Monetizing RSS

And get free targetted content you can control 100%

Here's an interesting twist how to use RSS that I found out quite by accident. It didn't start off as a concious effort for monetizing RSS for her and it's really no rocket science. The best thing is, it won't add on to your workload but actually decrease it. A friend of mine had a little problem finding good headlines to feature on her web based newsletter. After suggesting to her to search all the RSS directories and search engines, I thought, why not create her own?

So what? I have one I don't see your point you say? Let me guess... your feed is currently attached to a blog that you decided to publish because you hear all the great traffic it's supposed to bring you right? You're probably just hoping that someone will pick it up and publish it on their site or add it to their RSS reader. Don't get me wrong. Nothing wrong with that at all but...

The Problem
If you're on the receiving end like my friend, sometimes these feeds are not awfully relevant and at other times there is a fear of unsuitable content cropping up. You're probably thinking; you can just type in your keyword into a RSS directory like BlogDigger or PubSub and achieve the same effect. Yes maybe, but the problem about unsuitable content is still there.

There are ways to get around that but the real heart of the problem is RSS directories are a huge repository of all kinds of feeds. A huge percentage of them are personal blogs. I'm sure you would have noticed if you go do a keyword search in such directories, a huge chunk of the results are meaningless ramblings. Example, I entered "gift baskets" into BlogDigger and I get things like someone received a gift basket yesterday or gift baskets available in a hotel in some city. They may help your web ranking by pulling in all the right keywords but have zero value to your readers. Ideally you want both - so I'm an idealist. Besides if you pull keyword results, you're can't monetize it! Aha! I'll show you how. Keep reading.

Solution

Step 1
Get a blog. Easiest and fastest way is Blogger for this purpose. This blog is really not meant as a promotional blog i.e. a blog that you want to publicize to everyone

Step 2
Tell a few people who have complimentary but not competing businesses that you have a new option to get on your newsletter for free (if you're selling adspace already this freebie will motivate them) or they can post their articles there for free, people love that. Create blog access for each of them and of course set some ground rules - you don't want this to turn into a free for all ad space. Allow them to post their articles, news of interest or excerpt from their newsletter. The key is you dictate the relevancy. Since it is a blog entry you can have the choice to unpublish that article if you think its not relevant and so on. You're in control

Step 3
Use the RSS feed the blog generates for your own newsletter headline or anywhere on your website you deem fit.

Benefits:

1. Free and laser targetted relevant content you can control
2. Fresh content (and spiderable)
3. Don't require a lot of (or any) work
4. Use this method everywhere on your websites not only newsletter

Monetizing RSS
If you charge money for advertising. Forget about manually adding text ads. Use the method in this article. Charge advertisers a per access fee or per duration (day, week, month). How simple and automated can it get?