Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Full or Partial Posts in RSS Feeds

Full or Partial Posts in RSS Feeds

A little flurry in the blogosphere this week: Robert Scoble announced that he was going to stop reading blogs that don’t include full entries in their RSS feeds. Namely, he was going to stop reading Chris Pirillo’s blog, despite the value he finds in it. Pirillo called this ”cutting off your nose to spite your face” but has actually turned on full posts in his feed.

I sympathize with both sides of the argument here. If your main way of reading blogs is through an RSS reader, it really interrupts your workflow to have to go to the blog itself to get the rest of a post. On the other hand, we’re all publishing blogs and if nobody ever visits them, well, what’s the point? Maybe we should just be publishing feeds and call it done.

Speaking for myself, I know I prefer RSS feeds that include the full post, and I’m much less likely to read a blog post that is only partially available through RSS than I would a full one. But, of course, when I get the full post I almost never click through to the blog. So actually, neither technique gets you good traffic to your blog.

But here’s the real problem, as far as I’m concerned: partial posts in RSS feeds that are so short you can’t even get a grip on whether the post is something you want to read more of. Twenty words isn’t enough, unless you’re an exceptionally tight writer or have amazing titles. This is the worst of both worlds—no one will click through to your blog to read the full post, nor will they read it through a newsreader. Now that’s shooting yourself in the foot!

I’m begging you, folks, throw those RSS-reading folks a bone and give them some motivation to click through to your blog!

Here are a few people’s thoughts to consider:

Darren Rowse - Should Bloggers Learn about Change Management?
Tris Hussey - Full feeds aren’t the problem. Better advertising choices are needed
Chris Pirillo - Full-Text Feeds are Dead
Constantin Basturea - Why I’m asking for full-text RSS feeds
Allan Jenkins - Pirillo and Ochman Declare Full-Text RSS Dead; Wake Me Up for the Funeral
B.L. Ochman - I’m With Chris Pirillo: Full Test RSS Feeds Are Dead
Agylen - Switching to full feeds

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 05/27 at 12:53 PM • Blogging Tips

Comments

Actually I don’t care people visits my blog or not. For me important is that people read my writings.

Posted by Kristaps Kaupe on 05/29 at 03:22 AM
We were just debating this one today at our blog planning meeting. Jim Robertson falls on the side of full text and is addicted to using aggregators to find out what’s going on. From my perspective, it is up to me to write enough to motivate readers to visit my blog. But then, Jim’s a long-time blogger and I am just a 6-month novice trying to figure it all out. But it at least feels to me like the tree falling in the forest if I cannot motivate visits to my blog ... I get no good happy feeling. But then what good is the whole blog thing if we all agree with one another.

Posted by Dale Wolf on 06/09 at 07:22 PM
Google Adsense is developing a means to advertise along with the RSS feed. This is now in beta.

If and when this comes out, then there will be no problem with full text feeds.

Posted by Duncan Kinder on 06/26 at 02:04 PM