adClustr has an interesting post on making money from your RSS feeds. The post lists nine direct ways of making money from your feeds, and three indirect ways.

The indirect methods are interesting - two of them (having comments show up in your feeds, and having internal links in your feed posts) give an incentive for people reading your feed to click through back to your blog.

The third method is to provide a full feed to keep your readership. I don’t do this right now, but perhaps with a copyright plugin I might. I don’t know about this last one. I actually don’t usually care if a splogger uses one of my feeds - from an SEO perspective, it’s fresh inbound links back to my site so it’s a trade-off - but I can’t shake my “writer’s perspective”, which cringes at the thought of anyone using my full content for free.

I’ve always thought RSS feeds have a lot of potential, but I don’t know how well ads in feeds actually do. I’ve had quite a lot of success with Text Link Ads, especially for my more niched blogs, but I don’t get quite as many ads placed on my feeds as I do on my blogs in general.

I know when I’m skimming through my feeds in Google Reader, I do notice the ads, and any additional interesting links at the bottom of each post in a feed, but I have never clicked on an ad.

But from my perspective, the more money I make from what my blogging, the more blogging I’m able to do. adClustr’s post is a good reminder of another potential income source.

Via BloggingPro.

Update: Funny thing. I just realized Feedburner offers the option of adding a number of items to the end of each post in your RSS feed, including a copyright display. I’m testing out full feeds now.