Online Money With Google Adsense Part - X Increase Your RSS Subscribers

If you want to increase subscribers for your blog , it is one of the best ways of doing it. But a point to be kept in mind here is that an RSS feed is much harder to monetize than a blog . For the same number of people visiting a blog and an RSS feed the income generated by the blog may be 20 times more than generated by the RSS feed.

Despite very low income , you should still try an increase your RSS subscriptions. One of the important reasons being RSS represents genuine reader base, and anything done to increase your subscribers will definitely increase your blog in the long run. Another reason to increase your RSS subscriber base is that some ad networks like ReviewMe , take your RSS subscribers into account to determine the price , the more number of RSS subscribers you have the more you would get paid.


Offering a Full feed definitely helps.

To increase your subscriber base in the long run , you should offer a full feed. Many RSS readers wont sign up for a feed until its full . Use your RSS to give your readers an enhanced reading experience . Never use RSS as a traffic builder to your post . There are many people who use this method. I find it very cheap method to get traffic to your post and one that I advise you to avoid totally. I am not offering any RSS feed to my readers right now because at this moment I don’t have sufficient content on my blog.


Never show your RSS count if it is too small.

FeedBurner provides a nice widget which you can use on your blog , it shows the number of RSS readers on your blog. The number displayed represents the number of people that accessed your blog the day before. Personally I advise you to not show the subscriber count until it reaches 30.

A bit of human psychology is involved here . People in general like to play safe . They would not subscribe to a blog with very few readers, even if the blog is very good. It is best to not display your RSS subscribers until you have sufficient number of subscribers that you can proudly display. The bigger the number of subscribers , the more chances are that new readers will subscribe to it . Smaller the number , less chances of readers subscribing to it. If you really want to tackle this hurdle , you may display someone else’s RSS feed count to get the subscribers. Nothing is fair in this world but that’s one way to get the attraction of your audience.


Be sure that readers see your RSS button.

The RSS button should necessarily be placed near the top of your blog preferably on the top left corner which is considered to be the hot spot in advertising . If you can’t place it there make sure you place it at a place where it is easily visible without scrolling . You should let your readers know that you have a RSS feed and for that you need your RSS button to be visible. If you are providing a full feed to your subscribers then you must label your RSS button as full feed RSS to let your readers know that they can read all your content from the feed.


Ask your readers to subscribe.

You may ask your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed if they liked your blog. You can do so by by adding a line at the end of your post like “If you liked my post , please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS ”.Instead of doing this you may edit your template files , so that you may not have to write this for every post that you publish. In WordPress you need to edit index.php file if you want your request to show on the home page of your blog.


Advertising options for your RSS feed.

The best way to make money from your full RSS feed is to ask your readers to visit your blog. You may use Google Adsense for feeds or Text link Ads Feedvertising. Google adsense for RSS is the best way to monetize your blog . The ads may be CPM or CPC based , but in any case you can make sufficient amount from your RSS feed.

Text link Ads Feedvertising are similar to text link ads for a blog. Instead of buying a link on a blog , the advertiser buys a link in your feed. The pricing system is very straight forward , so there is no need to worry about variable CPM rates and / or click fraud. Remember Feedvertising is available for WordPress 2.0 or higher.

Official Announcement

I want to begin by thanking all the readers of this blog. This blog has been aroud for quite some time now but the updates have been scarce to say the least. 2011 was a very tough year for me personally, having to undergo a series of changes both in my personal as well as professional life.  Finally everything looks settled and I want to interact with my readers on a regular basis now. 

You can expect more regular updates of this blog along with useful tips and suggestions that will help you a great deal to increase your productivity and do what you like doing the best i.e blogging. Happy Blogging everyone :)

Online Money With Google Adsense Part - IX Make Money from your Blog

How to get RSS readers to visit your blog.

While most of the readers prefer to visit the blot , but there are many who may like to read your blog via full feed RSS. This in itself is a major problem with only a handful of ways to monetize your RSS feed as compared to infinite ways available for the blog.

