My Adsense For RSS Trial – The Results
A few days ago I wrote about the trial I was interested in conducting on RSS advertising. Adding Google adsense to your RSS feed has been around for some time now, but no-one is saying how well it performs as they do with on-site Adsense.
This post is the result of my great RSS experiment.
My One Word Conclusion
Indifference.
My Thought On RSS Advertising
People taking RSS subscriptions are pretty tech savvy and they want to read content not respond to advertising messages. I think people are ad blind and not interested in clicking on the offers put before them.
I think you need a large number of subscribers and some compelling ads (perhaps graphical ads) to get the clicks required to make this worthwhile.
There are bloggers in my RSS reader who use RSS advertising, but I have never clicked on an ad what about you?
Income
I have a modest RSS following, and the ads have had a relatively large number of impressions, I was expecting some action, let me give you the numbers …
It is against the rules of the adsense program to discuss your earnings but since I earned nothing I am happy to report my income was zero. No clicks no cents nada zip.
Drop Of Subscribers
As I said I think people are indifferent to the ads, my subscription rate has continued to gently climb, there has been no drop off of subscribers that I have noticed.
People just don’t care about the ads.
Moving Forward
<shrugs shoulders> I don-know I’m indifferent about it all. I don’t think there will be an impact if I remove the ads or leave them there. My spidey senses are saying get rid of the ads in case I alienate anyone into unsubscription.
Please leave me some comments before apathy on the subject overtakes me completely 
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How To Integrate Paypal With Your Wordpress Blog
In my opinion, Paypal is fast becoming the payment processor of choice for bloggers selling goods and services from their WordPress site. There are a number of ways to integrate Paypal with your blog, I look at a few scenarios here:
Just In case .. What is Paypal?
Paypal is a credit card payment processor. It acts as a middleman between your clients and you, processing transactions on your behalf. They do the hard work of securing and protecting people’s credit card details, you simple accept money and pay a small fee in return. You don’t have to have a merchant account for Paypal which makes it ideal for small companies or bloggers.
Paypal charges a fee per transaction of dependant upon your transaction value per month. I pay 3.4% + 20 pence per transaction, your fees will vary by location. There are no setup or monthly fees as there are with other payment processors. Full details on transaction fees can be seen at the transaction charge page
If you don’t have an account, you can sign up at Paypal.com.
It goes the other way too, you can send money to people securely, but this post will concentrate on income rather than expenditure. This is a gross simplification of Paypals services, but in a nutshell it allows you to send or receive money securely online. Your credit card details are never sent over the net. People trust paypal and will look for it over other payment processors such as WorldPay.
Now lets integrate paypal with our blog.
So You Want Payment
There are numerous scenarios where you may want to charge visitors to your site, I list them below with an integration idea:
Consulting Services/Service Contracts
You may sell a consulting service or sell your time at a fixed rate per hour. If you do, using a paypal button is probably the solution for you. Using this method, you set a small piece of html pointing to paypal which states your account details, the amount you want to charge.
There is a technical manual on configuring your buttons manually, or you can go to the button factory inside of your Paypal account and step through the process from =my account->profile -> my saved buttons. Below is a sample button for $0.01 so you can see the process in action, no refunds will be given
Donations / Tips
A popular way of monetising content is to offer your readers the chance to make a donation or leave you a tip. Paypal allows you to create a donation button in the same way you would create a fixed price button. Simply suggest that your readers may like to give you a tip with a big button and see what happens.
Membership sites
If you want to have premium content on your site, you may consider a membership site. Paypal has a subscription facility which allow you to take recurring payments from your customers.
You can create a subscription payment button as mentioned above, and then manually add you members to your site. The subscription service will take regular payments until your customer cancels the payment.
There are a number of membership site plugins which take this to a higher level, the hard work of coding paypal will already be done for you. Simply specify your account details and the rest will be done for you, most importantly the process of cancelling memberships when a subscriptions is cancelled is done automatically and your content is hidden from the non-member.
The membership site plugins I have used are Your Members and WP-Member. Both of these are premium plugins.
Physical Product Shopping Carts
You may want to sell physical products using a shopping cart system such as Amazon uses.
Paypal has a shopping cart and checkout process, where you would add a button to a page or posts which would add an item to a shopping cart, you also place a checkout button on your site so payment can be collected. This is a little cumbersome as html code needs to be added to each page, do I hear a problem which needs to be solved by a plugin …
I have used one e-commerce plugin which takes the hard work of creating product pages and integrating them with Paypal and it is called WP E-Commerce (the WordPress community is very boring with it’s naming standards I would have called it blog-u-shopper or WordPricer).
