I really think there’s not enough said about what feeds can do, and what they can do for your business. During the remodel of this site, and the building of two others that I am working on, I have been doing a lot of thinking about feeds and their uses. And now, I’d like to share these thoughts regarding building value and relationships through feeds with you.
Definitions
For the non-geeks:
- feed:
Web-based content, provided in a stream that can be displayed in many forms. - full post:
The entire entry displayed together on one page, as you can see on this page. - excerpt:
A snippet of the beginning of a feed entry, usually a certain number of characters long. On the front page of this site, you can see excerpted functionality that is created by manually inserted a break in the beginning of each post. - feed reader:
An online or installed program designed to download content from multiple sources.
Full Post or Excerpt?
If you subscribe to this feed using one of the links on the right, you’ll notice that you will always get the full post with your subscription. I use the excerpt function in WordPress for display purposes on the front of this site, but I don’t make people click through to read the rest if they are subscribing in a reader or through e-mail. Why? Well, the simple truth is that I find the practice annoying, and I’d rather provide value than annoy my readers. Consider this: I have, on more than one occasion, refreshed all of my subscribed feeds in my NewsFire feedreader while connected to the internet, and tried to read them offline on BART or in an airport. Every excerpt-only feed didn’t get read because I had free time to read, and yet I couldn’t get the whole post. If this happens enough, I’d probably just delete that feed out of my reader and stop bothering with it.
Need more concrete reasons? How about these:
- Excerpts don’t encourage clickthrough.
According to Feedburner, excerpts do not drive higher click-throughs. And if you couple that with my feed-deleting annoyance, you’re actually losing readers. - You don’t need the clickthroughs.
If your content is advertising-driven, just monetize your feed. Feedburner now supports the AdSense CPC model through their ad network along with their original CPM model, and any traditional ad sales that can be made through a static site can be made through your feed. - Bandwidth is endless.
I’ve heard someone argue against full feeds because they say it takes up too much bandwidth. Seriously? It’s text, people! Even your feed with your ad in it takes up less bandwidth than your website, and high speed connections are a business standard. - Alexa doesn’t matter.
My other favorite is that decreasing your page views by putting the full post in the feed will drop your Alexa ranking when no one clicks through. Trust me, no one takes Alexa seriously anyway—view your results with a grain of salt. - Duplicate content sucks.
I hate searching for something on Google, clicking on a link, and then finding some blog excerpt with a link to the original post. People try to do that to this site all the time, and the pingback off me. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, so don’t do it.
In summary, writing is really about providing value, and including the full post in the feed increases that value to the reader. Value is what builds trust and strong readership, not clickthrough gimmicks. When you work on great content and building relationships, your subscriber levels will build organically along with your inbound links (and therefore your web traffic). So if you want to build trust and readership, put the full posts in your feed!
Feeds as Social Media
I have been using NewsFire for Max OS X for a while now, but I was recently turned on to Google Reader. While NewsFire (and other standalone-type feed applications) has the ability to let me download the feeds and read them offline, using an online program like Google Reader does have the added benefit of social networking. For example, I created a page in Google Reader with my favorite feeds, and then chose to share certain articles via a link on this site. (You can also see those results here.) As a content provider, if you can get influencers to share your articles on their reader pages, they can then spread your content around for you, ads and all!
Additional Resources
Mon, Nov 26, 2007
Technology and Websites