• Contrary to what some make money online bloggers will tell you, having a large number of RSS subscribers will not be your instant passport to making money on the net and in some case they could even do you harm.

money in your pocket Most readers who subscribe to RSS feeds are web-savvy. They know that the sponsor adverts you have on your side bar are there to earn you bucks and most of your readers will not be interested in inflating your earnings. They want to read information which will help them learn how to make a living online, not fill your pockets.

Of course, if you set yourself up as ‘an authority on how to make money’ and then convince your loyal readers to click on those banner adds and buy the products you are promoting, but have not used yourself, then you will make money from RSS subscribers. But as this blog is about not scamming your regular readers, I hope you won’t be tempted to do that.

Regular subscribers to your blog (whether through RSS or social bookmarking) can actually do you harm as a web entrepreneur. Particularly if you rely on those readers as your main source of traffic and you run Adsense on your site.

Regular readers know that adsense ads are there simply to make you money, that they are not part of the information you are giving them. So most of them won’t click on them. If you are getting many more regular readers than search engine readers, this will affect your adsense CTR (click through rate) and you will lose out on cash you could have made.

Even worse, if some of your regular readers do click on those adsense ads, Google will be able to ascertain that these are not search engine readers and you will end up with a highly discounted Cost Per Click. Have a look at Griz’s Optimization Tips for Adsense|How to Make Money for Beginers and you will see just why these factors apply.

And, if your social blog (i.e. the one everyone subscribes to) is running Adsense, this will affect the payment you receive from your account on all your niche sites and you will not make very good money online (and if you wonder why I have that add up there above this post, on a totally ’social’ blog, rather than a blog which makes me money, well, there are ways around this of course… including a very useful tip for displaying Adsense only to search visitors which is explained at Courts Internet Marketing School, but we are discussing the pros and cons of RSS subscribers here…)

So how can you make money on a blog which has plenty of RSS subscribers?

Well, you could scam your readers by selling them useless products and then keep them with you while you explain to them just why those products are not working for them, and maybe they ought to think about spending out on something else you are offering… But could you sleep easy at night? I couldn’t.

You could, of course, convince someone that your high level (or even inflated high level…) of RSS subscribers and social bookmarking readers is actually worth a lot of cash and sell them your site. Again, not to be recommended if you want to keep any credibility online.

Or you could try a better way to make money from those regular readers to your make money online blog:

  • You could sell them products in a truly ethical way:
  1. You could offer them good advice and tell them about products you have actually used and can honestly recommend.
  2. You could also tell them to purchase the products only when they are ready and not before and offer them links to good free alternatives (which may not have all the bells and whistles, but are enough to begin with).
  3. You could help your readers decide whether they are ready to buy the products or not by offering advice as to what they need to do and learn first.
  4. You could show them true examples of how the product has worked for you.
  5. And then you could feel justified about directing them to your affiliate link.

  • If you have niche blogs which sell products, you could use your RSS feed to get subscriptions via feed sharing sites like Bloglines. This works for me in adult blogging and could well work in mainstream niche blogging too. I have had a few sales from people searching Bloglines for adult content and I guess they may search there for other mainstream niches also. It is not a great money spinner however, but this is not about scamming regular readers, this is about people searching for a product you are selling using an RSS source, rather than joining your blog to find out information on how they can make a living on the net.

  • There is also the case that if your regular subscribers like your blog and are bloggers themselves, they may well link to you in an article and if they use good keywords in their anchor text, that is always a bonus too.

But do not ever think that having a large number of RSS subscribers will be a great source of making money online, because they will not. Unless, of course, you are an ‘A List’ scammer…

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