Free idea - Affiliate links to RSS readers

(note - this post is a bit nuanced, so if you're not into RSS readers, etc you can probably safely skip it... ;-)

Here's a simple and sweet idea I'm giving out for free to all the RSS reader companies in the world. I offered it to Mark Fletcher of Bloglines about a year ago, but haven't seen it implemented yet. I'd really love to see this done by one of the RSS readers/aggregators/whatever they're called:

It seems like the biggest barrier for mainstream adoption of RSS readers is subscribing to that 1st feed. I know this, because I evangelize Bloglines to a lot of people, but then when they finally sign up for an account they're usually clueless about what to do with it next, and why they should even ever use it. 

Now, as a blogger, I'd be more than happy to endorse an RSS reader on my blog so that new users that are wondering what those RSS links do could subscribe to my feed.

But simply linking back to an RSS reader site is pretty much useless for my readers, and doesn't have much value for me (blog owner).

So I thought it would be awesome if I could post a link that "primes" the recommended RSS reader with my WebX.0 feed. So when a new user clicks on my "We love Bloglines!" link they go to the Bloglines signup page. Once their account is active, my feed is already automatically subscribed to. Cool!

Value to me (feed owner) - I easily got a new subscriber. This link is 100x more valuable to me than a stupid link back to the homepage of some random RSS reader site.

Value to user - their account already has one feed they're interested in, making that 1st feed hurdle that much easier.

I think this could be a sweet and cheap (aka - 'viral'...) way to build a lot of affiliate links back to the RSS reader company that does this first. The implementation is probably super simple... they'd just need to add a referring feed URL in the link (something like: www.bloglines.com/signup.jsp?sub=www.webx0.com), and support it in their account setup process.

Please someone do this... you're guaranteed a ton of free incoming links from the blogosphere!

2c

Comments

[Phil Hollows]

Hi Yaron:

You mean like this?

http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?Track=http://www.webx0.com/atom.xml

Phil