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