Ever wondered how webmasters create feed mashups?

If you don’t know what I mean by ‘feed mashup’, take a look the homepage of this blog where it says “Ros’ Other Blog Posts“. You’ll see another example on my personal blog under “Recent on Ros’ Other Blogs“.

What you’ll notice is that the most recent posts from a variety of my blogs show up in those spots.

In the past, I’ve used software to create mashups, but now I’m using Google Reader.

Creating your own mashup with Google Reader is easy.

• Subscribe to the feeds you want to publish in Google Reader.
• Create a new folder and assign the feeds to that folder.
• Make the folder public by going into Manage Subscriptions (on the bottom left-hand side of the page), Settings, then Folders and Tags.
• The public page now has a feed of its own which includes all the feeds in the folder. To get the feed URL, click on “View Public Page” and copy the link.
• To post the mashup on your WordPress blog, go into Widgets and drag the RSS widget into the section where you want it placed, i.e. the sidebar.
• Enter the URL, a title and other particulars as you want the feed displayed.

So there you have it, an rss feed mashup of your own!.

I’m terrible about checking my Google Adsense earnings. I occasionally login to confirm that the amount on the check equals the amount reported in the Google Adsense interface… occasionally.

So, when I logged in this morning to review the reports, I was surprised (and delighted) to notice that this month’s earnings are more than triple what my average Adsense earnings have been over the past year and more.

Granted, the checks were markedly larger in both June and July — but I likely put that down as a ‘fluke’, endorsed them and took them to the bank.

As it’s unlikely to get 3 times ‘lucky’, and traffic to the site has actually decreased slightly over the summer, today I determined the cause for the substantially larger checks…

Google Adsense for Feeds

If you visit my feed for this site, you will notice that Google Adsense ads are displayed after every post summary. (Note: if that’s not what you see – keep reading to learn the reason that’s changed.)

What is most apparent is that my clickthrough rate on Adsense for Feeds (across all channels) is considerably higher (2.87%) than the CTR on AdSense for Content (0.39%).

Too, the Page eCPM on Adsense for Feeds is likewise higher at an average of $16.48 (across all channels) than the eCPM on Adsense for Content which sits at an average of 2.36.

On some channels the eCPM ratio between feeds and content is 20:1.

So placing Google Adsense after every feed item is a great tactic if you want to increase your Google Adsense earnings.

But before you rush off to do so, ask yourself the following questions first — especially if you promote goods and services as an affiliate on your site.

• Is earning an extra $100, $200 or $1000 per month (as the case may be) from Google Adsense really worth the cost of diverting traffic away from my site?
• How much more could I earn if those ‘clicks away’ became site visitors who bought the products I promote.
• In other words, am I really willing to trade potential subscribers / buyers for pennies on the dollar?

How you answer those questions really depends on what stage your affiliate site is at.

If you are just starting out as an affiliate and haven’t yet joined too many affiliate programs, then monetizing with Adsense is a great choice.

However, if your site is fully developed — promotes a number of products, services and builds a subscriber list — then you might actually lose revenues with so many Google Adsense placements in your feeds.

On the other hand, even with a fully-developed site, placing Adsense after each post summary may amount to an increase in overall revenue.

Only you can determine what works best for your site, by checking your stats much more often than I do!

Do you place Adsense units in your feeds? Any comments on how frequency of placement has affected your revenue? Please share, we’d love to know!

Want to learn more about how to increase your Adsense earnings?

Check out Stephen Crooks’ Cash Cow Guide which includes his $100 a Day Adsense Challenge Report as a bonus. This was Stephen’s challenge to make $100 a day from adsense within 3 months from a brand new blog.

If you are a visual learner, you might prefer Michael Cheney’s Adsense Videos that show how he completely EXPLODED his Adsense earnings.

Have you ever wanted to stop the feeds on your blog?

For example, if you wanted to import a number of static HTML articles that you had elsewhere on your site and post them into your blog without sending an email to all of your Feedburner email subscribers each time you posted one of those articles – you might want to stop the feed… temporarily of course.

One way to do that is to remove the following files from your WordPress installation.

• wp-atom.php
• wp-comments2rss.php
• wp-feed.php
• wp-links-opml.php
• wp-rdf.php
• wp-rss.php
• wp-rss2.php
• feed-rss2-comments.php

The other way – apparently – is to us the No Feed plugin by Jason.

Let’s see if it works…

Follow up… Well, sure enough the No Feed broke the feed and gave an error message when I clicked my Feedburner link.

On the other hand, when I deactivated the plugin, this post showed up immediately under Current Feed Content at Feedburner, so it remains to be seen whether Feedburner will send that email out… but I suspect they will.

Any other ideas?

Have you checked recently to see whether your blog’s feed is valid?

No?

Well, consider this a cautionary tale.

I stopped by Feedburner and was shocked to see that one of my blog feeds was showing exactly the same number of subscribers as it had when I last checked – a few months earlier.

