Tease excerpt or full feed & how to monetize your rss feeds

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Tease excerpt or full feed & how to monetize your rss feeds

Written by Rak-Wholesale.com, on 12-04-2008 13:32

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If you offer a syndicated feed to your readers, you've probably battled the question of whether to offer full posts in your feeds or whether you should just offer excerpts and hope to get interested visitors to click on the headlines to read the full articles on your site.

The benefit of having the readers click back to your site is obvious - more ad impressions, more hits, maybe more page click throughs to other content the visitor might find interesting. The bottom line - a possibility of more earnings for your site.

The temptation to keep your feeds limited to the first paragraph or so is huge. However, many avid feed readers have all but removed these subscriptions from their RSS readers. Why? Well, subscribing to an RSS feed is a way for avid readers to stay up do date with their favorite sites and see real time updates without having to visit each site separately. These people are usually short on time and short on patience, and when faced with a tease paragraph, might just balk at the notion and not even bother to click through to read the full article, as they might feel it defeats the whole purpose of subscribing to get the latest news in their favorite reader.

On the other hand, dedicated fans of your site, will most likely click through to read your new content regardless of whether you offer a full feed or not.

So, how do you deliver the best user experience to both types without losing on those precious pennies that you hope to generate from your ads?

We've found some ad services that you could plug directly into your feeds, and earn pay per click revenue and even get paid per x impressions. This way, you could offer full feeds to your readers and monetize your feeds as a completely separate income generator than the ad programs you feature on your site or blog.

Pheedo - choose to show ads on your site or your just your RSS feeds, pay per click and pay per x impressions, full suite of statistics to analyze your feed traffic and ad revenue

text-link-ads - Nice service offering free script integration which allows you to insert ads into your feeds. Best of all, you could serve either their advertisers' ads, your in house ads, or even your own affiliate ads in your RSS feeds. Currently they work with Wordpress powered blogs/feeds only.

Yahoo Publisher Network (currently in Beta) - Offering ad revenue on a pay per click basis

We've yet to implement these on our feeds, mostly because we are working some kinks out in our attempt to offer full feeds in our subscriptions. So, please don't hold it against us - the motivation here is entirely a technical issue (a bit hard to manipulate without breaking our site templates - we use Joomla CMS). But we would love to hear some feedback from those of you who have been offering full feeds/excerpts and have implemented ads in the feeds.

The Rak-Wholesale.com Team

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