For the longest time my main RSS feed has just shown the title of the post and a brief description of what it is about. The reader had to click through to my site in order to get the full article.

I am not really sure why I did it this way. I guess in someway I was concerned about driving traffic to my site. I am not really sure why that mattered to me. Surely it is more important to get my content out there rather than worrying about the format. However for some reason I didn’t think that way.

However, today I listened to the podcast of Steve Olechowski from Feedburner talk at the Future of Web Apps conference. He explained that the audience who consumed RSS was largely different from the audience that would check out a website on a regular basis. Experiments by Feedburner members indicated that switching to full content feeds made no difference to the number of visitors to their sites and in some cases actually improved click throughs.

I am not doing the presentation justice and he covered a lot more fascinating stuff, so if you are somebody who uses RSS feeds in your business I highly recommend you take the time to download it.