I’ve been looking a lot at RSS feeds lately. How to use them, how to promote them, and how to make my numbers grow. I know from my own experience that I forget about sites, even ones that I enjoy, and I’ve begun to use readers and find out what a great tool RSS really is.

So I want my own readers to be able to take advantage of this and be able to find me again if they’ve enjoyed something they’ve read. (This “they” is YOU, by the way.)

When I first started out I got the message, “Make your feed easy to find.” Check. I’ve put it at the top of my blogs.

But now I want to do even more!

First, I noticed that other people had nifty little footers at the bottom of their feeds. Some with adverts and some with messages that didn’t appear on their sites, so I did some research.

Wordpress Plugins:

• Feed Footer Plugin
• Better Feed Plugin
• PostPost
• Sig2Feed

But none did exactly what I was seeing, so I keep looking, and guess what? It’s a standard feature you can get for free on Feedburner. (Yes, I feel dumb.)

Seen these? Well all you have to do to have them on your own feed is click a few buttons! It’s incredibly easy if you’re already using Feedburner. Log in to your Feedburner account and click “Optimize”.

Then Click “Feed Flare” on the left column.

Then simply go down the list and tick which options you wish to show up on your feed in the Footer.

Save. And it’s done!

This will increase the chances that your RSS readers will interact with your blog!

Other good articles on RSS feeds:

• Increase RSS Subscriptions 
• John Chow’s RSS Competition.   (I include this as I think it’s a great idea and inspiring to think of creative ways to raise reader’s awareness of your feed!)

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I confess I was skeptical when I saw John Chow advertising WidgetBucks.com on his blog. Mostly because I figure anything that makes him a zillion dollars will at most make me 35 cents.

Plus after the whole Blogrush thing and people swarming to and fro and proing and conning and on and on, I was reluctant to try it, but I tell you, it looks promising.

I run an online community (non-bloggish) that gets around 500,000 impressions monthly, and the Google Adsense income for it has been steadily declining. So I replaced it today with Widget Bucks. Click image below to see full-sized screenshot:

What this screenshot can’t illustrate is the interactive quality of the widget.  Users can scroll through a list of top ten items in a category, and it moves them automatically after a delay.

I’m excited about the possibilities, because Adsense is so often a disappointment.  Sure the income is somewhat respectable, but on a site with half a million monthly impressions, I can’t help but think I could be doing so much better.

I definitely plan to add this to The Naked Celebrity, and possibly Bitter Women as well (my other blogs).

Sometimes I think I should have called this  “Experimental Blogging” instead of “About Blogging”, because I’m constantly trying new things.  But if you’re on as much of a journey with your blogs as I am with mine, I thought you’d be interested to hear what I’m trying, why, and the outcome.

I’ll give WidgetBucks a few weeks and then report back with a comparison to Adsense.

Have you tried WidgetBucks?  If so, how are you liking it, and if not, why not?  I’m interested to hear all of your feedback!

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I’m a big believer in upgrading to new versions of software when it’s out of the BETA stage, because it affords much easier support. When something goes wrong, I don’t want to be treated to choruses of “That was fixed 3 upgrades ago!” and it’s very easy to find yourself one, two, then three upgrades behind… and even more!

Not to mention that with Wordpress it can be dicey. We all use so many widgets and plugins and different themes that I always hold my breath when I do an upgrade.

I found this program: Wordpress Upgrade Preflight Check , a widget that you can access through your Options menu that will go through the widgets and themes you’re using and alert you of possible problems before you upgrade to Wordpress 2.3.

I’m so glad I did this, because I’ve discovered that the ultra-cool theme I’ve put in for my newest blog… isn’t at all compatible and would have been broken if I had tried to upgrade it, making my site unreadable. So because of that and the fact that I’ve realised it’s not the best when it comes to SEO (it only displays one recent article) I’ve decided to go with a different theme before making the switch.

I’m so glad I found this widget, because it enabled me to take care of potential problems before they became problems! This could have easily cost me half a day (at least) trying to figure out if I hadn’t used the Preflight Check!

