Fedafi - Wordpress Plugin for RSS

I have found this video about “Widgets as a Platform,” part of the recent 2008 Media Summit in New York.

if you work in the widget industry you must-see this one
Among the topics addressed by the panel are strategies for distributed content, thoughts on engagement.

Hooman Radfar, CEO & Co-founder, Clearspring Technologies
Kevin Freedman, Vice President, Finance & Operations, Slide
Eric Alterman, Chairman, KickApps
Dan Riess, Vice President, Marketing and Ad Solutions, Turner Broadcasting System
Sun Jen Yung, Managing Director, Investment Banking, Oppenheimer & Co., Moderator

RSS has the highest value among Web 2.0 technologies, according to a Forrester Research report released last Friday.

The research firm surveyed 275 IT decision-makers online between April and June.

Twenty-three percent of those surveyed report substantial business value for RSS. One in three uses RSS for marketing purposes. Podcasting came in right behind RSS, with 21% reporting substantial business value.

By contrast, only 11% said blogging delivers substantial business value. Fourteen percent said their company does not measure Web 2.0 business value at all. Of those that do measure, the majority look at traditional metrics such as ROI and total cost of ownership.

In a another Forrester Report Rebecca Jennings (Research senior analyst) said that “Over the next few years, the shift of online marketing from experiment to mainstream will force marketing organizations and processes to change. As different types of social media like MySpace and peer reviews strengthen their grip on users, expect marketers to jump on the bandwagon by switching ad spend to social media forms like RSS, blogs, and networks.”

And You are you already using RSS into Ad or Marketing strategy

As reported by Read/Write Web Syndicate IQ has closed its doors. Syndicate provided services similar to Feedburner. I agree with Richard that this isn’t a problem with the ’space’ - I’m guessing that’s the new word for industry (the business you are in) - publisher services, more a problem of business models and expectations.

Post bubble 2000 the web became real, small businesses could succeed with good business skills, great ideas and a good business model. Today it is much more difficult, many ’spaces’ have people who don’t necessarily have those three qualities - but they do have the ability to raise VC - just like the pre-bubble firms of 1999.
This means the firms with good business skills, ideas and models have to sit around and wait for the VC funded firms to burn through their cash or find new ways to compete. Unfortunately Syndicate IQ wasn’t able to wait any longer and I feel for them.

Syndicate won’t be the last in this space, looking at some of our competitors blogs that haven’t been updated for months you begin to wonder and that is bad for the space, we need good ideas and they won’t be coming from the behemoths of this industry.

The action in publisher services will come from around the edges rather than a frontal attack. The problem is that we are not hitting enough of the edges.
What it does mean is that the smaller, non-VC funded firms have to really work hard, innovate and move quickly.

Yesterday Google released an updated policy for Adsense users. Some changes and you can read the source here and the real deal here.

Most important change is competitive ads, you can still have them on your blog as long as they can’t be confused with Google ads

In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

Guy Kawasaki posted about the amount he gets through advertising from his blog, more of a ‘here’s the numbers make of it what you will’ than a ‘look at me’ type of post and very useful it was. This has lead to quite a conversation, including one about us here at Vecosys.

What is interesting is that some, like Vecosys have risen above the mire of ‘you don’t know what you are talking about’ and considered the whole ‘blog advertising’ arena.

Alan Patrick at Broadstuff has just written on the subject with an interesting take on banners vs search, likening blogs to the old magazine media. Much is being made of metrics and for those who have them they are a powerful tool. But, my thoughts are that blog advertsing in particular is more like product placement. Especially for the long tail.

I think savvy marketers won’t be looking for ‘goal conversions’ they will have a much more subtle approach to blogs. Like product placement in movies the long tail can achieve the same with their engaged readership. Pay per post on the other hand will become the product plug.

Now of course I would say that, having just started an ad network for feeds, but I would have said it anyway and my goal for our network is to get people using the exchange system. This way many will build their subscriber list telling others about blogs worth reading.

Back to the point, if the most powerful endorsement is a personal one then it follows that placement within a conversation also carries some of that power. The RSS feed is the channel conversations use to travel, they are different to the blog itself. In fact for many it’s the only point of contact with the blogger. It follows that impersonal Google ads are a flat plug, like interrupting a pub conversation with your mates and making a sales pitch.

A banner ad from a company you’ve chosen is more like a placement. Imagine how Pepsi would like it if every time guests came around you got Pepsi out? Okay not every time, but sometimes

If you like Pepsi and your friends like you it then becomes more difficult for them to dislike Pepsi, in consumer behavior this creates a triangle of love, because disliking Pepsi means they may have to dislike you. Hence celebrity endorsements and product placement, you like Tom Cruise so if he drinks Pepsi you have to like Pepsi - way too simplistic but you get the idea.

That’s the niche for banners in the long tail.

If a blogger ‘endorses’ a company/product and I like the blogger then maybe that will go some way to win the battle for my mind for that product type. Wash, rinse and repeat and over time brand positioning can be achieved.

