.orgI’m not Reading Your Partial Feed
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Many people believe that if they show only partial posts in their RSS feeds that more people will come back to their site to read the whole thing.
Dumb.
Let’s suppose for a second that your content is as good as Shoemoney’s or Aaron Wall’s. Know what they found when they went to partial feeds? Same thing that everyone finds.
People hate it, and they let you know by not only coming to your site anymore, but by unsubscribing to your feed as well. Multiple studies have confirmed that.
Show the full feed. Give your customers what they want. Reap the rewards.
Karin, RN
September 23, 2008 at
7:51 pm
I don’t want to be dumb so–oh this is hard for me–I am releasing full feeds as of today.
Shane
September 23, 2008 at
7:54 pm
Maybe you can start a support group for all the others who will need convincing
Karin, RN
September 23, 2008 at
9:22 pm
LOL
Jenn
September 23, 2008 at
10:45 pm
I still need a bit of convincing. I don’t show the full feed for Atlanta on the Cheap, but my reasoning is that some days the email will contain multiple posts. My thinking is that the readers want to quickly glance through the deals (free museum admission days, free ice cream, half-off theater tickets, free concerts around the metro area,etc) & will click on the deals they want to check out.
I prefer to keep all of the info on one screen. If I bury, say, the free admission days under a post with a long listing of free concerts in the area, they’ll never see it since, in all likelihood, they won’t scroll down.
I do show the full posts for the last 10 or so posts on the first page of my blog, but that just makes sense. There are other ways for readers keep tabs on posts further down the page, such as the list of recent posts.
Shane
September 24, 2008 at
8:45 am
Thanks for the comment! I would buy that, and I like that reasoning. However, many (most?) of your readers will subscribe with a feed reader that keeps each post separate. And others will subscribe via email with a service that sends separate emails for each post.
Overall, though, I would think the reasoning would be the same as for your homepage. If I’m not going to want to just skim the offers on your homepage, I think it’s even less likely that I would want to skim them in my email. I don’t want to have a separate click for each thing I want to read.
John
September 24, 2008 at
9:04 pm
Why not both a full feed and a partial post feed? Let the user decide which they want. Also, where the issue is aggregation, ethical aggregators can grab the partial feed, thereby driving traffic to the original source.
Shane
September 25, 2008 at
8:38 am
Good suggestion, John. I hadn’t thought of that. Do any of the major blog platforms have an option for dual feeds?
John
September 25, 2008 at
5:42 pm
Only had a handful of minutes to research this. It seems to be quite a hot topic actually, and here’s one solution- a dual feeds Wordpress plug-in. http://www.scratch99.com/wordpress-plugin-dualfeeds/ It’s not listed on the WP Compatibility list for 2.6 but it is for 2.5.
Shane
September 25, 2008 at
8:01 pm
Great work, John. Thanks!