Beef up your Feed with the Feed Footer Plugin
One of my favorite Wordpress plugins lately has been the Feed Footer plugin, from Blog Clout. I subscribe to about a zillion feeds, and I’m surprised that I don’t see it used on other blogs more often. Feed Footer allows Wordpress bloggers to add special notices and other items to the tail end of their posts that are only viewable by RSS subscribers. Here are a couple of ideas on how you can make your feed pop using Feed Footer.
Thank your subscribers
This might sound like a no-brainer, but for some reason I rarely see bloggers tip a hat to their RSS subscribers. After you’ve convinced someone to subscribe to your feed, thanking them for subscribing is a great way to complete the connection you’ve just made… after all, if you had the opportunity to meet your readers face to face, you’d want to thank them personally for reading, wouldn’t you? The fact that feed subscribers can be anonymous online doesn’t have to deprive you of the opportunity to be courteous.
Here’s a graphic image that I use in my feed footer… it’s actually the same image that I applied to Trevor Fitzgerald’s “Subscribe Remind” plugin back in January. I felt that using a graphic would create a stronger impact than simply using text, and I also like the continuity of using the same image both on my blog (to encourage subscriptions) and in the feed (to show appreciation to my RSS readers). If you’d like to see this graphic in action, go ahead and subscribe to my feed and check it out.
Present advertising
There are different schools of thought on monetizing your RSS feed, but if you choose to go that route, Feed Footer allows you to present ads at the bottom of your feed. If your subscriber count is high, you could consider selling ad space in your feed footer… John Chow sells text ads in his feed footer for $200 a month! Of course, you may not have 20,000 RSS readers like John does… if your subscriber count is low, you might have a hard time attracting paying sponsors. In this case, you could still monetize your feed by presenting targeted affiliate offers in your feed footer.
Offer bonus content
Special content that isn’t available to regular readers of your site might be a good way to encourage new readers to subscribe to your feed. You might think about putting a download link in your feed footer for an ebook (yours, or someone else’s that you have the right to promote). I’ve tossed around the idea of running a blog contest where the contest details are only available in the feed footer… people interested in the prize would have to subscribe to my feed to figure out how to win it!
What can you think of?
These are just three ways that you can use the Feed Footer plugin for Wordpress to juice up your feed. Have you got a neat idea or trick to share? Feel free to leave it in the comments!
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Chris Bloczynski dot Com is a blog about entrepreneurship and internet marketing. It's targeted towards ebusiness owners and bloggers, with an emphasis on principles such as attitude, mentorship, tools to streamline your business, and tactics for marketing and growth.
I like the contest idea. You could also give tips or advice that only subscribers get.
Selling ad space is a nice way to monetize it. I like to put affiliate links to offers related to the blog post on one of my websites that offers an RSS feed. Does pretty well.
Good article. This will help my new blog.
Great info. I always wondered how it was done. I will definitely implement this on my blog.
Its a nice write up i must confess
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog.
The graphic idea seems much more compelling than a simple reminder plugin. Nice work!
This is great idea. Thanks for the post!
- Dave
Its been a while now and no new update.what’s actually hapening
.Somebody should do something about it.
Thanks so much for this post though i think you have posted this berfore now and you just re posted it again.