I am yet to be convinced that a blog is the best platform to sell stuff, a service such as Shoppify or an e-bay store is probaly better, but hey what do I know, if you are selling physical products successfully from a blog let me know in the comments section.
Pay to Post
Y0u may want to charge people to add a post to your system. For example a jobs board where there is a fee to add something to your blog. One of the simplest and best solutions I have found for this is a plugin called EasyPayPal. This also allows the simple creation of members only content so you really should check this one out.
Selling Ad Space
If you are in a position to sell Ad space on your blog, paypal may well be the processor you use.
You can setup an advertising page and setup paypal, buttons to sell ad space. The other option is to check out an ad plugin such as OIO Publisher which allows you to sell ad space and integrate it with your Paypal account to accept payment.
Info Products
If you have an e-book or webinar to sell, how do you integrate paypal with your site to take payment before your content is made available for download? The problem here is that you want to collect payment and protect your link until payment has been made.
wp-member the membership site solution I mention above does this as does EasyPayPal, but I would recommend you may want to look at e-junkie, this is an offsite payment processor and download fulfillment service. This takes the headache of delivering your info. product to your customers, my mantra is always if someone will take on a headache for me and the cost is okay go with them. The service starts at $5 per month.
Check Out The Many Paypal Plugins
There are a number of paypal plugins over and above what I mention, check out the plugin repository http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/paypal
Paypal Get’s My Thumbs Up
I hope this have given you some ideas for integrating paypal with your site. I have only touched on the solutions here to give you a feel for what paypal can do for you.
I have been using Paypal to collect payments for my services since I started this site, the trust people have in Paypal increases your likelihood of a conversion. I love the ease I can take payments, pay others and of course give refunds (I have a no fix no fee guarantee). The charges sometimes feel a little high, but removing the hassle of credit card security probably makes up for that.
Need Help Integrating WordPress With Paypal?
If you need help integrating your blog with Paypal, I would be happy to give you a quote, please visit my service page and let me know your requirements.
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Adding Adsense To Your RSS Feed
Advertising in your RSS feed has been around for a while, but I have not seen anyone crying from the rooftops on how effective it is. There are not images of people holding up their cheques for $$$$ sayng RSS advertising is the best (as they do for traditional AdSense). Since no one is saying how effective it is, I thought I would run an experiment on my own feed to see how effective it is.
I’m not a fan of traditional AdSense, the idea that someones comes to your site to read your quality content and then clicks away for a couple of cents does not sit very well with me. I have yet to make my mind up about RSS feeds, and I will probably only leave it up for a couple of weeks.
So I’ve laid my cards in the table and full disclosure has been made, now lets move forward this post is all about adding AdSense to your blog’s RSS feed.
If you want a quick lesson on RSS, you can check my post on the subject Beginers Guide to WordPRess RSS.
Step One Get and AdSense Account
The first step is to sign-up for an adsense account at http://adsense.google.com
Once you are in go to adsense setup and then to adsense for feeds.
Why Google Bought Feedburner
You can only add adsense to RSS feeds which are served up by Feedburner. Feedburner developed itself as the leading RSS hosting company before being acquired by Google a couple of years ago. It has taken some time but finally they have fully integrated the adsense platform with Feedburner.
Google bought the top platform with a ready made user base to serve up ads.
Change the Look’n'Feel
So your have decided to add RSS, there are a number of options you can set:
Ad type – you can specify that text and image ads or text only ads are shown on your feed. I have selected text only. Since I have very little control of knowledge of what will be advertised, I thought text will be less disturbing to you my jolly readers if something unpleasant is pushed upon you.
Post interval – a nice touch is to control how often ads are served. You can select every post, or set an interval of every x posts so part of your content can be ad free.
Post length – you can specify ads over a certain word count to only display ads. I was thinking why Google would do this and my thought is that a reader needs to be completely engaged to read a long post, and perhaps they are more inclined to click on an ad at the. I’m not sure but the massive heads at Google will have done that for a reason.
Location – you can serve your ads at the top of bottom of the page
Colours – you can let adsense detect the colours of your feed, or you can setup a custom palette.
Assign this configuration to your feed from Feedburner and click save, it really is as simple as that.
Beware Click Fraud
Click fraud is a cancer on pay per click advertising, do not click on my feed ads unless they are of real value.
