Add a Footer to Your RSS Feed: 7 Practical Examples

The bottom of your RSS feed is valuable real estate. Some bloggers use this space effectively and some choose not to use it at all. Many of your subscribers will not read all the way to the bottom of your feed, but for those that do you can add to the value of the post be utilizing this space.

Different bloggers use this area for a very wide variety of purposes. There is no right or wrong method, so try to find one that you think will enhance your feeds the most. Here are some real-world examples of what you can do with the bottom of your RSS feed.

1. Sell Ad Space

If you are trying to monetize your blog, consider selling ads at the bottom of your feed. John Chow is a goog example. Each of his RSS feeds includes sponsored links at the bottom (be careful with how many ads you insert on your feed, though). John is the master of monetizing a blog, and this idea is no exception. An alternative to selling ad space is to use your own affiliate links at the bottom of feeds.

2. Special Bonuses for Subscribers

One proven method for increasing subscribers is to give away something of value as a gift or bonus to subscribers. Chris Garrett uses the bottom of his feeds to provide a link to his bonus e-book download. This way the subscribers are able to see the link and download the e-book, but it is not visible on the blog itself.

3. Include Copyright Information

Plagiarism is a serious problem for a lot of bloggers. You can help to discourage others from stealing your content by including the copyright information at the bottom of your feeds. If another blogger scrapes your feed your copyright info will show up on their blog (so be sure to include a link to your blog along with the copyright). This strategy is used by Daniel here at Daily Blog Tips.

4. Links to Other Articles on Your Blog

Your RSS subscribers are most likely interested in many of the other articles available on your blog; however, they’ve probably missed several of them. One method used by a lot of bloggers, including me on my own blog, is to use the bottom of feeds for linking to other posts that may interest subscribers. This may help to increase the number of subscribers that click through to your blog.

5. Provide Additional Author Information

Building credibility with your readers and helping them to feel more connected to you is critical if you want to build a large and responsive subscriber base. Andy Beard includes a picture of himself and some very brief information about his blog. This is an interesting idea that not many people are doing yet. Andy also includes links to other posts on his blog at the bottom of the feed (once again, be careful with how much information you insert, you do not want to clutter the RSS feed).

6. FeedBurner Ads

If you are a FeedBurner user you have the option of placing pay-per-click ads at the bottom of your feeds. The FeedBurner ad program is similar to other leading PPC programs like Google AdSense. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim uses FeedBurner ads.

7. Contest Information

Contests are very popular right now among bloggers who are trying to gain some publicity and grow their subscriber base. One method is to run a contest that involves placing information at the bottom of your RSS feed that can be used by subscribers to win the contest. David Culpepper of PureBlogging recently ran a contest like this.

To see these examples in action you can subscribe to any of the blogs mentioned here.

Now that you have some examples of what you can do with the bottom of your feeds the next question you may be asking is…

How Do I Get Content to Appear at the Bottom of My Feeds?

WordPress users have a few different plugins to choose from. The options include:

RSS Signature (formerly known as sig2feed)
PostPost
Better Feed

Use any of these plugins to enhance your RSS feeds and make them more effective.

Steven Snell on September 10, 2007 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

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38 Responses to “Add a Footer to Your RSS Feed: 7 Practical Examples”

Jan on September 10th, 2007 3:31 am

thank you for cool tips!
Technobuzz.net on September 10th, 2007 4:07 am

Thanks For these tips…
Daniel on September 10th, 2007 4:35 am

Actually I need to take a look at my feed footer to see how I can further optimize it. It has been a while since I last touched it.
Shankar Ganesh on September 10th, 2007 4:41 am

The feed footer is a great place to put copyright notices!

I’ve learnt its effectiveness, and started putting copyright stuff and author name in my blog’s feed footer.
Wallace on September 10th, 2007 4:58 am

nice post,
do you know how can i add specific content at specific post feed?
Daniel on September 10th, 2007 5:00 am

Wallace, I don’t know any plugin that lets you specify a footer on a post by post level.

