First you’ll need to log in to your Google Voice account and in the upper right hand corner, under the Settings menu, select Voice settings.

When the Voice settings screen loads, you’ll see a top menu. Click Call Widgets ==> Add a new call widget. At that point you’ll be asked to set up your widget, which includes the option to record a custom greeting as well as telling Google Voice how to behave when someone places a call. Once you’ve customized the widget to your liking, click save.

Next, copy the full embed code and paste it into a text file. You’ll want to locate the id# and copy it. Be sure to ignore the “id=” and “style” tags.

Now jump back over to MailChimp– specifically to step 3 of the campaign builder. Click on the add image button in the WYSIWYG, and select “upload”. Paste in the following static image link to get the “call me” badge shown above.

(You may want to resize the image depending on where in your template you’re placing it.)

Next, click on the “Link” tab at the top of the image upload dialog. Paste the following, replacing [idstring from the Embed box] with the ID number we previously pulled from the widget.

So you’ll ultimately end up with something like the following:

This is how the widget appears in my actual newsletter:

As is often the case with this sort of hack, there are caveats you should be aware of. The Google Voice Support discussion notes that this method does not work well with Internet Explorer, although Firefox and Chrome appear to be OK. I ran an Inbox Inspection on the campaign and email clients seem to render the button without an issue since it’s just a static image with a link. But the degree to which the actual functionality works with individual email clients still needs to be tested.

Step 1. Sign up for Adsense for Feeds through Google Adsense. (Doug notes that in his case, this required him to work directly with Google to move his feed’s address and convert his account.)

Step 2. Set up a new list in MailChimp for your FeedBurner subscribers.

Step 3. Export your email list out of your FeedBurner account and import these into the “FeedBurner subscribers” list you set up in MailChimp.

Step 4. Create a new RSS-to-Email Campaign in MailChimp using the FeedBurner feed address rather than your blog’s regular RSS feed address.

Step 5. Design your email and then select the “FeedBurner subscribers” list as the one you want to send to.

Essentially, this pushes the feed, with ads, directly into your MailChimp email.  It looks great and has relevant advertising!

My email list continues to grow – much better than it did with the plain ol’ FeedBurner email.  I don’t make a fortune off of the ads since I have less than one-hundred subscribers – but it’s a few bucks a month that I wouldn’t have had before!

Even without a gigantic list of subscribers, this is one way you can start monetizing your RSS-to-Email campaigns with very little effort.  Thanks again to Doug for the great tip!