In case you did not know click fraud is the process of clicking on paid ads without a desire to review or buy the products. Click fraud is done by bloggers trying to increase their income or by advertisers competitors trying to deplete advertising budgets.
Watch This Space
I will report back in a couple of weeks on how effective RSS advertising has been (or not been). I would love to hear your opinion on advertising in RSS, it’s something I know will polarise people.
Many people subscribe to RSS to get away from the ads, how do you feel about them coming after you.
Are you tempted to unsubscribe from my blog because of it? Please let me know before you click unsubscribe this is just an experiment I don’t want to fall out over this .
Tell me your stories about adsense, show me that RSS advertising can work or not in the comments section.
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So You’ve Bought Your First Premium WordPress Theme …
I think it is a big step on your journey as a blogger when you hand over your hard earned for your first premium theme . It says you are serious about your blog and you want it to stand out from the also ran free themes.
The problem is, premium themes look excellent and with that excellence comes a complexity of use. I have been working with a couple of clients recently to coach them using their new themes. From this experience I thought I would documents the common pit falls premium themes can spring upon you.
What’s A Premium Theme
A premium theme is a professionally developed template for your WordPress blog. They tend to be of a high quality with lots of wizzy features such as video players and featured post rotators.
They are the middle ground between free themes and custom developed setups, they tend to cost around $100 and for that you will get a customisable theme, support and usually updates. You will get a fairly unique looking blog, add to that your own logo and bingo a less than ordinary blog look and feel.
My site uses a premium theme Ice Cream Dream, it’s not as busy as many premium themes but the cleanness and efficiency is something I could never ahve done myseld, I have very little graphic design skill. That’s why I handed over my money for a premium theme.
Here is a short list of companies creating premium themes so you can get an idea of what is available, no affiliate links here, just companies themes I have used:
Premium themes are for bloggers wanting a unique look without the skills or budget to develop their own custom theme.
RTFM
The first thing to do when you get hold of your premium theme is to read the f*cking manual. This sounds obvious but the devil is in the detail, I don’t know how many times I have steamed ahead, installing themes only to have to go back to the PDF packaged in the zip file to learn how to use a complex theme.
The documentation is usually packaged with the zip as well as being available on the plugin site. Check out the sites forum as well as the documentation so you are up to speed with any issues before you install.
A quick tip, look for documentation on the plugin developers site before you buy. If it is incomprehensible, I recommend you take the advice of Dionne Warwick and walk on by. If the documentation is poor, it is a sign that the support will be equally poor. On the same note if documentation on how to install your theme is not on the site, consider if you want to buy this theme. I learned this from hard experience I was installing a premium theme for a client and the documentation was so poor I had to pull apart the code to understand how it worked. Techies are notoriously poor communicators, they just expect you to understand what is obvious to them. If I am paying for a theme I want support and quality documentation.
Plugins
Often a premium theme will rely on certain plugins to work properly. Make sure you have downloaded and activated these or your theme will not work as expected . The plugins will either be included with the theme zip file or be documented in the readme file. Take notice of versions, sometimes updates to plugins can make themes fall over.
Custom Fields
This is one which catches out many people. A custom field is a small piece of information which you pass into the theme for it to perform a function. An example of custom field usage from my site is the thumbnail on the front page. For each post I create, a custom field needs to be created too called thumb which contains the URL of the thumbnail image to be displayed on the front page.
Custom fields are added from the edit post page, scroll down and near the bottom of the page you will see a section like this:
Enter a new custom field name, then add the value as specified in your documentation, don’t forget to activate it by pressing “add custom field” . Please be aware of the case Thumbnail is not the same as thumbnail with custom fields. As you add custom fields they are saved (see the drop down) so you can easily create new fields for your posts.
Categories
Many premium themes use categories to position items on the page. For example many of the look and feels will have a featured post section, to get posts into the featured section, you need to add them to a category named featured.
Again watch the case, I spent hours trying to get some videos to appear by adding the to a category called video instead of Video.
I Love Premium Themes I Do..
A premium theme says you are serious about your blogging, but please remember content is still king and your true fans will probably subscribe to RSS and never see you day-glo rotating doo-dad from that point on. Don’t get too hung up about your look’n'feel.
Just to re-iterate, read the manual and do exactly as the developer tells you and you site will look as smart as a carrot .
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Adding a Poll to Your Blog
When you want to ask your readers a question or are stuck for a quality post nothing beats a poll. In this post I will show you how to add a poll to your WordPress blog.
What Will a Poll Bring to My Blog?
