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A full-fledged RSS strategy embodies two decisions: How much content to put in the feed Whether or not to run ads in the feed The two decisions are synergistic; they depend on each other. If you make money at your blog through advertising, or hope to, you probably want to
either withhold some of each entry from RSS or put ads in the feed. Putting ads in partial feeds will likely get you torched and blacklisted. As it is, you’ll likely get some angry response simply by introducing ads in a full feed; that’s because some RSS purists (like some early adopters of any technology that started out commercial-free) believe that RSS should forever remain unsullied by advertising.
If you are not out to make any bucks from your blog, there is no reason to withhold content from the feed unless all your entries are very long. (If you specialize in long-windedness, you limit your readership by that fact alone.) If your site contains no ads, putting partial entries in the feed — thereby unnecessarily tormenting your readers — will bring a blogosphere thrashing down upon you. And you’ll lose a lot of silent readers who won’t bother to complain.
Internet content, and Internet content has a value. How much value you realize from your blog depends on several variables, the most important of whichis traffic. The more traffic there is passing through your site, the more chance you have to turn those eyeballs into money.
Does this all sound too mercenary? That’s fine, too. Many people who write personal blogs have less interest in making money from their online diariesthan they do in selling stale bread. I don’t mean to compare your blog entries to stale bread. Perhaps that wasn’t the best analogy. My point is that blogging started as a giving activity, and it still is for most individual bloggers. For most people, trying to generate a revenue stream (as they say in the business world from their hobby blog is not worth the trouble. But an equally valid point is that any site with even a handful of readers can serve as a modest home business. Making money can be a hobby, too, even if your ultimate goal is just to cover blogging expenses. In the case of a basic TypePad account, as an example, that means earning a few dollars a month from your blog. I know people who never imagined they would turn a bloginto money, tried it, and did indeed recoup those few bucks every month.Chances are good that a few dollars per month is the high end of a blog’s earning potential — let’s be realistic. But the attempt has the side benefits of making the blog a little more professional in appearance and making the blogger a little more professional, too. If you’re making 50 cents a month to start,you might be motivated to reach one dollar, and move forward from there. In the effort, you’re likely to make your site look better and explore the marketing tricks that bring more traffic.