Are you guilty of not actively promoting your rss feed?
I know that I am, because as a Affiliate Marketer I was always told to drive all of my visitors to a Squeeze Page via an auto-responder service.
The reason why I use an auto-responder service is because It helps me to keep in contact with all of my subscribers, and over time establish a better long term relationship.
Personally speaking…
my favourite method of communication is the one that I’ve just described above”.
But…
I realized and this is very important.
That if I want to continue to survive in the ever changing Internet World.
Then I have to make as many lines of communication as possible available to visitors to my blog.
Whether their prefered method of contact be by email,mobile phone or some other type of hand held reading or listning device.
Giving out personal information is still a big sticking point for most people online.
This is where your rss feed comes into its own…
because it allows people access to all of your blog posts without them having to give you their email address or any other information that their not comfortable with.
Just in case you didn’t know,Google offer’s you the chance to make money from your rss feeds by means of their Adsense program.
To make Adsense work, you will need to continue providing regular and interesting content for your rss feed.
If your not doing this already, then to quote a popular marketing phrase.
“You are leaving money on the table”
I hope you are beginning to see why promoting your rss feed is becoming increasingly more important.
However their are problems associated with using rss, one of them being the sheer variety of rss readers and news aggregators. available.
If you want to make more visitors to your website subscribe to you’re rss feed, then you must make sure that it is…
compatible with all of the most popular news aggregators such as iGoogle, Twitter.My Yahoo etc.
You can easily do this by burning your original blog or news-letter feed on Feedburner and then enabling the SmartFeed option.
If you were to back only 5yrs ago…
you would find that hardly anybody was using rss, which incidentally means
“Really Simple Syndication”
Now everybody wants to get in on the act, especially the big news corporations who are trying to dominate the market.
Why All The Sudden Interest in rss?
“MONEY”is the simple answer, Depending on the amount of people that you can get to take your rss feed,
Then their is potentially tens of thousands of dollars to be made by allowing the major companies to advertise on your blog posts or news-letters.
There is a popular belief amongst people who run their own news-letters
(especially if you promote affiliate marketing products)
that you should never allow other ads to appear because they are a distraction and will make visitors click away from your main page that you want them to read.
I am currently testing this theory by using a special Gadget that allows me to run Google Adsense and Kontera ads on all of my current news-letter messages, without jeopardizing my main subscriber base.
What I expect to discover after running this little experiment, is that people who are genuinely interested in my offer.
Will still read my emails,articles, blog posts, etc, via my rss feed. without being put of by the additional Google Ads.
With this thought in mind, I predict that over the long term I will get lower click through rates on most of the affiliate programs that I promote,
but a higher click through rate on my Google Adsense ads, without hopefully a significant drop in my overall profit margins.