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Little side note: Going to be a light posting week for me because I’m a tad under the weather. 

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I used to use Amazon affiliate links on various websites years ago, but had lost track of what was happening, because I found that people got used to seeing the same old amazon boxes on every website, just as they have grown accustomed to seeing a PayPal donate button. We tune out the images we see all the time.

The other down-side of trying to use Amazon as an affiliate-type programming is that you only get a 24-hour cookie, meaning the purchase has to happen pretty quickly. Most programs out there give you a more leisurely 30 days for your click-ees to make a commitment.

However, Amazon has some nifty new widgets that I think look pretty good, and I’ve been looking again at trying out Amazon as a tool for monetising my blogs. I decided to share them with you in case you either had never used Amazon Affiliates, or had, like me, not looked at them in some time.

Unbox Videos and Slideshow give a moving and active presentation to the Amazon product links. Nicely eye-catching.

I particularly like the Product Cloud. People like this layout of information right now, and are used to clicking on category tag clouds on blogs.  I think My Favorites would be most suitable for a personal blog or a review blog.

Likewise, Wish List might work best on a personal blog. Personally I’m not sure how much time Quick Linker would save someone, since it’s not that difficult to add an amazon link to a website as things stand now. Will have to explore this one.

Search is one I’m not sure how useful it will be. If people want to search amazon, my own feeling is that they’ll just go to amazon and search. If you aren’t familiar with aStores, they’re something Amazon has added to make it incredibly easy for someone to create an entire website shop based around Amazon products. Amazon even hosts the shops. You can see an example here with Cheap-iPods.com .

The Products Link widget isn’t really anything new, although it’s in an easier-to-plug-in format.  Product Preview  and Context Link (below) look promising if you’re interested in advertising Amazon products without actually cluttering up your sidebar with any additional widgets.  I particularly like the Product Preview, because you can decide exactly where and when the adverts appear.

Text Links follows a format similar to Text-Link-Ads, but it leads to a specific destination on Amazon.com

The Omakase, Banner, Recommended Product Links (below), and Search Box (below) widgets look a lot more like traditional Amazon advertizing, but with the ease of an automated widget.

I’d written off Amazon.com as a source of potential income on websites, but these new widgets look quite interesting!

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Last weekend, everyone who was blogging about blogging was blogging about Blogrush, begging their readers to sign up through them. Why? Because Blogrush is a new “traffic-generating” widget for bloggers that relies on the users to try to sign up other users, in a sort of Multi-Level Marketing setup. The way it seems to work is that you earn “credits” by the impressions your own site generates, plus the sites of anyone you get to sign up under you, down through 10 tiers of users.

My own feeling about this is that only the ‘A-list sites ‘ who already have a lot of people visiting will benefit from BlogRush’s pyramid structure. I’ve already seen a lot of people complaining that, as smaller blogs, they aren’t getting the traffic they expected (read:none), whereas some of the big boys are saying they’ve earned tons of credits, but the system is so new BlogRush can’t yet process all those hundreds of thousands of impressions they’ve been promised.

And also, once people get used to seeing the BlogRush widget on every site they go to, they’ll tune it out. They all look alike, and I’ve already stopped noticing them, after just a few days. This can happen just as easily with Google Adsense and other ads, but at least with Adsense you can customize it to either blend it with your site, or make it stand out, whereas the BlogRush widget is identical on every site.

I personally don’t think it’s going to live up to the hype. When the smaller blogs see that they aren’t getting any traffic, they’ll remove the cumbersome, ugly widget. When the A-listers that they signed up with aren’t reaping benefits from their signees anymore, how is this better than BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog? In fact it isn’t, and I can tell you that I only get a very small percentage of my traffic from either of those two sources.

The moral of the story here is not that BlogRush is evil. In fact, I’m sure they’ll get the early bugs sorted out and perhaps add some functionality that their users will value and enjoy.

The moral of the story is that we, as bloggers, need to curb the impulse to jump on bandwagons. Be a free-thinker and use your best judgement. Then if you still want to write a blog post promoting the exact same service that 1289083103802 other bloggers are posting about on that very same day, feel free.

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