Feedburner? Feedblitz? Monetize My Feed?
January 17th, 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I don’t know about Feedburner sometimes. It seems everyone uses the service. I like using it. But I am not sure if my subscriber count could have possibly jumped from about 100 to 278 yesterday. Either I did something right that gave me more subscribers in one day than three months of work ever did or they are having issues. But who would know. The last post on their blog was a couple of months ago.
So I took a look at my stats a little more. It seems that the massive amount of extra hits to my feed came from Feedblitz.
But checking Feedblitz, I only have 9 subscribers there. Who knows whats up with that. But while I am at it, I might as well get some other feed questions off my chest.
Feedburner is all in all a great service, but I do have some "Burning Questions" to steal their phrase. If I leave a comment on a blog that uses the CommentLuv plugin, does the link to the Feedburner redirect count toward my site or get lost in space? I have never really investigated this before, but I will look into that one.
And I only remember tagging one post in the past with "feedburner", yet no less that 70 posts are tagged with "feedburner", which is why I took a tag cloud off the site. I am not the official Feedburner blog and I am not sure how they got there, unless the Feedburner plugin somehow does it. Since Feedburner is owned by Google, if this is so, is Google spamming themselves?
And what of feed directories. I am the list guy, but I have yet to exhaustively add this feed to directories. I have a list right here and using it would help me update it. Time to scope some out and find out which follow and which don’t. Which only list a feed location and which list some posts with a link back, like MyBlogLog or Bumpzee.
And should I make my Feedburner feed shiny and happy. Should I load it up with dodads and links and use a custom style sheet or does that matter?
And the final question is monetization. I have full feeds. I know when I subscribe to a blog with full feeds, I only visit the site if I am going to comment. Should there be ads in my feeds? I ask this question because most blogger’s idea of feed monetization is to go with a CPC or CPM, but I know from experience on other sites that CPA is the way to go. And do ads in feeds piss off subscribers? If so, I am not going to sacrifice subscribers for a few pennies a click.
And since the Related Posts for feeds works so well, why couldn’t I have a Related Products for feeds plugin. Oh, that’s why. It doesn’t exist yet or at least I have not found it. My idea: a backend product database that the plugin pulls related products from. Modules for affiliate programs like CJ, ShareASale, and Clickbank that import datafeeds into the database. I was building a site of ShareASale datafeeds. I stopped when I was not even close to halfway through and my database was already holding over 1,000,000 products. Yes, six zeroes. The more products to relate, the closer the relation becomes, but I wasn’t sure how much MySql could deal with. Another thing I have to investigate. But maybe it’s time for me to check out Scriptlance for someone who could write this plugin for me. I could do it, but I already know my average time for development.
Whether this should have been a post or a brainstorming session on the back of an envelope remains to be seen. But one thought brings on another and if you trust them and let it go as far as you can, new things you never knew existed in your head come out. Of course, new ideas bring new issues that have to be dealt with and more things to investigate. And I wonder why I so much to do at times.
Question authority, question yourself, question everything and you will find new answers. The person that doesn’t will be left behind in the brick and mortar world. The person who doesn’t will vanish in the internet world. Evolving begins with a question and results in a long, convoluted post.
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i don’t believe ads in feeds bother most people. Some of the most prominent bloggers I know are pushing ads in their feeds, and it hasn’t slowed me down yet. As a matter of fact, I’ve been planning on adding them to the bottom of my feeds as well.
Jerry’s last blog post..A WYSIWYG plugin for WordPress that will make you smile
I know I am going to do something about monetizing my feeds. Not sure quite what yet.
Hmm, how does one put ads in the feed with feedburner? And what ads work best? Adsense? I know that Google owns feedburner now and adsense will come to feeds eventually, but I would like to explore monetizing options on my feed.
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I sometimes put my foot in my mouth by saying things before I investigate if they can actually be done. But I started thinking about this further. And was wondering if there where a way to build a sidebar into feed. It would be cool to drag a drop. Or a plugin to do this. Not sure if any of this is possible, yet.
At the moment, my feed provides summaries purely cos I can’t grasp why anyone would visit the site if all my latest and greatest is already right there in front of them. Unless, of course, the site provides bundles of great stuff that people specifically visit in order to access and, on that score, my blog is still in its infancy.
Do you think an RSS feed actually benefits the blog that doesn’t enjoy masses of traffic? Unless I’m missing something here, I just don’t geddit;-D
Reward Rebel (aka Layne)’s last blog post..Internet Marketing and My Sister
I visit most blogs only through my feed reader. Entrecard has changed that a little. Using them, I have visited more blogs in person. But for the most part, I like full feeds and visit the site when I want to comment. The subscriptions I have that are summaries have to grab me in the first few sentences or I won’t be there anyway.
I starting blogging more heavily assuming that there is not much money to be made from banners unless I’m getting massive traffic. I have monetized specific posts that get a lot of traffic with targeted ads. My strategy doesn’t really involve catching many impulse buys, but that doesn’t mean I don’t mind hedging my bets that way which is why I am investigating monetizing my feeds.
I see a more long term, build it and forget it income stream from getting my posts ranked in the search engines. More inner linking to product reviews. There are not many yet though.
It’s not just in the the subscribers, but the links that can potentially get back to your blog as a result of your feed. When you can add your feeds to MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and other similar sites, each post is also a set of new links back from each one of these sites. And places like Zimbio reprint your whole post. Links placed into feeds may pack more of a punch when the feed is passed around the web like that.
Some may mention the duplicate content issue. But I figured my site is currently getting indexed very quickly. I have seen my posts show in Google with four hours or so. If there is a duplicate content issue, I will still have my content here first.
Just a note on the Feedblitz thing. As on today, Feedburner says I have 645 subscribers. I can get a big head sometimes, but a 600% increase in 3 days is just not logical. And 538 are from Feedblitz.
There was a major Feedblitz glitch recently I saw one of my feeds jump from 3000 or so to 4500-ish to 5800 and then drop back down to just under 3000 again. Very annoying as my charts are all skewed by their error now.
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David Bradley’s last blog post..Blogger to Wordpress Pagerank Saver
Not sure ads in your blog feed would put people off, it would really depend on how they looked within the feed. And of course being relevant to the subject would surely help the CPA.
One way of successfully monetizing feeds I’ve been playing with is providing affiliate feeds from an advanced ebay search. So people looking out for size 10 UGG boots on a Buy-It-Now will have a constant feed of the latest available ones on ebay.
Seems like a good option for some sites. You can use the tags from the post to pull up related products out of Ebay.
I not monetize my blog feeds yet. I guess must try. thank for sharing.