If you do some research you will find that there are many bloggers who have over 50,000 daily visitors to their blog via RSS feeds , yet they are earning less than many other bloggers who have less number of visitors to their blog .. There are many forums who have million visitors to their site daily via RSS , even they find it difficult to monetize their RSS . But one thing in favor of these sites is that they sell ad space at a very high price keeping in mind the large number of readers visit to their site everyday. But you should still provide full RSS feed to your readers because these are the readers who visit your blog because they genuinely like what you provide them.

Having a large RSS subscription is essential and one thing every blogger should try and build for his site. RSS represents a loyal base of audience and if you have your RSS subscribers increasing it indicates that your blog is growing and is heading towards the right direction. Remember most of your RSS readers wont visit your blog , and making money from your RSS feed is very difficult. I have discussed a few ways to monetize your blog in my previous post. The best way to make many from your RSS subscribers is to encourage them to take a look at your blog. Following are some of the ways to do just that .


Use FeedBurner FeedFlare
Most of you might be running your RSS feeds through Feedburner. Feedburner provides a very useful feature called FeedFlare which allows you to add a comment count at the end of each post . This lets your RSS readers to see the number of comments a particular post has generated . Unless a reader subscribes to your comments RSS , he cannot read the comments others have made on your RSS post. This encourages your reader to visit your blog if he wants to read the comments .If a RSS reader is interested in your post , there are high chances that he may click on the comment link to get the view of other subscribers.


Encourage comments.
Having no comments on your blog doesn’t help you much. You should encourage your readers to comment on your post . As I had discussed previously that a blog is a two way communication tool between an author and readers , it should remain that way . One way traffic is never good in any case.

The easiest and the most effective way to encourage comments on your blog is to ask for feedback . A RSS reader has to visit your blog if he wants to comment on your post so it is a great way to get them to visit your blog.

In the beginning you may have to comment yourself by fake names to get the ball rolling. It’s sneaky but there is no harm in doing it . Many popular forums are built using this technique.


Use some videos.
Another nice way to get your RSS readers to visit your blog is to embed some videos in your RSS feed . An embedded video cannot be played with a RSS feed . If your reader wishes to watch the video then he must visit your blog.

Adding a nice description on what the video is about always encourages your readers to visit your blog. A video without description is similar to a blank post . your RSS readers will see a blank post if you do.


Link to old post.
This is one of the best way to get your RSS readers to visit your blog . Whenever you write a post and it has relation with some of your old post , you should provide a link to it. It has many added advantages , besides getting your RSS subscribers to visit your older post it also lets search engines find your older articles . It encourages your RSS readers to click on it to see what they have missed earlier.


Tell your readers that RSS is updated in real time
A new post wont be available as a feed until your RSS feed updates and updating your feed may take several hours . So in order to visit your latest posts they should visit your blog for the current post(s).

A way to remind them could be saying something like this at the end of your post “This may not be my latest post. Do visit my site for the latest posts , in case you may want to get the latest updated post.”

Online Money With Google Adsense Part - VIII Make Money from your Blog

To make real money from your blog you need to do more than just displaying Google Ads on your blog. For beginners it is the easiest way to monetize their blogs. Your main aim should be to find out the maximum number of ways to extract money from it, without making it too obvious to your readers and providing them with rich and useful content beneficial to them. You may always come across people whining that you have too much ads on your blog even though you would have only one like I have. So what to do about these kind of people, remember these kind of people who complain loudest about advertising are the ones who will never click on your Ads. You don’t make money out of them so would you consider their complaints about too much advertising? The decision is upon you.

How do you know when to take these complaints seriously ? Well the answer is quite simple . Always keep a track of traffic to your blog . If it starts going down , you need to make changes to your blog . The chances of traffic going down because of too much advertising is very slim and I would say it is next to nil . You may conduct a poll on your site to find out the real reason for your readers not being happy with your blog and too much advertising won’t be the top reason for it. There are many top blogs on the net with over 15 advertising blocks on each page but nobody complains. Even if the readers complain these blog owners don’t care listening to them . If you really want to monetize your blog , you might as well do it now.