Everything You Need To Know About RSS Subscribers
Having an RSS feed has its ups and downs and deciding what to do with it can be tricky. I hope my pointers are able to help you out with determining what is best for your blog as I have gone through a lot of trial and error figuring this out.
RSS Monetization Versus Blog Monetization
It is more difficult to monetize an RSS feed since there are less options out there to aid you in doing so. What if your site had 10,000 RSS readers out of a total of 12,000 daily readers? That would mean that only 2,000 readers are actually coming to your site. Since an RSS feed is harder to monetize than a blog, you’ll be damned if you make much money.
Some Ways To Monetize Your Feed
- Automated Feed Advertising Programs – Google Adsense for Feeds is likely the most popular example out there when it comes to this. Extremely hassle free and ensures fresh ad exposure through banner rotation.
- Negotiating Private Ad Sales – You will likely need a ton of RSS readers to attract this type of advertising. This is basically directly selling ad space in your feed. Could be a hassle in my opinion dealing with ad contract expiration dates and time consuming renegotiating new ad sales.
- Manually Inlay Affiliate Links – This means banners or contextual links. Contextual links will likely have a better conversion rate over banners. Good way to enter the realm of RSS monetization if you know what you’re doing with this and have the proper affiliate accounts to supplement this.
Getting Readers From Your Feed To Your Blog
If you are using FeedBurner to run your RSS feeds, it will have a feature called FeedFlare. FeedFlare has a plethora of options to play with however the one we want shows the comment count at the end of each post. Of course, many readers love to read through the comments posted on articles to see what fellow readers have to say. However, they will not be able to view the comments from the RSS post unless they are subscribed to the comment RSS as well. This will force the reader to pay the blog a visit if they wish to read the comments.
Of course, you must encourage comments on your articles to get that comment count higher. This plays on human curiosity to see what is being said in order to draw them to the blog. Read my earlier post on attracting comments to your blog articles. You can even make some aliases and post some comments yourself to get the ball rolling!
Reminding readers that RSS posts are not real time also creates the urgency for them to still check your website for new or updated content.
Linking to old posts like I just did above will entice RSS readers to click on the link which will take them to the linked post in your blog. It also draws more attention to earlier blog articles that your newer readers may have not seen and aids search engines to index your older posts.
Embedding a video in lieu of photos will also help to draw in RSS readers. Since they are not able to play videos in RSS, they will have no other choice than to visit your blog. For this to be successful though you must post the video with an enticing description that will lure in the readers, not to mention, if you do not write anything they will simply see a blank post.
Tips To Gain More RSS Subscribers
- Make Your RSS Icon As Large And Visible As Possible – If it looks nice, big and fruity people are more willing to click on it. Just as how I have mine in the top right hand corner, you cannot miss it at all!
- Offer A Full Feed – Don’t try to tease your RSS readers with half posts in order to try and get them to click to your blog to read more. This will likely just scare RSS subscribers away.
- Do NOT Show Your RSS Count When It’s Tiny – People do not like to be the first one to do anything by nature especially when subscribing to a blog with 2 readers. FeedBurner provides a chicklet that shows this count however I would not use it until my feed reaches at least 100 RSS subscribers.
- Ask Your Readers To Subscribe – At the bottom of each post you make, just ad a small image or piece of text that says “If you enjoyed reading my article, please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed”. You could also edit your single.php file for it to automatically come up in every post you make to save you the time and effort of doing it.
Benefits of Having Many RSS Subscribers
The first and largest benefit in my opinion is that the number of RSS readers you have reflects the true growth of your blog. The reason why is because RSS readers are loyal people. People who really want to follow your writing. Secondly, some product review sites such as ReviewMe factor in your RSS count when calculating your review price. The greater your count the more you get paid from them.
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