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RSS feeds are great. Tech-savvy users love them because they can receive site content and other information without wasting time checking for updates. Site owners love them because they mean that more users will consume their content (on that note, consider subscribing to the Beaconfire Wire feed). Unfortunately, this kind of convenience means that you’re missing one critical thing: everything else on your site that you use to upsell people once they arrive for your content.

That’s why non-profits who have a significant RSS readership should consider ways to advertise their other services in their feed to push people to donate, take action, or join the email list. While visitors to your site will already be pushed this way by a strong information architecture, most feeds are pure content.

Several services exist to let you make more of your feed, by placing ads or links back to your site in your feed. Feedburner is perhaps the most popular, because it’s already widely used for other things. On the Beaconfire Wire, we use Feedburner to get stats on our feed and to add a few other neat features. And, as I wrote last year, it’s completely free. One feature independent bloggers will find useful is that it integrates with AdSense, allowing you to monotize your blog in another way. For non-profits who have specific links to include (like “Make a Contribution” and “Sign the Petition”), you can add custom “FeedFlares” at the bottom of each post so you don’t miss a chance to bring in more donors or activists.

So what if you’ve been advertising on the web in traditional ways, and want to diversify? Consider using a service like Pheedo to serve ads in a variety of content networks. Pheedo came to my attention in my NY Times feed, and they claim to have a pretty diverse network. Rates vary depending on the network you want to buy in - for sub-$5,000 purchases, you’re limited to buying in a network rather than choosing a specific feed or feeds, which makes it more difficult to segment your audiance - the site indicates that advertisers can make segmentation choices on a variety of criteria, but this may be restricted to larger buys. Update (5.28.08) - As Bill from Pheedo notes in the comments, advertisers can specify which segments of the network ads will appear in.

While RSS giveth, it also taketh away. New ways to promote your organization allow non-profits to expand their efforts to this space to take advantage of changing user habits. And as RSS becomes more ubiquitous, we’ll hopefully see an expansion of ways for non-profits to take advantage of it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Advertising, Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.