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Complete RSS feed

Published on: March 29, 2007 by Paul Boag

I have made the decision to change my RSS feeds from being just a snippet of  my posts to the full thing. Sorry it has taken so long.

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.

Comments

Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email

  • Post by geniosity on March 29, 2007 10:30 PM

    I JUST though of subscribing to your RSS yesterday though I'm not sure why I was so slow, considering I've been a podcast listener for so long, and today you give me the best news.

    It is SOOO much easier to read the full feed than click through. You'd have to really compete with the 1000 other feeds I have to read to get me to leave Google Reader and go to your site (well, not necessarily leave, but you know what I mean).

  • Post by Tony on March 29, 2007 11:10 PM

    Hi Paul,

    I checked Future of Web Apps page but couldn't find the download - do you have a direct link?

  • Post by mike on March 29, 2007 11:39 PM

    Paul, when did RSS go from really simple syndication
    to Rich Site Summary?

  • Post by Paul Boag on March 30, 2007 9:14 AM

    @Tony, you cannot download that individual presentation unfortunately. You will need to subscribe to the whole RSS feed and then pick out that one presentation from there.

  • Post by Luke Harries on April 3, 2007 9:29 AM

    I have your life stream on my Google sidebar. I think I get the main blog feed in that. It's much easier with the full story in RSS. I can click once and see it all in a mini window. The feeds that only give a short sentence to describe the article are less likely to get people actually reading the article.

  • Post by D.Joseph Design on April 3, 2007 7:16 PM

    Interesting. I only get my news via RSS now. But I like the excerpts better than the full post because I can quickly browse all of my RSS entries in Google Reader, and then star or mark as unread ones of interest to me based upon the short summary.

  • Post by Mark Stephenson on April 6, 2007 7:04 PM

    Interesting...I was just applying the 80:20 rule to my feeds and was considering unsubscribing on the basis of having to click through to read the whole article. I will have to reconsider my decision ;)

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