Profiting From RSS Part 2
December 12, 2006
There are many ways to profit from your blog or website and one way is RSS a great and sometimes untapped resource. Don’t overlook this potential asset.
Publishers are evaluating options and determining how they can profit from RSS feeds. The two obvious contenders that publishers are considering to profit from their RSS feeds are: subscription RSS feeds and RSS feed advertisements.
Subscriptions.
Subscription feeds are designed so that subscription fees are charged for unique quality content. Publisher include teaser copy in the RSS feed and readers have to purchase a subscription to see the content in its entirety. The New York Times was the first to introduce the subscription model. Initially the NY Times faced some resentment from users who had become accustom to free RSS based content, but ultimately consumers realize that businesses must achieve profits in order to continue.The greater the value of the content contained in the feed and the uniqueness of the content will determine the success of subscription based feeds. Simply put, if readers can obtain the same quality and quantity of content from an alternative free source they will. Not unlike magazines, if the content the publisher is providing is unique and valuable, the subscription model will flourish.
Profit From RSS
November 13, 2006
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and millions have signed up with programs on or online websites to get rss delivered to them daily. This is a great way for you to get your website, blog, product out their and you can even profit from other ways such as with Adsense.
Feedvertising From TLA
September 29, 2006
Last week, Text Link Ads announced that they would be offering Feedvertising, which has been in a limited beta for a while. Anybody that is using WordPress 2.0 can download a plugin from the TLA site, add a bit of code to their pages, and deliver ads, at the end of each post in their RSS feed.
Feedvertising gives you the ability to sell ad space, define your own message, or both. Quite a few high profile blogs, such as TechCrunch and ProBlogger have been using the service during the beta period, with pretty good results.
With Text Link Ads, advertisers pay a flat amount per month, so there is no cost-per-click or variable CMP rates. You’ll know exactly how much money you’ll be making and how much potential there is.
If you’d like a closer look at how to add this to your blog, take a look at the Flash video tutorial.
If you’re not signed up at Text Link Ads, there is an approval proccess to go through. All you have to do is create a publisher account to start the approval proccess.
RSS Thieves
September 14, 2006
RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication allows you to simply syndicate your blog, website, newsfeeds and more all over the internet. People can sign up with the click of a button and read your blog through their email programs, online or special feed programs.
However, as it becomes more simple to do this and can help you get more readers to your blogs, it is also a loved format for content thieves. Special programs allow them to automatically steal your content and lots of others, keeping their blog or website updated with your material.
Some sites are legitimate and will simply provide your post title and a summary, linking back to you so that people can go to your site to read what you have written. This provides you with free advertising and more visitors.
Blog Feeds and RSS To Blog
June 11, 2006
I came across a program called RSS To Blog and many others like it and I realized that of course newcomers won’t understand what is actually going on with it but I wondered if the other bloggers or wannabe’s that do will even care if they think that they can start pulling in hundred’s or thousands a month through Adsense?
RSS To Blog is program that you can buy which after you set up it can automatically create hundreds of blogs for you and post for you. You sit back and do nothing, while you have a self maintaining blog that updates daily while you hope that you adsense dollars will grow. After looking into it I discovered a few things they don’t tell you.
The first is you need to get a web hosting account going and believe me if you don’t know what your doing good luck on getting it set up. It can be very confusing. You also need to buy a web address. After you do that you can create sub accounts. If you don’t know what a sub account is I will of course explain. If you create an address such as gotmilk.com, the sub accounts would then be, gotmilk.creditcard.com, gotmilk.bookilove.com. You can create a variety of “different” web pages with their own names that way instead of paying tons for new web addresses.
Those are the semi-hard parts but the biggest is the unethical parts of the program. When it says automated and that it automatically updates your blog for you what it is actually doing is scouring the internet and using rss feeds it is taking posts, word for word from other peoples blogs, articles, websites and posting it to your blog and claiming it as yours. If you care only about the money this won’t bother you, but just remember; The web can be a big place, but it is also small in the sense that it won’t be long before someone your stealing from, or someone who knows someone trips across your money making blogs. That is called unethical slash lawsuit waiting to happen.
Ad Spending on Blogs, Podcasts, RSS to Hit $50M in 2006
April 15, 2006
According to a study conducted by PQ Media, ad spending on blogs, podcasts and RSS will reach $50 million this year.
The report found that blog, podcast and RSS advertising are the fastest growing segments of the alternative media industry. Spending on user-generated online media expanded at an aggregate 198.4% to $20.4 million in 2005, and is expected to grow another 144.9% to $49.8 million in 2006.
By 2010, that total is expected to be a whopping $757 million — with blog advertising making up 39.7% of the total and podcast advertising comprising 43.2%.
Which marketing categories are the most profitable? Technology, automobile, and media. Last year, these three accounted for more than half of total spending on user-generated online media.
Source: BtoBonline
Money-Making Methods for Bloggers
March 16, 2006
ProBlogger Darren Rowse has made a list of 8 (direct) ways bloggers can earn money. Here’s a summary:
1. Advertising
There are many ad options: Contextual Ads, Other CPC Advertising, Impression-based Ads, Blog Ads, Text Ads, RSS Ads, and more.