We hope that our network grows, last year over 1.5 million copies of Wordpress were downloaded and we want every last one of them using our plugin and using it to build up their own personal subscriber list. Then, when they are ready we will have a network that is unique, a way for the likes of Pepsi to reach into thousands of households by personal endorsement.

Disclaimer, I hate Pepsi.

At last we have started inputting publishers to the network, you should get your ID sometime soon if you haven’t got it yet.

Once you get it login to the user area and edit the details we have for your feed, these details will be public.

If you want a publisher ID and haven’t contacted us yet register here and then just fill in the form on the ‘publishers’ tab.

Please report any bugs.

Thanks to all of those people who have asked for a publisher ID for the advertising network - we have not forgotten about you.

We are debugging the the site that will deal with advertising and hopefully by the end of this week you will all have your ID’s.

Once you have an ID and activate advertising in the plugin this banner will appear in all articles in your feed:

The banner will be linked to a page that gives potential advertisers details about your feed, here’s an example:

The page shows your subscribers, grabs a thunmbnail of your site from Alexa, grabs the Cosmos of your blog and the rank from Technorati, shows the views and clicks for ads in your feed averaged over the previous 7 days and the costs to advertise.

If an advertiser chooses your feed then we take payment, inform you and you have the choice to accept or decline the advert. If you accept the ad will appear automatically in your feed for the purchased timescale - one week (7 days) or one month (28 days)

You get to set the price for your adverts and we take a percentage of the sale to cover our costs. We haven’t finalised the percentage but it will be less than AdBrites 30%.

We will pay out every month with no minimum. Initially all payments will be made through PayPal, so you need a PayPal account to get started, but once we get the USA end of the operation setup we will be offering payment by check.

The whole idea behind the network is that advertisers can select a ‘basket’ of feeds to advertise on, this allows them to hit a wide target area in the long tail, it also means advertisers won’t just be targetting feeds with lots of subscribers. If they want to advertise to say 10,000 people they can select as many feeds as they need to hit this number.

As always we are more than happy to get your feedback and hope we can build something that is a good fit for the vast majority of blogs out there that don’t have 20,000 subscribers.

On a different note please subscribe to our feed, the plugin is beta, over the next few weeks it is likely that we will release new versions as we fix bugs and add features, I noticed today that the number of downloads (over 300 so far) is vastly greater than subscribers and I’m worried people will be left with old versions not knowing a new one is out - so subscribe.

Fedafi RSS Wordpress Plugin (Beta)

Today we released the beta version of the Fedafi Wordpress Plugin. Find out more and download it FREE here

Features

Fedafi Wordpress Plugin is just that, a plugin for Wordpress, it creates a full text valid RSS 2.0 feed from your Wordpress blog adds a style sheet, tracks subscribers and tracks clicks on articles. Plus it will allow you to sell advertising space right in your feed through our publisher network

• Auto Creates a Valid RSS 2.0 Feed
• Full text feed
• Realtime update
• Valid RSS for IE7
• Fedafi Installs Easily
• Upload the files
• Activate the plugin
• View your stats
• Tracking is a key part of Fedafi
• Track overall hits on your feed
• Track unique hits on your feed
• Track by user agent
• Track clicks on outbound links by article
• See statistics by month
• Monetize your feed
• Activate advertising
• Get adverts from the Fedafi Publisher Network

Requirements

Fedafi Wordpress Plugin was developed on various Linux web servers, including Plesk and cPanel, that use Apache, PHP and MySQL using version 2.0.2 and above of Wordpress.

• Version 2.0.2 and above of Wordpress (hasn’t been tested on anything below this)
• A website on a Linux webserver with Apache
• PHP 4.3 or over
• MySQL 4.0 or over
• Ioncube loaders (included bundled with the install package)

Instal Fedafi Wordpress Plugin

Install is easy

• Download the plugin
• Upload to your Wordpress install
• Activate the plugin
• Adjust your template to the new feed URL or use a 301 redirect to it

Upload the files
Download the zip file and unzip, the contents will look like this:

The two files you can see:

• rss.php
• fedclick.php

Go in the root folder of your Wordpress install, this is the folder that contains wp-config.php

The folder named ‘fedafi’ needs to be uploaded to your plugins folder. You need to upload the whole folder so that your plugins folder now has a folder within it called ‘fedafi’

Activate the plugin
You now need to go to your Wordpress admin in your browser and click the ‘plugins’ link

Here you will see the ‘fedafi’ plugin, click the ‘activate’ link

If you now click the ‘dashboard’ link you will see a new sub-link called ‘Fedafi’

Click this and you will see your feed details

Redirect your feed URL
The URL to your new feed will be http://yourdomain/rss.php

You can edit your template to use this new URL or edit the .htaccess file in the root folder of your Wordpress install and add a 301 redirect

The redirect should look something like this:

Redirect 301 /feed http://yourdomain/rss.php