Using feeds or aggregates, such as RSS Feeds, can be a great way to increase traffic to your site, and also put a bit more money in your pocket.
Most internet users are aware of feeds and the function they perform. Don’t miss out on the potential to earn more income by ignoring their importance.
Feeds, or feed aggregators, feed readers, or aggregators, are defined by Wikipedia as “client software or a web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs (video blogs) in a single location for easy viewing.”
Feed aggregators work in conjunction with your computer’s web browser. Any number of mobile devices also integrate RSS feeds in their functionality. Although there many software programs that function as feed aggregators, RSS is by far the most common.
When you offer a feed option on your website or blog, you are giving visitors the chance to keep updated on changes to the content. This is becoming an increasingly popular way for avid internet users to read news and find recently posted information.
Include RSS Feed on Every Page
It is easy to add an RSS Feed button to each of your website pages. Your hosting service probably has directions in your main account panel. For a blog, it is even easier. Many templates come already configured with an RSS feed button in place, usually in the header.
RSS subscribers are targeted traffic. They have already visited your page and are interested enough in the content to want to come back. The potential for converting them to paying customers is immense.
RSS Feed Advertising
One of the best ways for an aggregator to monetise your website is through RSS feed advertising. Google’s AdSense program now supports this new type of affiliate marketing. It works by linking ads to each feed.
When you sign up for this option in Google AdSense, you will receive a new URL that becomes the feed address. When a subscriber receives the feed, they can then click on the included advertisement. Bidvertiser is another company offering affiliate marketing that supports RSS feed advertising.
RSS Feed advertising allows you just one more avenue to boost your click through rate. With more and more people utilising mobile devices to access the internet, this could be a real boon to your affiliate earnings.
Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE)
Another manner of making your feeds earn money is by submitting your products to a CSE. The CSE grabs product update feeds, then offers the results to consumers using the service to find a specific item.
For best results, ensure that your product’s keywords are very focused and included in the title. Select the appropriate category for your offerings. Images, detailed descriptions, and brand logos help your products get noticed. Cross-selling helps to increase income from sales after the conversion.
Feeds are easy to set up. They are one more way of interacting with your visitors and potential clients. The ability to make money through well-placed feeds is nearly unlimited, particularly in conjunction with affiliate advertising and comparison shopping engines.
About Sean Rasmussen
I 100% agree with you on how important RSS feeds are. Google Reader has become my newspaper – scanning through my morning feeds has become a routine. So many blogs that I read I would never come back to if I couldn’t subscribe to them.
On the flip side, when someone like me has all these blogs pulling into a reader, the good content stands out, and the blah content just gets passed over and marked read with the rest of the stuff that doesn’t stick out. Getting people to subscribe is only half the battle, imo.
I agree the RSS feeds are great.
Didn’t know you could monetize it though
Hi Sean,
I’ve never heard of ‘comparison shopping engines’. I can’t get over how many ways there are to make an income online.
Hi Sean,
Before reading this article I thought that using an RSS feed is for bookmarking purposes only. Now to know it’s also used as a sales tool for marketing is very interesting and very handy knowledge to have as well.
Hi Jill,
I didn’t know that you could use an RSS feed as a sales tool either. It’s just another great way to generate an income. I still have so much to learn. Sean has a lot of great information buried in these posts.
I have several RSS feed buttons on my personal tool bar that present me with news feeds from different sites. I wonder if telling customers how to install these on their tool bars for my sites is a good idea?
I could never get my head around what an RSS feed was actually used for but I am slowly starting to understand the whole concept. Thanks for letting us know about comparison shopping engines. I will be doing a little more research on them.
Hi Sean
I wasn’t aware that the RSS did more than make subscribers aware of new content on my site.
The Comparison Shopping Engine and RSS Feed advertising will be fantastic when I start the IMPOTY affiliate campaign. I will need to make sure the keywords of the IMPOTY package are in the title as you have suggested. Very clever and looking forward to implementing this soon.
Thankyou.
It’s endless, endless!
The amount of good advice here in this comp. I need to do my RSS stuff a lot better than I am doing currently – so this page is bookmarked for my review and implementation (later).
Peter
I would have liked to have had the time to implement each new learning onto or into my fledgling blog site along the way but we are restricted by time here.
I do have one RSS feed button installed but I see that Wal has several (need to ask why).
I have a huge bunch of notes to go through sometime after this is over.