Have you ever wondered how these big name bloggers add their own footer to the bottom of their RSS feed posts?
It’s a fantastic marketing strategy that many people use to gain subscriptions to their websites.
The Usual Strategy
The typical strategy for this is to offer the visitor some special gift if they sign up to your website’s RSS feed.
Typically, the gift is a free eBook or similar. The catch is they have to sign up to your RSS feed to claim it in the footer of the RSS post. This usually points back to a page on your site with a download link (or even sometimes is just a direct link to the freebie – like a PDF document).
Read more about creating a free report and the power of using this technique.
What Else Can I Use An RSS Footer Link For?
Uses of footer links in RSS feeds are quite varied. Usually you’ll find that it’s a free report, or some reward for signing up. But sometimes you’ll see it used in other ways.
Advertising
Using Feedburner you can place Adwords advertising on your RSS feed. This is probably the most common method of doing this and it’s dead simple using Feedburner’s instructions and Google Adsense.
Another great way (and I think a better option) is to place your own advertising here instead of the normal Google adverts. You cannot do this through feedburner, so you’ll have to use one of the methods I outline below (keep reading for more info).
This is great because you can either advertise your own products/services, or sell the advertising space on to other companies if you have a sizable audience.
Author Information
This is what I’m doing at the moment. For bloggers it builds credibility and allows you to put your face infront of your readers without them having to visit your site.
Personifying your website is a great strategy – I’m a big fan of it. Now you can do it with your RSS feed too and reach all of your audience.
Special Offers
If you run a business and have a number of subscribers then you’ll be familiar with running special offers via your blog.
Why not make it known that if your customers sign up to your RSS feed they will get access to RSS member’s only specials? Using a footer link you can rotate specials and it will always be reflected in your latests posts.
This is a nice constant reminder that you have a sale going on and a great incentive for people to sign up to your RSS feed.
Your Imagination Is The Limit
Really you can put anything in your RSS footer links and the sky is the limit. Steal one of the ideas I’ve presented above and see how it works for you.
So How Do I Add Footer Links To My RSS Feed?
The best way to add footer links for WordPress users is by using a RSS footer links plugin.
There are two great plugins that will let you add RSS footer links to your feed.
PostPost Plugin
The PostPost plugin is a handy plugin for WordPress which allows you to add code/content before and after your posts, pages, and – the one we’re interested in – RSS feed contents.
Better Feed Plugin
The one I like and have been using personally (as my development themes cover a lot of what the previous plugin does) is the Better Feed plugin.
Better Feed Options
Better Feed allows you to control lots more about what the contents of your RSS footer links contain – even giving you a handy interface for it which you can steal the post title, comments links, urls, tags, word counts, and loads more.
Plugin Installation
WordPress plugin installation is quite simple, and the Better Feed plugin can be found and installed by using the “Add New” plugin search inside your WordPress administration panel. Unfortunately you’ll have to manually install PostPost.
Conclusion
Hopefully you’ve found this tutorial handy! I know I was quite chuffed when I found out how to do this as it was something I’ve been meaning to look into for quite some time.
If you want to check it out in action just sign up to the Code My Own Road RSS feed!
