italics or underlined.”
Once you download and install the FeedFooter plugin, FeedFooter is really simple to configure. There are no tricky options or configuration steps that you have to go through. FeedFooter lets you add up to 10 different spots that rotate on a post-by-post basis. That is to say that if you write 10 posts, you can have up to 10 different things show up. For example, this affiliate link was added to the bottom of one of my posts recently:
FeedFooter is not limited to 1 link per post, either. As stated on the FeedFooter website, you can have up to 500 words in your footer box, meaning that you should be able to add at least 3 or 4 footer items.
Alternatives to FeedFooter
I realize that not everyone likes the same color or the same songs, so here is a short list consisting of alternatives to FeedFooter.
- BidVertiser Ads for Feeds – If you are already registered with BidVertiser, this pluging will allow you to “show the BidVertiser CPC ads in your feeds, as well as get access to our various multiple-subscription Feed Widgets that will help you publicize your new feed”. If you are not already registered with BidVertiser, registration is easy and free.
- Google AdSense for Feed – Much like the Google ads you see on webpages and blogs, “AdSense for feeds is a program that enables publishers to place relevant ads in the feeds they syndicate”. This program is still in BETA and your blog must have at least 100 users to qualify.
- RSS Footer – “This plugin makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feeds, for instance to display a link back to your blog.”
What Are The Benefits of an RSS Footer?
By having an RSS footer, you create yourself extra opportunity to make money. You can sell more advertising space, you can make more money through affiliate links, and you can provide your RSS readers with secret incentives that only they will know about. John Chow is the master of gaming the RSS footer and he’ll often have RSS only giveaways for his readers. In addition to having your users see those ads and links when they read your post, those ads and links are there permanently meaning that if you place an affiliate link, your link will potentially bring you money anytime someone clicks through.
The Downside of RSS Footers
For as good as RSS footers are, they are not an instant monetization solution. While ad space and paid reviews will account for a big portion of your blog’s income, you should not expect nor should you rely on the bounty brought in by RSS footer links. While RSS Footers provide you with extra advertising space and another opportunity to make money through affiliate links, you need to realize that a lot of people won’t read your post down to the sweet (or bitter) end. This means that while you can have affiliate links at the bottom of your post, your readers won’t click through your ads as often as they would had the advertisement been mid-post or somewhere above the fold.
I am an optimist and always look at the positive outcome that certain things tend to have. Even though an RSS feed is not necessarily the best way for you to make money with your blog, it is still A way for you to make money with your blog and my suggestion for you is to deploy a tool such as FeedFooter in order to maximize your income stream.
Like what I have to say? Then check out my blog at http://www.LearnHow2Earn.com and let’s Learn How 2 Earn in 2008!
Excellent post. Although i think bidvertisers feeds isn’t the best alternative for making revenue out of your feeds and the rssfooter is aimed at making the bloggers pwn the scrapers 🙂
Nicholas,
Good points! I agree that bidvertiser isn’t necessarily the best way to monetize your footer. I offer it only as an alternative b/c I didn’t want people to think that FeedFooter was the only alternative.
Best,
Nick
Since bidvertiser has only been offering this option for a short time, it will be interesting to hear reports as to how the ads are actually performing.
Alan Johnson
Wow! This is my read of the day 🙂 Keep up the good work!
-Mike
Thanks Mike!
oh wow I didn’t realize that this was a guest post. How did you get the opportunity to make a post here?
You can simply drop the blogger of choice an email and, if your post is worth it, they will be glad to publish it on their blog.
Alan Johnson
Not bad tips, but nothing beats turning into John Chow and raking in his blog income.
We all bow down to Chow…he’s good, that’s for sure. I’d like to know how he initially got all his traffic, that’s for sure! 🙂 If you read this post: http://www.johnchow.com/getting-traffic-is-half-the-battle/ you will see that John Chow received over 217,000 visitors in his first month! I’d sure like to know what kind of evil trickery he used!!
He basically got a ton of Diggs to the front page.. I believe he had 10 front-pages within a month before getting banned.. that ramped his blog crazily..
oh man, that is evil trickery! that gives me an idea for another post though 🙂
He didn’t get anywhere NEAR 217,000 visitors his first month. He had 217,000 visitors the first month he put ads on his site, which was already well over a year old at that point.
Basically he pwned digg, got loads of frontpages and then digg pwned him. However, he managed to keep the users (well most of them initally) and he’s built up from there 🙂
Indeed, even if Digg users have a relatively short attention span and convincing them to stick around after reading the article is a challenge, social media traffic should definitely not be eliminated from the equation.
Alan Johnson
Nice post like the word squeeze more money from your blog.
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Scarlett T.
LinkWorth Staff
ouch. what happened to your PR? was it the paid posting?
that is so cool. too bad I have zero rss readers LOL.
Will,
It’s never to late to start! Set a goal for yourself and make your RSS sign up button more prominent! The Feedburner Chicklet that you have is kind of confusing and I don’t think you have your site’s RSS feed set up properly. When I click on the subscribe button in the firefox address bar, it takes me to your wordpress RSS feed, not the feedburner feed.
Best,
Nick
I agree with Nick, every blogger starts out with no RSS readership, it’s all up to you at this point: if you make your resource a “must-bookmark” one as far as quality is concerned, results may be just around the corner.
Alan Johnson
Chow’s post is not 300 words. Does it still count?
hello! Tyler,
I’m trying to subscribe to e-mail feeds with LearnHow2Earn (from header, right) but I’m getting this error.
[ServletException in:/body/publicize/subscription-verify.jsp] /body/publicize/subscription-verify.jsp(26,2) Unable to load tag handler class “org.apache.struts.taglib.html.HiddenTag” for tag “html:hidden”‘
can you subscribe me 😀 thanks!
Hi there,
Sorry that you’re having trouble signing up to my feed! I’m not sure what’s going on there but I just tested it and the sign up form seems to be working now. You must have caught feedburner at an inopportune moment!
Best,
Nick
I use feedburner and ti works pretty good for me.
Indeed, Feedburner is a great resource. Not only can you keep tabs on how your RSS subscriptions are doing but you can also know with which RSS readers your users are viewing your feed in addition to many other free tools that Feedburner provides.
Agreed. Feedburner is, by far, the best program for feeds I’ve seen. Even though the messed up some saturdays ago, and scared the crap out of me. ;-p
Ah, very nice. ::installs::
How do I get involved? The content is great and caused my curiosity. I realize that more millionaires will be made on the internet than any other business. Did you design your own website? What are the costs?
I believe that the witnesses and the documents are authentic. ,