How To Monetize Your Custom RSS News Feeds: Amazon Burner

Feedburner has done it again. The great guys behind the orange burning RSS flame are really doing some excellent work to make RSS more usable, spliceable, trackable, good-looking, and even now even profitable.

The latest addition to the great family of RSS Feedburner services is the Amazon Burner, which allows online publishers utilizing RSS newsfeeds to integrate a relevant contextual Amazon-sourced product feed....

"FeedBurner detects your feed categories and then asks you to assign an Amazon store (books, music, software, electronics, etc.) to any category for which you want to include the Amazon Associates program. For example, you might choose to associate the music store with your music category, DVD's with your Pop Culture category, ....

You, the publisher have total control over

a) which (if any) parts of their feed get Amazon links

b) the frequency with which Amazon Associates links appear, and

c) whether they should appear alongside really short posts or next to very detailed ones.

FeedBurner leverages the latest release of the Amazon Web Services to match relevant products from your selected Amazon store to your specific content and creating the first direct, non-intrusive and highly controllable way of monetizing RSS feeds while making them, in many instances even more valuable to the subscribers.

One simple question comes to mind:

Why doesn't FeedBurner the same feature I have long set-up for my Movable Type custom interface? In my MT post editing page I have created three extra fields in which I can place "manually" three Amazon unique identifier codes (ISBN, ASIN, etc.). What this does is that it creates a strip of custom and personally selected Amazon books on the right column of my article pages.

You can see this at work right here, on this page.

The beauty of this custom feature is that it overrides an apparently more fanciful script running on the backend and providing contextually selected Amazon books in a fashion very similar to what the guys at FeedBurner have just done.

That is: when I don't do anything the script does its job and places there whichever books it thinks are appropriate. But when I want to be in control and drive with laser precision the attention of readers to key relevant books and publications, I can do so adding true, real, thick value to both my article and to the individual selections which reinforce my style, brand and points carried forward in the article.

This does some good to the Amazon books too. Being personally selected and reflecting in truth the style of the article author these truly represent an extension of the author view and not just a real estate area sold to other for colonialist advertising.

Here is an example of the Amazon Burner at work on my Latest News feed.

Get the drift?

The real value is bringing the two things together, Amazon products contextual to the content and RSS feeds. Providing a default automatic matching capability, is also OK for beginners.

But don't be fooled, the real premium value is in YOUR selection, in your unrepeatable personal selection.

You are the newsDJ!