Bloggers: Give Me the Whole Post or Give Me a Link

July 10th, 2006

Are you giving your blog readers partial feeds?

There is nothing wrong with delivering partial feeds. The main benefit is it ensures people will visit your site to read the complete posts and therefore be exposed to your advertising or messages. In addition, they may benefit from seeing other content that they wouldn’t see if they just read your feed.

The issue that prompted this post is that two blogs (this one and this one) I came across this month offer partial post feeds only.

I read blogs using Thunderbird. In the content window, all I see is a partial post that just ends. There is no ellipsis. There is no link to read on. It just ends. For a couple days, I just thought it was sloppy writing and then I realised that the posts were incomplete. So, in order for me to read the complete post I have to open up the headers bar in my reader and click on the permalink which opens my browser to the complete post. This takes me way out of flow. I generally read most blog posts fairly quickly and I don’t read all of them unless they look interesting or valuable.

It is bad enough that I have to go to the site at all, but why do you make me have to work for it? Why can you not place a link at the end of the post fragment to tell me to “read on”.

Three Solutions

Here are a three possible solutions for the need to deliver partial feeds:

Include a link at the end of the excerpt to the permalink.
Monetize the feeds by adding inline ads.
Include special offers, links to related posts and products at the end of your syndicated posts.

Great Content Will Deliver Site Visits

Send whole feeds and don’t worry about site visits. If your posts are compelling, I will happily visit your site. Examples of this are StevePavlina.com or ProBlogger.net. Both of these blogs run full-post feeds and I often visit their sites, not because they force me, but because the content is so good I want to read more.

Tell me what you think?

Tags: blog, DesignByFire, problogger.net, Slow Leadership, stevepavlina.com, Thunderbird

Entry Filed under: Marketing, Briefs

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7 Comments Add your own

1. Jules | July 10th, 2006 at 2:09 pm

I read my RSS feeds in Opera.

Some of the feeds include the complete article, like yours, and other RSS feeds contain just a short exerpt. However, all of the feeds I see have a link to the article on the originating web site, even if I can read the whole post (the advantage is that I can click on the link and comment on the article).

None of the feeds are without a link which leads me to wonder if what you experience is a Thunderbird issue. Some feeds, such as 456BereaStreet.com, include a link within the RSS feed so I see two links to the originating post. I am thinking now that perhaps Opera is providing the link to the article’s RSS feed so there is no dependence on the post providing one.
2. jay | July 10th, 2006 at 3:54 pm

Jules,

You could be very right about Thunderbird. I should try Opera’s reader. I hadn’t thought about my client being wrong. I haven’t looked at the actual delivered feeds to see if there is a “more” link in them.

That being said. The only reason that bloggers should not deliver whole posts is if they are concerned with content theft and there are apparently tools for that. My real pet peeve is the fact that I have to keep app switching while reading posts and it takes me way longer to get through all the blogs. I read.

Cheers,
Jay
3. Jules | July 10th, 2006 at 9:17 pm

You could consider submitting an enhancement request to the Thunderbird/Mozilla team.
4. jay | July 10th, 2006 at 11:26 pm

Jules,

I think I will have to do that. I imported my feeds into Opera after your comment and it seems to only place them in as feeds. It does not seem as though you can place feeds into categories. This is one of the reasons I am using TBird as well as the fact that it is my mail client.
5. Jules | July 12th, 2006 at 5:16 pm

I just noticed on WebStandards.org is a post about Firefox 2 Beta 1 released (http://www.webstandards.org/2006/07/12/firefox-2-beta-1-live-today/) and one of the features is improved feed support. This might be of interest to you.
6. Destination: World Class &hellip | July 14th, 2006 at 12:55 am

[…] I posted the other day about unsubscribing from blogs because I was getting only partial feeds and no link. I have come to realize that the bloggers in question are not to blame and it is really a function of my feed reader client. On an average day I read between 20-50 posts. I don’t necessarily read the whole post. I usually skim the article and if they are sending me partial feeds it takes me out of flow. […]
7. In Search of a Desktop Fe&hellip | March 1st, 2007 at 6:25 pm

[…] posted the other day about unsubscribing from blogs because I was getting only partial feeds and no link. […]

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