Earning Money from Google Feedburner

Feedburner is a web feed management provider that was launched in 2004 by Dick Costolo, Steve Olechowski, Eric Lunt and Matt Shobe.

Feedburner provides customized RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters and other such web-based content publishers.

Google Feedburner is an RSS feed generator service from the stables of Google. It is different from all the other services that may just produce a feed for you.

It goes one step further and also gives you vital statistics about your blog or website that you’ll definitely want to know…

Services that are provided to publishers by Feedburner include analysis of the incoming blog traffic and also an optional advertising system.

Though it was initially in a state of limbo whether advertising would be adapted to the RSS format, authors these days choose to include advertising in about 60% of Feedburner’s feeds.

Users are able to find out the number of people that have subscribed to their feeds and also as to what service/program did they subscribe with.

Published feeds can be modified in several ways, including automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us, also “splicing” information from a lot of different feeds.

Feedburner is a typical Web second generation service, which provides web service application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows other software to interact with it.

The ads of the Feedburner Ad Network (FAN) which are displayed in subscribers’ feed/feeds are cost-per impressions (CPM) ads. This effectively means that advertisers pay is based on the number of impressions displayed on their feed/feeds.

They’ll receive a portion of the amount that is paid by the advertisers for these served impressions. Although the exact revenue share is not openly disclosed, the goal is to empower publishers to earn as much as possible, or more than they could when they are with other advertising networks.

Any publisher who already has a Google Ad Sense account can run Ad Sense adverts on their site when they participate in the Feedburner Ad Network (FAN) or use the FeedFlare service that can display interactive links below the content published on their sites.

Ad Sense ads are displayed in 300×250 or 468×60 format below the first post on each and every page of your site that has the script code installed. For that reason, it is imperative for the script code to be installed.

By using Google Feedburner, you can find out statistics like:

How many people have subscribed to your RSS feed? – Of course there are so many sites in cyberspace that can give you a simple count of how many people visited your site or blog.

However, Feedburner can actually tell you other vital details that will help you make an informed decision about your blog as well as the service.

Who’s re-posting your feed? – This could be a vital source of information to the owner of the blog or the website. The feed that is re-posted is traceable as to what use it’s being put to. This helps the subscriber in more ways than one.

Which links are clicked on? – Again, this particular piece of information can be useful to the owner of the blog or website to get a fair idea about what links are being clicked on and to formulate a specific strategy that could make the profits for the blog or website take a northward turn…

Subscribers: This is basically the total number of people subscribed to your RSS feed. Basically, this is a number that’s computed by Google based on how many times a certain IP address request your RSS feed within a span of 24 hours.

Reach: This would mean how many people actually read or click on something in your RSS feed. There is a comparable difference between people who just request your feed and people who actually take the effort to read content posted in your feed.

Activating Google Feedburner service:

• Just sign in to your Feedburner account.
• Click the title of your feed on My Feeds.
• Finally, visit the Monetize tab, where one can connect this service to their Ad Sense account if you already have one, or create a new Ad Sense account.

This service is presently available to all Feedburner publishers and not just those already participating in FAN. Just note that if you have enabled FeedFlare for your site, you’ve already added the code that makes these ads go where they have to go.

Therefore, it is advisable to connect your account to Ad Sense on the Monetize tab and you will be ready to earn some cash.

There are certain problems to face due to a lesser click through rate and not all blogs having advertisements placed on them…there is a fair chance of a subscriber making some money from the Feedburner when it is linked to one’s blog or website.

Feedburner is still in the growing stage after being acquired by Google recently. With the passage of time and better exposure to the blogging community and cyber citizens, it has the potential of being a good revenue generator for the blog and website owners.