I had an email from a reader who asks:

“You encourage people to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, but how do you make money from them if they never see the ads on your site?”

Well firstly, it’s always a good idea to give people that reason to visit your site, even if they usually read your posts in their RSS reader. That way they will see the ads on the site, and because they’re a subscriber, you won’t have lost them forever if they click an ad.

When writing your posts, provide useful links to related articles on your own site. I talked about this in more depth in the good linking policy article I posted back in November. (And yes, that’s an example of providing a relevant link!)

The second thing you can do is monetize your RSS feed directly. Many people still don’t realise that you can put ads directly into your feed. There’s a few ways to do this:

  • The Text Link Ads plugin has an option that allows you to sell ads on your RSS feed. That’s really simple to implement, and all the ad sales are taken care of for you.
  • Google Adsense is currently beta testing Adsense ads on RSS feeds. As far as I’m aware, this is still a closed beta program, but you could always try contacting Google support and asking.
  • If you don’t mind selling ads yourself, you can use a Wordpress plugin like WP_RSS_Sticky or RSS Footer to add a link that only appears in your RSS feed.

In short, there are many ways to make money from your RSS feed, but one of the best ways is to use it to drive regular readers back to your blog. Just remember that people generally expect the RSS articles to be ‘clean’, so don’t overload your feed with annoying, flashy ads. That will just encourage people to unsubscribe altogether.

Subscribe to Money Blogger for more tips.

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