Tips to increase your RSS Feed Subscribers

RSS feeds are the best way to keep track of a blog or a website without going to the site. I had explained about the advantages and disadvantages of RSS Feeds, but when we look in depth, it more of advantage to have more number of RSS Feed readers. Now the question is how to increase your number of Feed readers. Even though I do not have a considerable number of Feed Readers as I have not really worked on this. I have a simple email subscription box, but need to increase my number of Feed Readers and you can make money from RSS Feed Subscribers

Things I have already done

Feedburner Account – I have already created a feedburner account. Why do we need to have a feedburner account. Feedburner is a free service which keeps track of our feedburner subscribers. Feedburner is free to use and it provides us with Free Email Delivery option which is something considerable. Other important advantage is that we can have the statistics of our RSS Feed Readers.

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10 Top Plugins for Wordpress Post

Wordpress is one the most widely used Blogging Platform which is an open source software written in PHP and Mysql. I would say that this is the best best blogging tool and its very user friendly. To enhance the features of this platform, you can use different plugins which are free to use and is available at the Wordpress Plugins Directory. Some plugins are commercial which most of them are free to use. In this post, I have done some research and listed down the plugins which should be useful for you.

cformsII - contact form- cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

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Some Wordpress Plugins You may like to use

Recently I was not doing any posts here as I was busy with the development of some Wordpress plugins. I have completed those plugins and are hosted at the Wordpress Plugins Directory. If you are having a Wordpress blog, you can try these and let me know your comments.

Kish Twitter

This plugin will be helpful for bloggers who use twitter actively. Once you install this plugin, you can view, update the latest timelines and your readers can see who you follow, who follow you, your latest updates, latest public updates. If you are logged in as the Admin, you can update messages from this widget. You can find it working at my Technology Blog. This plugin is using AJAX so no page reloads and its simply fast. The features includes the customisation of the widget. You can change the font, color, background, height, width of the widget in the settings to match your theme.

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Monetize your blog with Feedburner

I have been using feedburner to burn my blog feeds and manage subscriptions. One of the features of Feedburner is to monetize your blog using Google Adsense. You can now integrate Google Adsense with Feedburner to serve ads to your blog subscription as you may be aware that Feedburner is acquired by Google

Login to your Feedburner Account

Select the blog for which you would like to display ads

Select the Monetize Tab

If you are using Wordpress, select word press from the drop down menu, you will get a code and the instruction to paste the code to your wordpress template

You are done

Blending Google Adsense to your blog

After doing some changes on the template of this blog, I was working on optimising my Google Adsense Ads placement and did some blending work. So what is this blending work. Now a days what happens is most of the visitors are seeing these Google Adsense ads on every web page and they know about these ads well. What we need to do is to blend these ads and make it a part of our blog. Google adsense ads should not be separated from our blog. I did some blending work by modifying the sidebar links using CSS. The ads I created on Google Adsense is according to the color scheme of my blog theme and the links I have created in way that really blends with the Google Adsense Ads.

I am just experimenting it and will come out with the change in click through rate. Just have a look at the image on the right, which is of my sidebar, this includes Google ads as well as my recent post links. I have also added a block of Google ads inside the content page, which floats on the top left side of each post. The interesting part of Google adsense is it serves relevant ads and ads which are related to the post. By using this method the chances of increasing the click through rate is good.

Even you should try using image ads, which are good for increasing your Google adsense revenue.

While writing your CSS style please make sure that you test it both on Internet explorer and Firefox as both are popular browsers and widely used. There are some problems with Internet explorer and shows funny views for some CSS scripts.

According to the Google terms and conditions

1. Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
For example, ads shouldn’t be placed under titles such as “Dallas Business Opportunities” or “Today’s Hot Deals”. Placing ads directly below titles such as these implies to your users that the links in the ads are publisher-created content. The example below shows a placement that does not follow this guideline.

2. Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.
Similarly, you should not place an ad unit by a group of links that has identical colors and line spacing. Doing so may cause users to think the ad unit is content created by you. In this situation, we recommend using a different color for the ad titles or indenting the ad unit to help distinguish the ads from your own content. This screenshot shows an implementation that does not follow this guideline:

Google adsense is one of the best revenue generator for your blog if you use it wisely

To comply with the terms and condition of we have placed a heading as sponsor and separated from the group

Changing the Template of your blog

Today I was bit busy changing the Template of my Blog. I had some problems with my last template. Some plugins were not working and was giving me some trouble. The video posts were not showing up on Internet Explorer. The other problem with the tabber that I has having on my last template. When I activate some plugins, the tabber does not work.

Checklist after Updating your Template

Check If all the plugins are working fine - For some plugins we need to call them inside the template and when we change the template, these plugins will not work.

Check with all popular Browser - Check if your site is working as expected at least on Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Update tracking codes - If you are running an affiliate program or some campaigns, then you will be using some tracking code in your template, make sure you add those codes to your template. I usually create a separate file for this and just add the include function with the right path. If you are using Google Analytics, again you should have to add the tracking code to your template

Update your Adsense Code - Suppose you are using Google Adsense and the new template is having a different color, then you should update your Adsense code. You do not need to make any modification in your code here, but just login to your Adsense account and update in the Adsense setup by editing the right saved ad.

There are many things to be updated when you change your template if you have customized your WordPress installation.

If you find any thing odd on this blog, please post it as comment here.