Do You Display the Whole Article In The RSS Feed?
I often see discussion on different webmaster forums recarding if you should display only a summary in the RSS Feed or the whole article.
Here is (in my opinion) the pros and cons for displaying the whole article in your RSS Feed:
The Pros
- Your reader gets the whole article in their reader with all the others, making them saving time.
- Readers tends to like whole article feeds. Which means they are more likely to stay subscribed.
The Cons
- You give your article out totally free. (You don’t get views on all your ads on your site. Sure, you can have some ads in the feed, but not as much as you can have on your site)
- You most probably will get less visitors on your site.
Do you have anything else to add? Please make an comment.
I offer the full article in my RSS Feed, basically because I like that myself. But what I have noticed is that I tend to visit the blogs i subscribe to less frequently. The only times I do it is when I want to make an comment, or read what other readers have commented. Other then that I don’t need to visit the site, since I get all what I want in my reader.
What do you do? Display the full article or only a summary?
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The plan for the future aren’t done yet, but I will write some about it on a...
I show my entire post in my RSS Feeds because I give my readers the option on if they want to go to my blog to make a comment. I mean, they don’t NEED to but it’s completely up to them, you know?
Honestly, I’m not a big fan of needing to do extra work and if I’m forced to read half the article, I tend to get mad when it cuts off… for instance, if I’m reading it in an e-mail form on my cell phone…
Jay
DatMoney.com
DatCurious.com
I have my full text and images shown in the RSS Feed.. but feel that i won’t be getting more visitors as many subscribers would be reading off everything in the mail itself.
What do you frankly suggest?
One thing is for sure, you will loose (a lot!) of rss subscribers if you cut off youre feed.
It’s a good tip that youinterlink youre articles.
When you’re done writing the article, look over it and find phrases you can interlink to other articles on youre blog.
Good tip there Staale..
Interlinking the articles can be one of the best ways to drive traffic from RSS mail readers to our blogs. This is very much seen in Techcrunch, where an article has a minimum of 4-5 links to its own old posts!
Full feeds rock. I prefer that if I’m using a browser unless the author has dozens of posts a day.
Staale, get out of my brain man! You must have been to the Bloggeries and read my thread about the full or short RSS feeds.
On my site I have been using short to entice people to actually come to my blog. I have read quite a few posts and comments that people prefer full posts. I think your idea to interlink your posts is a fantastic idea.
My other thought on this situation is to write posts in such a way that encourages people to come to the site and make comments, or add addons such as “link luv” or an addon that removes the “nofollow” tag from the comments.
This of course opens up an entirely new topic…
I agree that you should run a full rss feed. I run my blog with the full rss feed as well. I think it makes it easier to read all of your feeds from one location then if you like the article you open it from the reader to make comments or look at the page either way. If you are offering quality content you will get readers visiting your site because they want to give input or see what articles you have done.
Bud
A feed that gives nothing but a short excerpt is pretty much useless. I like to follow blogs and I just visit them if i want to comment. You need to make money using your blog sure, but not at the cost of user experience and value.
I prefer full feeds, and I have my own feeds set to display the entire articles. It bothers me to see only partial articles in my feed reader. I am also bothered by seeing only partial posts on the homepage of a blog. I like to be able to read the article in its entirety without having to open additional page and then go back to the homepage to read a second article.
Full feed of course. I rarely subscribe to sites with partial feed.
i give my readers full feed. i think they subscribe to my feed because they want to save time reading posts in their mailbox instead of having to go to the site and wait it to load.
I have mine set to full feed as it was by default. This had never been an issue until recently when a new news aggragator site for my topic was launched. Has caused quite a stir and promoted many comments.
I don’t purely for the reason that when I did, I was finding my posts turning up on countless ’splogs’. I found it annoying so I only display partial feeds now.