October 2004 | How to BlogHow to Blog

If you’re hoping to make some extra cash from your blog, but all of your monetized links are in your sidebars or headers, etc, then you’re losing out when people view your blog from feed readers. Not so if you use Feedburner – now you can beef up your feed to integrate links to relevant products using your amazon associate ID, as well as further enhance your feed by splicing photos and links into it AND get stats on your traffic. VERY COOL!

Neil Turner has blogged about his experience with experimenting with Feedburner, and while his post doesn’t reference the ability to incorporate amazon links, he does show you how he’s spliced in his Flickr photostream.

Here’s how the service works:

FeedBurner detects your feed categories and then asks you to assign an Amazon store 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, and nothing at all with your Personal and Family categories. You, the publisher have total control over the frequency with which Amazon Associates links appear, and whether they should appear alongside really short posts or only very detailed posts.

FeedBurner then leverages the latest 4.0 release of Amazon Web Services to match your posts to relevant Amazon content for that store, and FeedBurner transforms that link and content from Amazon Web Services into a simple linked GIF tied to your feed item.

Publishers have total control over which (if any) parts of their feed get amazon links, which amazon stores they want to map to their content, and how frequently they want these associate links to appear.

Richard Silverstein has a great post on how he created a category-specific feed that would only give blog aggregators posts that are appropriately categorized (he has a Folk and World Music category on his RichardSilverstein.com blog and wanted to submit only his music posts to mp3blogs.org, which, like the name suggests, is an aggregator for mp3 blogs. Here’s how he says to do it:

First, you need a Typepad Pro account allowing you to create advanced templates. Then, create a new index template dedicated to the category (you can also do this for multiple categories) for which you wish to have an RSS feed. Go to your advanced template screen and click ‘Create New Idex Template Set.’ Then open your regular RSS feed template & copy the code into this new index template. Then customize it so that everywhere you see a tag, you add in the category name.

For instance, if your category was called ‘Folk and world music,’ then you would change the tag to look like:

This will list only information about entries in the specified category.

You may also wish to replace the <$MTBlogName$> tag with the category name, or add the category name after the tag, such as:

<$MTBlogName$>: Folk and world music

This will be the title that people see when they view the feed in their newsreader or aggregator.

Once you’re all done customizing the template, save your changes then publish the template.

WARNING: It is VERY important that you list your category precisely as it is listed in your blog. This procedure is case sensitive and a single mistake may cause a failure to publish your new template.

Thanks, Richard, for coming up with this for the TypePad community!

Update 8/6/05:
Richard has since moved from TypePad to WordPress, but the above instructions are still valid for TypePad users who want to create category specific RSS feeds