2. Sponsorship
The key if you’re going to take this approach is to target advertisers in your niche that have products that closely relate to what you’re writing about.
3. Affiliate Programs (Amazon, Linkshare, Commission Junction, Clickbank…)
Affiliate programs take some work if you want to get the most out of them (perhaps more work than advertising) but can be lucrative if you match the right program with the right blog/topic.
4. Selling/Flipping Blogs
…in reality [this] is not something that is overly common…yet
5. Donations and Tip Jars
Most bloggers just don’t have the critical mass or the cult following to make [this] work.
6. Merchandise
[This] will probably only work if you either have a brilliantly designed merchandise range and/or you have a cult-like status as a blogger with some fanatical readers who are a little obsessive about your blog
7. Selling Subscriptions
To make it succeed you would need to have some sort of premium/exclusive content and/or real expertise on a topic.
8. Blog Networks
You can start a network and contract bloggers to write for you or secondly you might like to join a blog network as a writer.
NYT Free RSS?
May 31, 2005
Some publishers want to use “free” to draw traffic. Free linking over the web remains a big item in content circles as more major media companies come to value unpaid traffic. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) named a “free content” editor to extend efforts to feed free news links to bloggers, and the new paid archive-and-more plan from the New York Times (NYT), called TimesSelect, may include an affiliate revenue plan to induce bloggers to keep driving traffic to NYT op-ed columnists. Meanwhile, the New York Post continues to suffer fallout from their botched registration implementation and they weren’t even trying to get people to pay; the Drudge Report has dropped standing links to a few Post columnist.
NYT Digital head Martin Niesenholtz recently revealed how important RSS has become to the company’s online efforts. He expects RSS feeds to drive ever-more traffic to nytimes.com. “Links from My Yahoo! feeds have grown from half a million to seven million pageviews. It’s the fastest-growing distribution channel that we have,” he said.
We babble on about RSS regularly with little movement from publishers, but when it’s free, easy, and the NYT says it’s their fastest-growing distribution channel, isn’t it time to give it some more thought?
Weblogs Inc. Hits $2,000 Per Day in AdSense
May 27, 2005
Weblogs Inc. has broken the $2,000 per day barrier in AdSense revenue, reports Jason Calacanis.
These guys definitely deserve a hat tip.
It was just April 7th when they broke the $1,000 per day barrier. Now, just a few short months later, they’ve doubled that.
Calacanis reports:
It took us just over seven months (from September 2004 to April 2005) to go from $0 to $1,000, and about six weeks to go from $1,000 to $2,000. The increase was based on traffic gains and adding Google Adsense for RSS. We’re also involved in one other unannounced Google Adsense program that makes our sites a little more targeted (I can’t go into details on it, but it’s not having a huge impact).
I had no idea Weblogs Inc. was so big. Apparently they have a 10 person full-time staff, and over 75+ bloggers, who post regularly (many times a day) to the Weblogs Inc. network.
Darren Rowse of problogger.net fame chimes in on the comments:
Can I suggest that if you put them in content that you’ll probably increase your earnings by significantly more than $200- $300 per day if you’re earning $2000 currently.
I still remember the night I did it and saw my earnings double.
Of course you might not see a doubling as you’ve already done other things I hadn’t done back in those days - but I’d hazard a guess that it’ll be more than a 10-15% increase.
As for things here at Niner Niner, well, let’s just say we haven’t broken the $1000 per day barrier. Heck, $1000 per month would be nice!
Chris Pirillo Goes Full-Text
May 27, 2005
I’ve been reading Chris Pirillo’s blog for a while now.
More recently, I finally grokked RSS and have been using Bloglines in a major way.
FeedDemon is great, but I browse the web on at least three computers. (Home Desktop, Laptop, & My Work PC)
Bloglines makes it easy to read your feeds from anywhere with ‘Net access. The only thing I dislike, though, is that it seems to have trouble remembering which items I’ve viewed on other machines. I’m not sure if this is by design. It doesn’t make sense to me… If I’ve already viewed entries on one PC, why show them as unread on another PC?
Now, where were we…
Scoble and a few others have been bitching lately about how Chris Pirillo’s RSS feeds weren’t full-text. His site is ad supported … so his RSS feeds were just brief summaries that linked to the full posts w/ embedded AdSense ads, etc.
Well, full-text RSS feeds are back over on Chris’ blog.
I think this is a smart move on his part… Sure, you want to monetize your site. But you also want to provide a great service to your users. When full-text becomes the norm, and you’re still doing summaries, it really makes them think, “is this really worth it, that I have to click-thru and all?”
There will be a day (it may not be that far off, either), when AdSense for RSS or some other means will provide a way to monetize full-text RSS feeds.
Until then, I think it’s just one of those things that you’ll have to do (provide full-text RSS, that is), just to keep up with the proverbial Joneses. That … and to keep guys like Scoble from bitching about your summary feeds.
