RSS is a popular format that allow people to aggregate blogs content in order to receive automatic updates. This format is very popular in the blogging world, and most bloggers are proudly displaying how many loyal RSS readers they have.

RSS, like any other parts of your blog, can be monetized in order to make you earn more money online. In this article, I’ll discuss the pros and cons of this technique and show you how you can integrate ads in your RSS feed.

Should you monetize your RSS feed?

Sure, the idea of making more money using your RSS feed is definitely appealing. But this doesn’t mean that monetizing your feed doesn’t have any bad points.
In fact, it have some, and it’s up to you to judge if you should monetize your feed or not. One of the best advices I can give about that is to monetize your feed only if your blog is quite popular. Also, you shouldn’t add banners but only a simple text link.

Pros of monetizing your feed

• Your ad will be seen by your all RSS readers
• Adblock can’t do nothing about ads in the RSS feed
• Feed ads generally receive a good amount of clicks

Cons

• Ads (especially if they are too many) can turn off some loyal RSS readers.
• You can only insert one ad on the whole feed using the “RSS Footer” WordPress plugin.

How to insert ads into your RSS feed

Note that the following techniques don’t work with Adsense. Instead, you should display an affiliate link or sell the spot on your “Advertise” page.

WordPress plugin

The first – and probably easier – method to monetize your feed is to use a plugin named “RSS Footer”. The purpose of this plugin is simple : Allowing you to display any kind of content after each item of your RSS feed.
Getting the plugin to work is easy:

1. Go to Joost de Valk website and get your copy of the plugin.
2. Unzip the file and upload the extracted file to the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress install.
3. Login to your WordPress dashboard, Go to Plugins → Activate and activate “RSS Footer”.
4. Go to Settings → RSS Footer, insert your ad text and validate. You’re done!

WordPress Hack

Another way to add content to your RSS feed is to use a WordPress hack. Using the hack isn’t hard if you have at least a little experience with the PHP programming language.

Simply paste the following code on the functions.php file from your theme (If you’re using the Thesis theme that file is named custom_functions.php). If that file doesn’t exist, just create it.

function insertRss($content) {
    if(is_feed()){
        $content = 'text before content'.$content.'<hr /><a href="http://www.catswhoblog.com">Did you visited CatsWhoBlog today?</a><hr />';
    }
    return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'insertRss');

Once you saved the functions.php file, your ads should appear in your feed.

Dealing with Feedburner issues

Most bloggers are using Feedburner to get feed stats and proudly display how many subscribers they have. They are right, this is good to attract advertisers.

Thought, people using Feedburner may not see their ad after installing the plugin or applied the hack. Don’t worry, you just have to resync your feed.
To do so, log in to your FeedBurner account, select your feed and click on the “Troubleshootize” tab. Once done, you’ll find a “Resync” button, that should make the changes show up almost instantly.

Want to see a live demo? Get WpRecipes feed!