RosalindGardner.com

Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner

Remove that Category from Your Feed

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Subscribers to the feed on my personal blog got a surprise message in their email — a business message I did not intend for them to receive and a message they probably did not care to receive.

And you know what THAT means… LOST subscribers.

So, what did I do wrong (THIS time)?

Well, I failed to set up my Feedburner feed to exclude posts from a particular category. When I posted to that category, the list on my Aweber account that uses the Blog Broadcast service, emailed that post to all the subscribers on the list.

Here's an example.

If I don't want NPT newsletter subscribers to receive posts that I make to my XOX (personal) category, that category must be removed from the Feedburner feed.

Here are the steps to take:

  1. Sign into WordPress
  2. Go to “Categories”
  3. Mouse over the name of the category you want to exclude and take note of the ID in the status bar as shown below. In this case, the ID is “381“.

  4. Now log into your Google Feedburner account and click on “Edit Feed Details” for your feed.
  5. Under “Original Feed Details” add ?cat=-318 (or whatever your cat ID happens to be) to your feed URL.

  6. Now test your Feedburner Feed and you will that posts from the ‘offensive' category no longer appear.

If you would like to remove 2 or more categories from a feed, simply add an ampersand before each category number ( @amp; ), i.e. https://rosalindgardner.com/blog?cat=-381@-642

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Ros

How to Triple Your Google Adsense Earnings

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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 Michael Cheney's Adsense Videos that show how he completely EXPLODED his Adsense earnings.

My 5 Most Effective Site Marketing Techniques

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Here's a traffic generation question / comment from Kenny that was spot on!

Rosalind, it is inconceivable that you have time to utilize all the techniques in your ebook.

So, in an effort to follow your lead, so to speak, if you were to narrow down the five most consistently effective marketing / promotion / advertising processes that you use primarily, what would you say those were?

In advance, thanks.

Kenny Love

GREAT question, Kenny!

You're absolutely right – I'd go bonkers if I tried to do ALL of the marketing techniques ALL of the time.

So, here are the 5 traffic generation or marketing methods that I use most consistently:

  1. Blogging for Search Engine Placement
  2. List / Email Marketing
  3. Social Media Marketing & Community Activity
  4. Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)
  5. Article Distribution & Marketing

Blogging for Search Engine Placement

Essentially, my first priority is to publish fresh content to my blogs on a regular basis (some of which are more regular than others). Although I don't engage in keyword stuffing, (which makes for horrible reading), the content of each blog post has to be tightly focused on one subject so that keywords and keyword phrases in the article are closely aligned and thus the post is more likely to get picked up and listed by the search engines, resulting in free traffic.

List / Email Marketing

The post is then distributed by email to the relevant subscriber list either through a blog broadcast (using Aweber / Feedburner combined) or through a link in a weekly newsletter.

Social Media Marketing & Community Activity

Engaging the audience personally through either blog commenting, forum posting or social media marketing comes next. I will respond to comments and answer any questions posted by my own blog readers and subscribers, which enhances information contained in the article and adds still more ‘fodder' for the search engines to notice. My social media marketing efforts are fairly scant – using applications like TwitterFeed to broadcast the post's title and link to Twitter for some more free traffic. From time to time, I'll post a comment to a high-profile blog or forum in response to a topic relevant to my original article, along with a link to that article.

Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)

Depending on the response from blog readers and subscribers, I may incorporate PPC marketing at that point. If the conversion rate is better than average for the audience, I'll do the math to assess whether it's worth driving traffic to that particular post or page with PPC, starting with Google Adwords and/or Yahoo! Search Marketing depending on the demographic. If the response is just ‘good', PPC may still be worth the effort if enough of that traffic joins the list.

Article Distribution & Marketing

Article marketing comes in 5th and last, because I don't post the same articles to my site as I would distribute to article directories so they require some re-writing, which takes time. Furthermore, the traffic isn't as targeted as it is with your own list or with PPC marketing… but it's traffic none-the-less and every click counts for something… eventually.

After that's all said and done, it's probably time to write another post — or more likely, take another vacation. 🙂

Testing Out the “No Feed” Plugin

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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?

Feedburner to Google Account Deadline Today

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Today is the deadline to have all your FeedBurner accounts moved over to your Google account.

Although I've heard various opinions on whether the old Feedburner subscriptions will continue to work – with some bloggers reporting that subscriptions should work indefinitely and others already reporting glitches with the old addresses – I'd trust the Feedburner to Google FAQ which reads:

“It is our intent to keep backward compatibility with your feed address as long as this service exists.”

I updated my accounts last week and haven't yet changed all the feed addresses, but the old one's are redirecting just fine.

The real issue is in updating your accounts. According to the FAQ, if you don't update your account:

“…you will no longer be able to access your account at http://www.feedburner.com, and your feeds will either begin returning a “404 Not Found” response or a “301 Moved” response back to your source feed.”

Learn more on the Feedburner to Google FAQ

What Happened to My Feed?

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RSSHave 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.

Feed Validator

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!

Update Your Website Content Automatically with CaRP Evolution

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CaRP Evolution>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.

Feedburner Buzz Boost

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:

Channel Level Data

  • title
  • link
  • description
  • date
  • image

Item Level Data

  • title
  • link
  • author
  • description
  • date
  • image
  • podcast

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.

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