One thing that I find somewhat surprising is that there are so many bloggers who completely disregard blog feeds. Making it easier for your readers to access your blog content, blog feeds are a great way to expand the readership of your blog. With feeds, readers can “subscribe” and get constant updates in the “Feeds” section of their Internet Browser. The feed is updated automatically when a new post is made so there is little need for maintenance. You can set the feed to only include the first half or so of the post so that visitors must actually visit your blog to get all the information, rather than only reading the feed and never visiting the blog again.

FeedBurner is the biggest of the “Feed Providing” sites, and since it is used on virtually every large blog that uses feeds, it’s the best network to use. They take care of everything for you and it only takes a few minutes to create an account, and get full access to a user panel of the account where you can manage every aspect of your blog feed. If you have never seen a blog feed, here is an example: Romow Internet Marketing blog’s blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RomowInternetMarketingBlog. FeedBurner has also started a new CPM based advertising program that we will go further into in a upcoming post. If you have a blog and don’t have a feed, go to FeedBurner.com and get one, you will be glad you did.

Although feeds can help increase readership, the one thing that webmasters care the most is monetization: how they can make money through their web sites. FeedBurner runs an advertising program, known as the FeedBurner Advertising Network or just simply, FAN. This advertising network, unlike that of Google or Yahoo!, is not run on a CPC basis where publishers are paid each time a visitor clicks on an ad. Rather, they are paid on a CPM basis where advertisers are paid $x each 1,000 times advertisement is viewed. With big name publishers such as Reebok and high payouts of $5-$7 per 1000 views, sites with decent traffic, 5000+ unqiues a day, can earn as much as $35 a day per ad unit using FAN. If multiple ad units are run, one can easily earn over $100 daily.

However, there are some restrictions. First of all, FeedBurner can only be run on blogs so if your site is not a blog, I suggest you create one. The other major obstacle is that to get accepted into the program, you need to have many people subscribing to your feed. Having a few thousand visitors daily and over 800 feed subscribers should be able to give you a good chance to be accepted. Like any high paying advertising network, you need to have a decent site to get accepted and paid. If you think your blog qualifies, try out this opportunity!