8 Easy Ways to Monetize Your RSS Feed

RSS Feeds are a powerful internet marketing tool that’s taken on several variants. Amazon.com uses feeds to help users keep track of bestseller releases. Wordpress.org uses feeds to deliver news on the latest Wordpress developments.

Websites like AbsurdlyCool.com uses feeds to distribute information about freebies and coupons. ReviewMe uses blog feeds to give advertisers a snapshot glimpse of publisher content and most affiliate companies offer RSS feeds for promotional use.

For bloggers, a RSS feed is mainly a content delivery and syndication system that allows readers to have access to your content without visiting your website.

While a blog feed’s malleability and search engine friendly structure leads to additional site visibility and traffic, it also has the effect of seducing readers away from your website.

This limits your website’s full monetization potential because a portion of your visitors will connect with your website in their feed reader and thus avoid the arsenal of contextual or impression-based ads you’ve carefully optimized alongside your content.

Some Solutions to the Problem

Feed advertising is a way of monetizing the community of readers who primarily follow your content through RSS feeds. In my opinion, there are three main ways to monetize your feed.

1. Manually include affiliate text or image links - Easiest way to get started. High likelihood for conversions if implemented contextually.

   
   

2. Private Ad Deals - Negotiate personally with advertisers and sell ad spots in your feed. Can be tiresome.

   
   

3. Advertising Programs for Feeds - Hassle-free method that ensures ad-rotation and uniqueness. A moderate number of subscribers is usually a publisher requirement.

Dosh Dosh’s Collection of Feed Advertising Networks

Here’s a current list of advertising networks which provide feed monetization options. Some like Feedburner offer category based (E.G. Internet, Business, Sports) advertising for your blog feed but others like Yahoo Publisher Networks offers contextual ads that are based on feed content.

Others like Q-Ads allow you designate ads base on specific keywords and programs like ThankYouPages allow to make money from interstitial ads which show up between your feed and its outgoing link destinations.

I’m quite sure that I missed out some networks, so please leave a comment if you know of any that should be included.

TARGETED CATEGORY-BASED ADVERTISING

Feedburner Advertising Network

Participation in FAN is by invitation, based on a variety of variables such as how long FeedBurner has managed your feed, your subscribership size and consistency, and frequency of content publication

Type of Ads: Text Ad, Text Ad with Logo, Banner | Rates: CPM

Feedvertising (Text Link Ads)

Allows you to run text link ads in your RSS feed. Apart from the Feedvertising ads, you can also choose to run your own in-house ads or affiliate links.

Type of Ads: Text links. No banner or buttons. | Rates: Flat rate pricing.

Pheedo

Pheedo’s FeedPoweredâ„¢ advertising platform converts your RSS feeds into rich, dynamically updating advertising that engages your audience…Pheedo retrieves your RSS feed several times an hour and updates your FeedPowered advertisements with any newly published items.

Type of Ads: Text, Logo & Text and Banner | Rates: CPC






CONTEXTUAL FEED ADVERTISING

Yahoo Publisher Network

Participants of the program must have a valid U.S. Social Security or Tax ID number, and web site content that is predominantly in English and targeted at a U.S. user base. Yahoo! will contact you about your eligibility to participate and about availability of the program.

Type of Ads: Text links | Rates: CPC

Kanoodle

Through BrightAds RSS, Kanoodle’s content-targeted sponsored links will be inserted directly into site owners’ RSS feeds within posts or as individual posts, with relevancy of the ads assured through Kanoodle’s topic-based approach.

Type of Ads: Contextual Text links. | Rates: CPC.






KEYWORD BASED ADVERTISING


MediaFed

Our ad placement system automatically inserts adverts into your feeds in one of two ways: Adverts are inserted every x articles where you control the value of x. Or by matching keywords to your article contents to target relevant advertising.

(Note: I’m not entirely sure if MediaFed is still currently offering RSS advertising.)

Type of Ads: Banners | Rates: Unknown

Q Ads

Q-Ads is an advertising network that frees writers from traditional constraints in advertising. Q-Ads delivers relevant advertising, based on user defined keywords, as image based text ads that can then be used on websites, in blog posts, and in RSS feeds.

Type of Ads: Text & Video Ads | Rates: CPC






INTERSTITIAL FEED ADVERTISING


ThankYouPages

RSS Interstitials that allows publishers to insert advertising into the links contained within their RSS feeds. When a user clicks a link from your RSS feed, they will are shown a short, fully branded, interstitial advertisement between the click of the link, and the final destination.

Type of Ads: Full page interstitials | Rates: CPM and CPC

Adsense Alternatives - Other Contextual Ads

Robin Good has written a nice article on some other contextual advertising programs, apart from Adsense. There’s a whole bunch of advertising networks I haven’t experimented with, some of which include AdSonar, Mirago, Target Point and Q-ads.

The good news is, they don’t necessarily have to be alternatives, now that Google has allowed other contextual ads to be run alongside Adsense.

I’m not currently optimizing Adsense for Dosh Dosh, so I may run some monetization and placement tests for these programs. Anyone used these Adsense Alternatives before?

In maximizing the earning potential of your blog or website it makes sense not to rely too heavily on one single ad-supplier, for a number of reasons. For one, if your account is blocked for whatever reason you could suddenly find your substantial blog income drop down to zero overnight.

Sell Time-based Ads on Your Website.

AdVolcano is yet another ad network which connects advertisers with bloggers or webmasters seeking to monetize their website with the placement of advertisements. According to Entrepreneur’s Journey, AdVolanco allows you to “define areas of your blog.. and charge a monthly fee, rather than a cost per click, cost per action or cost per impression method.”

