6 Ways to Enhance, Promote and Monetize Your RSS Feed

Using RSS as a way to attract new visitors, create an open revenue stream, and retain your email newsletter unsubscribers

Many publishers view their RSS feed as a self-sustaining journal, a part of their blog that is great because of the low-key and hands-off approach that it was designed for. Well we’re not sure if they’ve noticed, but there’s a whole lot more to this online publishing than recycled content. Recycled content—with class!

Luckily, monetizing your RSS feed doesn’t mean diving into the nitty gritty, it’s pretty easy, and surprisingly exciting to find your content in niches that were once unexplored territory. Here’s a list of six things you can do—today—that will attract new visitors, create an open revenue stream, retain your email newsletter unsubscribers, and will give you (or your webmaster) something to brag about at the next new media conference.

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1. Validate Your Feed. Having a feed with errors is the best way to lose inclusion in feed readers. FeedValidator.org will make sure your feed is valid (especially important for Podcast feeds if you want a chance of being accepted into the iTunes collection). It will give you a line-by-line error report for an easy fix.
2. Create Chicklets. No, not the square-shaped gum. We’re talking about those little RSS icons you see on almost every blogger website used to recruit readers that prefer RSS to email. iFeedReaders.com has a simple “chicklet creator” tool for making them in seconds. They give you the code, and all you need to do is drop it into your website template.You can also create your own chicklets at feedforall.com.
3. Subscribe to Feedburner. Feedburner.com is the best thing since sliced bread. With an extremely user-friendly interface, Feedburner provides you with a number of free services. It’ll keep tabs on your feed, letting you know how many active subscribers you have, what they’re using to read it, ping RSS readers, create chicklets, enable it for podcasting, incorporate tagging and comments, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it calls your mom on her birthday for you.Especially helpful for your users, Feedburner provides them with an “;add to feed” page where they are able to select their RSS reader, read the latest entries, and view what your feed has to offer. If you’re feeling ambitious, they’ve also recently gotten into the email business, all for free, courtesy of their acquisition by Google.
4. Feed-vertise! This works whether you’re ad-based or product-based. If you’re product-based, start inserting text ads for your products. You can manually do it through your RSS feed code, or you can simply make it a part of your blog, which is what we’d recommend. If you are ad-based, you have a plethora of (mostly) free feed advertising agencies willing to help out:

Category-based Feed Advertising: Feedburner Ad Network, Feedvertising, Pheedo
Contextual Feed Advertising: FeedDirect, Google Adsense for Feeds (by application and beta invitation only), Kanoodle, Yahoo! Publisher Network
Keyword-based Advertising: MediaFed, Q Ads
Interstitial Feed Advertising: ThankYouPages

5. Use it as a Second Chance. Adding a link to subscribe to your RSS feed on the “unsubscribe” page for your email newsletter is a great way to retain subscribers who feel they are receiving too much email, but would still like to read your content. Combine this with feed-vertising and you’ve got a potential revenue stream out of an unsubscriber.
6. Promote it! Your blog isn’t the only place where people will see and find your feed. Try adding your feed to some of the big databases, such as the Yahoo Publisher Network, Google Blog Search, and Technorati. In addition to this, it’s advisable to use an all-purpose ping-er like Pingoat.com to get your site indexed in all of the small feed readers as well.