A poll is a very easy way to engage your readers, there is not the in-depth need to write a reply like a comment, a simple click on a yes or no answer is far more likely to generate feedback. It helps to engage your audience and make your blog feel more like a conversation than a lecture. Consider this; if someone asks your opinion in a conversation rather than talking at you during the intercourse, what feels better? I think polls add a pause to your conversation where your readers can give their opinion.
Polls are good for asking questions about your niche, getting feedback from your readers or even for marketing purposes e.g. a poll asking if your readers are interested in a membership side to your blog can be excellent market research.
I have used polls as way to test if my blog content is pitched at the correct level by asking the technical expertise of my readers, I have used it to test if people want particular services from me.
Add One Polling Plugin
Where there’s a poll there is plugin that’s my motto of the minute. Adding a poll to your blog is as easy as finding the right plugin. Below I list the things to consider when choosing your plugin.
Widget or Post
If you are running you poll over a number of days it maybe more appropriate to add a widget to your blog’s sidebar rather than containing your poll in a post. This is because posts may drop off the front page of your blog and potential poll results may be missed.
Check with your particular plugin to see if it is widget ready. I like a plugin which gives me the flexibilty of adding it to a post or page as well as having a ready made widget.
Posting the Results
I like a poll plugin which automatically calculates the results at the end of my polling period as well as an ongoing count displayed to my readers. Check to see if your polling plugin presents results to your users or only on the backend to your the administrator.
My Preferred Polling Preference
Alliteration always makes me happy
As always I would encourage you to check out the available poll plugins from the plugin repository and see which one matches your requirements, there are a number to test at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/polls.
The poll widget I use is called WP-Polls, it is available for download http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-polls
The plugin has an admin interface where you create your poll, then it is inserted into a post using a tag [~poll id="n"] the tag is then replaced and the poll inserted for all to see. It comes with a widget built in to drop polls onto your sidebar(s).
WP-Polls has a template editor so you can match polls to the look and feel of your site and It has a really handy interface in the dashboard so you can analyse the results of your polls.
I can set a time limit for my poll, and at the end it marks it as closed and only the results are shown. It allows you to set who can vote i.e. guest or registered users, I would not recommend using the registered users option, any barrier to entry will stop people voting in your poll.
The only thing missing for me is free form fields which would allow me to get more than a yes or no answer to my poll.
Offsite Polling Solutions
There are various solutions out there which allow you to host a poll off-site and then display it on your site. Solutions such as Poll Daddy will host your poll. This is of benefit if you poll is a huge multi page thing and you expect housands of results. Of course these tend to work under the freemium model with more advanced options available at a fee.
Have you used any offsite polling solutions let me know in the comments.
Other Ideas
If you want a very quick poll with immediate results, I can wholeheartedly recommend the combination of twitter and polldaddy, in a couple of seconds you can create a poll and put it in front of your twitter followers. This is excellent for asking a quick question and having the results correlated for you. This can be done from http://twitter.polldaddy.com/
The lazy writers guide to Polls
I’ll let you into the secret, polls help to fill gaps in your posting schedule if you are stuck for something to write about, first of all you set the poll with a couple of paragraphs of why you are running the poll, post one – check.
Next you get the result post where you analyse the post bingo two posts, not a great deal of effort. Post two -check, see how it fills the gaps.
Are You Going to Add a Poll?
Here’s a sample poll for you, I would appreciate your feedback:
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.Random Posts
The WordPress 2.8 50% off Mad Sale
Mad WPDude here, and have I got a sale for you …. no cannot do it, just cannot be a US car salesman.
WordPress 2.8 Released
WordPress 2.8 has eventually been released after much too-ing and fro-ing with bug fixing and slippage in the project. It was originally due for release last month but that date passed. The slippage is a good thing it means bugs were spotted (and fixed) before the code was sent into the Blogosphere.
You will probably see update notifications on your dashboard right now.
What’s New in 2.8
Full details of what is new in 2.8 can be seen at http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8, but my particular highlights of this update are:
- Install theme from dashboard instead of using FTP
- Hot key to save posts ctrl+s
What’s the sale about
I am offerning to update your site including installation of backup plugins, taking a complete and tested backup, update, post update testing and rollback if required for one hour instead of my usual two that I would quote for this job.
If you want me to upgrade your site to WordPress 2.8, drop me a line from wpdude.com/hire-wpdude quoting Crazy WPDudes Sale, or just say please update my site, whatever you are more comfortable with.
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