Less hits but more good sh*t – Get rid of your RSS extracts and join the full feed brigade!
So I can tell you now, officially, that you will probably lose between 30 – 50% of your visits (although not necessarily page views) when you switch from providing extracted RSS feeds to full feeds.
It could also, possibly, be the case that you get fewer comments (one of the main reasons I was providing extracts was because I thought it might get me more comments), although that could equally be a result of me writing far less interesting posts ;o>
But is this a bad thing?
The blogads perspective would probably say that it certainly is… the fewer visits the less clicks and so on, but I’m not sure that that’s correct. If you’re coming to a site from a RSS feed then I reckon that you’re probably not going to be an ad clicker. You will almost certainly be a related links or an in-post clicker. But that’s not something that you even need to be at a site to benefit from.
And from the ‘consultant’ or ‘selling yourself’ perspective it doesn’t really matter either. You’ve still got people reading, digesting and taking in your stuff (and your RSS readers are going to be far more important to you than any surfer / searcher in terms of getting you work & opportunities). So, my thinking is that if you are in this field you’re actually doing yourself a severe disservice by providing extracted feeds.
Having said that though, if you operate as a community hub, like Problogger, then it doesn’t matter either way! But we can’t all attract an A-list of guest bloggers to keep us going when we head off on hols can we ;o>
So I contend that, with the exception of considering the misuse of feeds, providing just extracts through your RSS feed is going to at best make little or no difference to revenue streams and at worse will lose you an awful lot of money.
We need to get over the hits.
- Posted on: June 10th, 2005
- 7 Comments
- Category: Archives
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Welcome to the dark side
Is it practical (and possible) to put a small comment form at the bottom of each RSS item? When people comment from within their RSS reader they could be brought here – maybe with a chance to review previous comments before submitting a final version of their comment.
Good question Martin, I know that WP (I think) inserts a link into each item which goes directly to the comments but a non-coming to this site comments function sounds pretty cool.
I guess it wouldn’t be in the RSS specifications so that wouldn’t do it… perhaps a form for calling the relevant comments php file could work? But that would clutter it a bit… hmmm.
You’d need it to be simple AJAX foldable too or something like that.
One way to get readers of feeds to click through to the blog is to reference past posts, like you did with “considering the misuse of feeds”.
I agree with you totally from the ‘selling yourself’ perspective. What you want there is loyal and passionate readers who are going to be with you for the long haul. You can’t afford to loose them through forcing them to go read the blog.
As for comments, I think that if someone has something to say, they will take the effort to click through and do so. It may be interesting to see if you get more or fewer comments with this change.
Just when I was in the middle of a perfectly good experiment I get linked to by Photomatt and my hits go through the roof
)
The comments thing (together with the value (or otherwise) of comments…) is an interesting thing. Will report on where that goes.
I find that sites that don’t provide full feeds end up getting dropped from my reading list. I can’t tell in 30-50 words if the post is worth reading. I need to be able to skim! If I like a post, I’ll visit it on the blog to comment, or read others’ comments.
I advise all my clients to provide full feeds. Many people don’t have time to manage bookmarks and visit blogs manually to check for updates, and these people will demand full feeds, or stop reading your site.
i love this feature. i get fewer comments but you’re right. more people are reading it now.