How could that possibly be? I wondered. The feed had been averaging about 10 new subscribers a day until that time and according to AWSTATS, the number of site visitors had been steadily increasing since then.

So, I went straight to the Troubleshootize button and quickly scanned the list for the most likely suspect.

It wasn’t problem #1. “Your FeedBurner feed isn’t up-to-date with your Original Feed. The fix: Try pinging FeedBurner using our Ping page. This action tells FeedBurner to go check your feed for updates immediately.”

The next option “Invalid characters or XML markup in content items, often introduced by composing your posts in Microsoft Word or embedding JavaScript code in a post” didn’t seem likely as I don’t use Word to compose my posts and the only embedded javascript was the ShareThis plugin.

However, I still decided to check both the feeds for validity problems.

The Original Feed Validator confirmed that the feed was invalid by reason of a CDATA error. After poking around for a while to try and figure out what that meant, I went back to the blog and started opening up the posts, starting with the one around the time the subscriptions stopped.

Sure enough, right at the top of the post was a little rectangular character that certainly didn’t need to be in the message. I stripped it out, saved the post and went back to the validator.

This time the news was better. “Congratulations! This is a valid RSS feed” was the result.

Woohoo!

Fortunately, because this error occured on a personal blog to which I barely post or monetize, the fact that the feed wasn’t valid didn’t affect my income.

However, it probably upset a few of those who were unable to subscribe, and that ultimately is bad for business.

To avoid losing subscribers and revenue due to invalid feeds, check them often. If you use Feedburner, the Original Feed Validator and Feedburner Feed Validator links in the Troubleshootize section will automatically input the URL at FeedValidator and run the check. Otherwise, visit FeedValidator.org and run the check directly from there.

Validate your feeds today!

Have you ever noticed how sites that syndicate content from other people’s blogs and newsfeeds seem to get high search engine rankings?

Do you want to integrate RSS newsfeeds from one of your own sites (or those published on other websites) into your blog but can’t figure out how it’s done?

Well, I had the same problem, did some research and you’ll be glad to know that the solution is really quite simple.

The Free Feed Integration Problem

I was using Feedburner BuzzBoost to publish recent post titles from this site to RosalindGardner.com, but got tired of the ‘Powered by Feedburner’ link that went straight to Feedburner, (outlined in red in the 1st screen capture below). Granted, you expect to show advertising in exchange for using a free service, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it… and as an affiliate marketer, I still don’t like non-paying links that go off my site.

CaRP Evolution: The RSS to HTML Solution

So, I started looking for a reasonably-priced RSS to HTML script that could be customized and found CaRP, a PHP script that runs on your website. It converts the content from RSS and Atom newsfeeds into HTML and displays it in your webpages.

Seeing Shawn Collins’ (Affiliate Summit co-founder) testimonial on the homepage definitely compelled me to look more thoroughly at the program. This is what he said:

“CaRP, which converts RSS to HTML for SEO benefits, is one of my favorite tools. It enables me to feature my blog content on other sites of mine, exposing my blog posts to more people.”

The script is highly customizable and the following data can be displayed:

The output can be further customized with custom mapping and plugins.

Benefit to Affiliate Marketers

Better yet, with the paid version of CaRP, you can build customized Amazon affiliate links based on your search terms.

I was convinced, bought the CaRP Evolution software and now the feed display looks like this:

Easy Installation

The installation and setup was easy. You just upload the software to your server / host (preferably to the root directory) and run the setup file from your browser.

To display the feed, you just place a snippet of code where you want the content to show up, and customization is easy when you follow the instructions in the ReadMe file provided.

CaRP Options

Carp offers 3 levels of software – free, single use licence and a single server licence. they also offer a subscription service, but I opted for the single use licence which also includes:

• 14 free bonus plugins
• A “brandable” eBook about making money with RSS that I can earn commissions by giving away
• An MP3 audio recording of the eBook
• “Podcasting for Fun and Profit”
• “Podcast Teleprompter”
• Free updates

CaRP Evolution.

RSS, RSS, RSS… you hear the constant chant, but do you really know what the heck it means?

RSS stands for ‘Real Simple Sydication‘ and is a way for webmasters to publish (or ‘feed’) new information posted on their site to feed subscribers. A single item will typically include a headline, a snippet of content and a link to the website.

Benefits of Using RSS

The benefit to feed subscribers is that it allows them to stay informed of rapidly changing content on a multitude of sites without having to sign up for individual newsletters or having to visit each site separately.

Most webmasters make it easy to sign up for their feeds, with easily recognizable icons and links such as:

• 
• Get the Newsletter
• Subscribe Via RSS
• Subscribe Via Email
• Add to Google
• Add to My Yahoo
• What is RSS?

There are many RSS feed readers, also known as ‘aggregators‘, to choose from. I started off with ‘FeedReader‘, which is a freeware application for Windows, and now use Google’s reader.

The primary benefit for webmasters who syndicate their content with RSS feeds is that feed subscribers are automatically notified as new items are published. Making RSS feeds available to readers typically increases readership and site traffic.