Partial feeds = Pissed Off Subscribers = No Subscribers
Full feeds, are the ONLY way to Go!
I wrote in my post “
There are 2 main reasons that opponents of this thinking cite as their reasons for using partial feeds.
- Using a partial feed forces the reader to visit their site - and essentially raise their stats, ranking, and bring in more money from advertisers. This may actually be true if you’re a large blog, with tons of great content like mashable.com, but for the small-time blogger, 90% of your readers are going to be too lazy to click on through and read the rest of your article.This hurts your credibility. You build credibility by writing awesome articles that everyone bookmarks, shares, and loves. If people can’t, don’t, or won’t read your post, they can’t see how great it is, and won’t bother visiting your blog anymore. You want people to read your content no matter what to build up your name, brand, and reputation.
Secondly, many readers, automatically just unsubscribe from any and all blogs that use partial feeds, if you’re ok with losing 40% of readers out there, then by all means use partial feeds, but I highly advise against it.
Also according to feedburner, having a partial feed will not increase clickthroughs to your site at all.
- Using partial feeds, can save your content from being scraped. That’s not always true, and the damage of losing subscribers, followers, etc out-weighs the alternative.It’s also possible that partial feeds can actually help scrapers, as the keyword density may be better.
Conclusion:
Successful blogging is about getting your message out there, and making your readers happy, think of what you would do in their situation, if reading a partial post do you always click through to the website? If so you’re the exception…
Personally, I get pissed if a blogger actually expects me to click through to their website, when I’m surfing my reader.
Most bloggers are lazy, or way to busy to click through on every post, especially if they’re researching for a new blog post, which is what I am doing 90% of the time I’m using my reader.
Bottom line: Stop pissing off people off and Switch to a Full Feed!
Here are a few other great blog posts I read recently to back this up.
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Tags: blogger, Blogging, credibility, Feed, feedburner, full feed, full feeds, full rss feed, full rss feeds, partial feed, partial feeds, partial rss feed, partial rss feeds, rss, rss feed, Rss Feeds
March 24th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Great call. In addition to that, I think your totally rad RSS icon will help as well.
March 24th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Interesting post Patrick… I do agree that full feeds are the way to go… however… (and there is always a however)…
What about that thing called advertising? For some of us, it IS a decent portion of income, and in your mind, would an ad in the feed (say embedded specially or something. and of course not overdone) be acceptable to you?
After all, if you’re not going to monetize the reader on your site and give it all away for free, shouldn’t there be somewhere for the blog writer to make something on their hard work?
Just food for conversation - great work on here.
March 25th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Jeremiah, yeah I highly - Highly recommend using advertising in feeds, I use feedburner’s built in feed ads, and I also use the feedvertiser plugin.
March 26th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I subscribed to your blog and just unsubscribed because you’re not sending full feeds. Why encourage others to do full feeds but you don’t? Unless something broke, I got headlines only.
March 27th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Wow, that was a big mistake - the issue has been taken care of, I appreciate you notifying me of the error.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Is there a way to keep the (more…) tags without sending out a partial feed? I wanted to use more tags for aesthetic purposes (e.g., not letting your frontpage having all of the content up front) but because it sends out partial feeds, I quit using it. I wish there was a way to use a more tag without abridging the feed.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
@Jon Limjap: Try this plugin: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/homepage-excerpts-wordpress-plugin/ — Home Page Excerpts - you can choose how many characters to use in each post on your home-page / Main Index section. It also helps w/ pagerank / seo. Hope that helps.