You could try working with the WordPress codex to create a special call for that.

Wouldn’t it be easier to add that specific info on the post itself though :)?
Sumesh on September 10th, 2007 5:14 am

There is such a plugin to do it post by post -blogclout.com’s feedfooter plugin.
simplr on September 10th, 2007 5:41 am

I would like to add a plugin called ©feed (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/copyfeed/) that is particularly useful for adding copyright text and a unique key (a digital fingerprint) to each of your RSS posts.

From the dashboard you can search for occurences of your unique digital fingerprint on the web to identify content theft. It also allows you to post full feeds (so ignoring the tag), include comments and add “related post” links.

Author’s site is in German (http://bueltge.de/wp-feed-plugin/204/) but the plugin can be configured in English (erm, sort of).

Anyway, an excellent plugin, check it out or watch in in action on my feedburner feeds (in Dutch, just to confuse you more - http://feeds.feedburner.com/simplr_posts - but you’ll get the idea).
Ellie on September 10th, 2007 6:25 am

I use Feed Footer, because it allows me to use up to 10 different footers.
engtech @ internet duct tape on September 10th, 2007 7:01 am

I think plugins like ChrisG’s are the way to go if you’re on self-hosted WordPress.

If you’re on blogger.com they have a setting for the feed signature.

If you’re on WordPress.com the only way to do this is using FeedBurner feed flares:
http://internetducttape.com/20.....-rss-only/
Dave on September 10th, 2007 7:58 am

Pheedo.com is another service that monetizes RSS feeds. Pheedo is very easy to join.
Sucker on September 10th, 2007 11:29 am

Good tips! I’d just like to echo the importance of #3 and #4, which can be used together quite nicely.

It’s a great way to get back at any splogs stealing your content. You can have the notice in the footer about where the content came from, plus all the links in your post make great backlinks!
Steven on September 10th, 2007 4:02 pm

Thanks to everyone for adding new resources and plugins. Some of them I had never seen before.
Costa Fong on September 10th, 2007 6:09 pm

Thanks for the tips. I think I will have to aggressively promote my feeds.
Jermayn Parker on September 10th, 2007 9:29 pm

I guess all footers need more working on include rss feeds
Myk on September 10th, 2007 10:17 pm

For more tips on how to customize your blog, you may want to checkout http://bookoftips.blogspot.com
shawnsweekly.com on September 10th, 2007 10:56 pm

That is really a good post. Very useful and relevant information.
Andy Beard on September 11th, 2007 5:03 am

I really need to condense mine a little and have been meaning to for months, but have been hoping Bloglines would add support for inline CSS.

They haven’t in the new beta, so I think I will probably switch to tables.

My footer is severely messed up in Bloglines
Sergio on September 11th, 2007 9:19 am

great resources!!! there a few to make in line!
Blogging The Movie on September 11th, 2007 8:27 pm

Thanks. I’m surprised you don’t have Brian’s threaded comments though.
alones on September 22nd, 2007 8:49 pm

It is good way to take more visitors to stay more~.

Thank~
Sandra on September 30th, 2007 8:11 pm

Great article with tips! You’ve given me some cool ideas…
WordPressWire on October 1st, 2007 6:49 am

Thanks for the tips - very useful list of WordPress resources.
Stasigr on October 29th, 2007 1:01 am

Hello, very nice site, keep up good job!
Admin good, very good.
Robert.jooste.org on October 30th, 2007 5:59 am

Very Interesting indeed. I’ve noticed that on a couple of occasions that I get “comments” from some strange website.
Not my exact words, but it says pretty much what I posted.

Then it appears on the blog post like the 27th, 31st comment on this post.

What you say about the copyright thing I believe is GREAT.

Well done.
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SEO Pricing on December 28th, 2007 8:26 pm

Yes defiantly feeds are way to go