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Advertising in RSS Feeds: Are we risking disaster?
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Author: Joe Duchesne
Topic: Advertising
Viewed: 47 time(s)
[ Not Rated Yet ]
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Advertising in RSS feeds is something that Google is considering
offering to its Adwords and Adsense customers. RSS stands for
Really Simply Syndication and is a really easy way for a
webmaster to share their news and information stories to the
world wide web.
Up until recently, RSS feeds had very few options for making
money with them directly. Of course having at least one RSS feed
on your website content will certainly build the relationship
you have with your website visitors which will result in more
sales for your company, making direct money from syndicating
your RSS feed wasn't possible until recently.
Is Putting Advertising in RSS Feeds a good idea?
There is risk to placing advertising in an RSS feed. Your
visitors are being bombarded by spam in their email boxes on a
daily basis. Everywhere you go online you run into advertising
in many different forms. Is it really a good idea to put
Advertising in an RSS feed?
I think it is and here's why. The internet is the greatest
source of information that any of us have access to. Much of
this information is free. The problem is, it takes real effort
not to mention knowledge to get that information online in a
useful form. People and organizations that are good at doing
this deserve to be compensated. If advertising in all forms was
somehow able to be banned today on the internet, tomorrow, the
amount of quality information available for free online would
drop dramatically. In order to try to earn a living, most
content providers would immediately have to seek some form of
compensation online.
A right way to add advertising and a wrong way
Even though I'm in favor of seeing advertising in RSS feeds, I
think that there has to be great moderation in the approach you
use. If too many items in the RSS feed are advertising, a user
will simply unsubscribe themselves from your feed. You would
also have to be concerned about webmasters who pick up your
feed. If you don't provide enough quality content in your RSS
feeds, you'll find it very difficult to get anyone to syndicate
the RSS feed.
I would suggest that you keep your advertising to less than 20%
of your feed. That would mean that in an RSS feed with 10 items
in it, you have no more than 2 items that are advertising. I can
see this number though getting dictated by the likes of Google
and other advertising agencies.
The advertising must add value to your visitor
The advertising will need to look like a news story in order to
be successful. If it is simply tagged as advertising, the click
through rate will most likely be horrible. At the same time
though, the link will need to be truly useful for someone
looking for information on that particular topic. If you have a
feed on maintaining a vibrant garden and the advertisers' link
is about being computer parts, this would very much turn off
visitors and webmasters alike. Companies like Google though have
become pretty good at targeting their advertisers to the context
of the page or content so I don't see this as a big problem when
using these services.
Should you add advertising to your RSS feeds? Yes, but be
cautious about it. RSS feeds are truly useful to your overall
marketing goals even if you abstain from putting any advertising
in them.
About the author:
Joe Duchesne is the webmaster for ScreamerFeeds.com.
ScreamerFeeds is dedicated to educating people about the
benefits of
target="_new">RSS feeds along with their potential uses.
Reprint freely as long as you keep the live keyword rich link in
this resource box.
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