Why You Should Use Full Feeds
Using full feeds to disseminate your content over RSS may seem silly. After all, if people can consume all your content through their RSS reader, they have no incentive to visit your site. Whereas if you only provide them with a snippet from the entirety of the content, then they have to click through to your website to read more, there by increasing page views, right? Not quite, according to Rick Klau, the Vice President of Publishing Services at FeedBurner.
According to his commentary from a few days ago,
First of all, I think the primary justification often given for partial feeds - that it will drive higher clickthroughs back to the publisher’s site - is off-base… Feed reading is consumption-oriented, not transactionally focused. We’ve seen no evidence that excerpts on their own drive higher clickthroughs.
The main reason for wanting to get readers to click through to one’s content (by using partial feeds) would be to get more advertisement impressions, to which Rick responds by mentioning feed monetizing options (which one is more profitable may ultimately be debatable). Apart from that, Dan brings up an important issue, that of RSS content-scraping which may prevent some people from publishing full feeds, but then himself provides the solution:
1. Use internal linking.
2. Install the Feed Copywriter plugin and add a copyright message and return link to the bottom of your feed.
3. Regularly check Copyscape to see if anyone is using your content.
With protection against scrapers available, along with the ability to easily monetize your feed, and knowing that people are much more likely to subscribe to full feeds rather than partial feeds, what’s keeping you from making the entirety of your content available through RSS feeds? Mike Arrington is doing it, and so are Richard MacManus and Pete Cashmore. What’s holding you back?
Read More at Pronet Advertising
Tags: arrington, consumption, copyscape, copywriter, disseminate, excerpts, feedburner, impressions, incentive, justification, macmanus, monetize, page views, pronet, publishing services, responds, rss reader, scrapers, snippet