Advertising in your RSS feed has been around for a while, but I have not seen anyone crying from the rooftops on how effective it is. There are not images of people holding up their cheques for $$$$ sayng RSS advertising is the best (as they do for traditional AdSense). Since no one is saying how effective it is, I thought I would run an experiment on my own feed to see how effective it is.
I’m not a fan of traditional AdSense, the idea that someones comes to your site to read your quality content and then clicks away for a couple of cents does not sit very well with me. I have yet to make my mind up about RSS feeds, and I will probably only leave it up for a couple of weeks.
So I’ve laid my cards in the table and full disclosure has been made, now lets move forward this post is all about adding AdSense to your blog’s RSS feed.
If you want a quick lesson on RSS, you can check my post on the subject Beginers Guide to WordPRess RSS.
Step One Get and AdSense Account
The first step is to sign-up for an adsense account at http://adsense.google.com
Once you are in go to adsense setup and then to adsense for feeds.
Why Google Bought Feedburner
You can only add adsense to RSS feeds which are served up by Feedburner. Feedburner developed itself as the leading RSS hosting company before being acquired by Google a couple of years ago. It has taken some time but finally they have fully integrated the adsense platform with Feedburner.
Google bought the top platform with a ready made user base to serve up ads.
Change the Look’n’Feel
So your have decided to add RSS, there are a number of options you can set:
Ad type – you can specify that text and image ads or text only ads are shown on your feed. I have selected text only. Since I have very little control of knowledge of what will be advertised, I thought text will be less disturbing to you my jolly readers if something unpleasant is pushed upon you.
Post interval – a nice touch is to control how often ads are served. You can select every post, or set an interval of every x posts so part of your content can be ad free.
Post length – you can specify ads over a certain word count to only display ads. I was thinking why Google would do this and my thought is that a reader needs to be completely engaged to read a long post, and perhaps they are more inclined to click on an ad at the. I’m not sure but the massive heads at Google will have done that for a reason.
Location – you can serve your ads at the top of bottom of the page
Colours – you can let adsense detect the colours of your feed, or you can setup a custom palette.
Assign this configuration to your feed from Feedburner and click save, it really is as simple as that.
Beware Click Fraud
Click fraud is a cancer on pay per click advertising, do not click on my feed ads unless they are of real value.
In case you did not know click fraud is the process of clicking on paid ads without a desire to review or buy the products. Click fraud is done by bloggers trying to increase their income or by advertisers competitors trying to deplete advertising budgets.
Watch This Space
I will report back in a couple of weeks on how effective RSS advertising has been (or not been). I would love to hear your opinion on advertising in RSS, it’s something I know will polarise people.
Many people subscribe to RSS to get away from the ads, how do you feel about them coming after you.
Are you tempted to unsubscribe from my blog because of it? Please let me know before you click unsubscribe this is just an experiment I don’t want to fall out over this :).
Tell me your stories about adsense, show me that RSS advertising can work or not in the comments section.