This literally means that you can offer time-based ad campaigns. For example, you might want to sell some space on your sidebar for the price of $10 a day or $250 for 30 days. Here are some points I’ve made after signing up and digging around their website.

• No submission prerequisite
• Minimum payout is US $20
• Payment is only made via Checks on a NET 15 basis.
• No option to categorize blogs by tags.
• User panel is clean and easily to navigate.
• No affiliate program for webmasters
• Weak navigation functions for advertisers

With nothing really to differentiate it from other programs like Text Link Ads, advertisers will most likely select the latter because of its far greater publisher base and in-site navigation.

I do like Ad Volcano’s site design and concept but I think that they should make it a lot easily for advertisers to pinpoint specific niches or blogs that are relevant for their campaign.

The addition of a live search bar, along with a tag cloud would probably do wonders. Categorizing websites solely according to page views just doesn’t seem to be effective to me. Suggestion for webmasters/bloggers: Try if you’ve had no offers with other ad selling network, you might just get an offer from Ad Volcano if you’re lucky.

Making Money Online With Affiliate Marketing - Tricks of the Trade

Search engine optimization e-books. It's simple, just register for an account there and then browse the many products and choose one you like, then start promoting it.

How do you know when an affiliate product is worth it?

Make sure the commission you receive is at least 50% of what the selling price is. Also, $30 should be the minimum commission amount you receive, otherwise you won't be making money online with affiliate marketing - your profit margins will so small it won't make sense to continue your efforts.

B) Next In Line?

Make sure there is a demand for the product(s) you select. How do you do this? First you must think as a consumer, NOT a seller.

What kinds of keywords will your customer be using to search for the type of product you're promoting?

How much will the customer be willing to spend?

Can your product help the potential customer?

Making money online with affiliate marketing is so much easier once you have thought about and solved these issues in the beginning. It is imperative that you attempt to predict the mindset of the person you're selling to so you can make sure you are putting the product in front of the right person. This will get you into profit more quickly.

C) Some Marketing Items To Consider...

Article Marketing

Once you choose a product to promote, write commentaries, product descriptions and/or reviews so that you are creating a web presence about your product. Article marketing will easily be one of the most powerful methods you can implement for making money online with affiliate marketing. This method will not only help your presence online to grow but it will build your credibility, which is very important.

Oh yeah, in most cases article marketing is completely free!

Getting The Most Out Of Your Link

This is very important. Whenever you make a post in a forum, comment on a friend's MySpace page, or even send an email to someone, always include your link. As the number of your links online grow, so will your profits. It is very common for people to click links simply out of curiosity.

Forums

Forum participation is very effective. Make efforts to excite people about your opportunity by spreading the word like a virus. The Internet is perfect for this kind of thing.

Lightning Fast Financial Success

The most important element in making money online with affiliate marketing will come down to your marketing effectively online. If you're not sure of how to flood your site with targeted traffic, then making money will become a great challenge.

If you learn to master online marketing then you will absolutely succeed!

How to Find a Good Affiliate Program

Why you should choose Clickbank:

Clickbank is a well known, reliable affiliate network. It is known as the best place to earn fast money as an affiliate. Clickbanks fee is very reasonable and the tools and services they provide are great. All new affiliates are recommended to join Clickbank to start their business.

Clickbank deals with digital products which are downloadable on the internet. There is no requirement of any physical delivery. After you are registered with Clickbank as an affiliate, you can choose any product from the pool of available products to promote. There are more than ten thousand products currently available.

The sales commission offered by the merchants on Clickbank is usually very high and affiliates can make 50% per sale.

Thousands of affiliates have joined Clickbank and are earning an income on a regular basis. You shouldn’t hesitate in joining Clickbank if you want your business to take off!

Let me give you some tips while working with Clickbank.

Promote Your Products in Forums

Search for some forums, at least three, that are related to your product with a high page ranking. Register on these forums and just start a discussion in the forum where maximum people are involved. Post your questions there or answer some questions of other members. Do not add any promotion text in the body of your posts. You are allowed to put your signature at the end of your post. Here is where you can put you name, your website link and your affiliate products link.

When you become an active member of this forum then you may get some traffic from these forums to your website. And you may know that when your website is getting the hits from some high rank website, then the page rank of your website is also increased. In this way you will get a double advantage. One is the traffic and second is the higher page rank. This will ultimately result in more sales of the products you are promoting.

Promote Your Products in E-mails

In this day and age, most everybody uses email to contact others. Your email may be personal, study related, business oriented etc. But at the end of your email text you are allowed to write you signature. Don’t neglect this signature. With your name, remember to add your affiliate link at the end. It means that with every email your affiliate links are advertised. If you send out 100 emails daily, it means 100 additional people are looking at your affiliate link everyday.

Try to expand your contact list. Use as many methods as you can to grab the email addresses of new people. Use online forums, chat forums etc to make new friends. Your email list must contain a minimum of a few hundred contacts. DO NOT spam. Don’t send email to the people who don’t know about you or who don’t want to receive your emails. Otherwise your email will be blocked and you will lose your contacts. Your emails should always be interesting to get the reader’s attention.

Promote Your Products on a Website

Most affiliates of Clickbank have their own website to promote their products. So it is recommended to upload your own website. Your website should be related to the products you are promoting. For example if you are promoting some antivirus product, then your website contents must match this theme.

Try to make your website clean and simple. Add your affiliate links in every page of your website. Don’t put big ugly banners to advertise the products. Instead use 2 to 3 lines of text links to promote the Clickbank products.

Conclusion

Clickbank is a popular affiliate network of digital products. You should start your business with Clickbank to become a successful affiliate. Try to use the forums, emails and your website to promote your Clickbank products for better results.