TechMiso

Nobody likes a tease, right? OK, maybe sometimes and for short periods of time, sure, everyone likes a good tease. Maybe it can be attributed to spicing up ones life. But if you think for a second you can get away with teasing RSS subscribers back to an HTML-laden website, get ready for them never reading your content again.

For those who rely heavily on picking up web content through RSS [like me], there’s little time for websites anymore. My first thought when I see a teaser feed is — feel lucky if that teaser drives even one person back to the main site — and better luck yet if you can ever track and prove that it actually does.

Full or tease. It’s an age-old dilemma surrounding RSS ever since it came on the internet scene back in the 90s. Some web engineers insist on partial feeds that drive traffic back to a website for reasons like – advertising, community, traffic stats, aggregator avoidance, or whatever other reasons.

Here are a few points to consider why running full RSS feeds is the only way to go.

Advertising-
I’ve heard a few folks express concerns such as this: “how do I satisfy my advertisers when my full content is running in RSS and my ads are on the website?” Take John Gruber’s Daring Fireball as an example of feed advertising gone wild. He’s nailed weekly feed revenue with something called ‘feed sponsorships.’ Daring Fireball sells it this way:

Week-long sponsorships are available for Daring Fireball’s syndicated feed (RSS). This is the only way to promote your product or service specifically to Daring Fireball’s audience of Mac nerds, designers, nitpickers, perfectionists, and connoisseurs of fine sarcasm.

When John says Daring Fireball’s audience, he means over 150,000 feed subscribers and 1.3 million web page views. John’s Daring Fireball just so happens to run a full and juicy RSS feed.

Then there’s community-
This almost seems like a no-brainer, but I’ll mention it anyway. If you provide another outlet (e.g. full wholesome RSS feeds) to your readership, then you are [by default] growing your community. Of course, you could shit on your community and tease them with partial feeds only to sacrafice readers by driving them back to your advertisers. (breath)

And traffic stats-
Another no-brainer, but here we go with a sprinkle of TechMiso opinion. Forget your traffic stats. When it comes to RSS, just put stats behind you. Full RSS feeds should be looked at as a campaign to generate readership. Give people your full-on wholesome content and when they get hooked, you will realize an organic increase in traffic back to your website. Take Steve Pavlina’s stellar motivational and commentary blog:

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $1000/day (updated as of 10/29/06).

Steve doesn’t talk about how large his audience is, but at $1000/day in 2006 (probably triple now in 2009), I’d wager to say his audience is large and established. Steve’s blog just so happens to be smartly available as a full RSS feed. Thanks Steve.

Aggregator avoidance-
I wrote in a past article about the land of lawless aggregators. Aggregators suck. They steal content and monetize it in sleazy fashion. But on the flip side, what aggregators ‘are’ good at is spreading your word. And some aggregators can be considered borderline acceptable in the manner they reproduce your material — like excerpts rather than just full on scraping. Worst case: you attempt to contact the offending aggregator and request they cease and desist.

I’ll wrap up here with what I thought was a joke. Virginia DeBolt on blogher.com stated something that almost had me fall off my chair:

The hard work and talent showcase inherent in creating a beautiful blog design doesn’t show up in a feed.

Here’s where the confusion kicks in. Your blog design is an insignificant factor in popularizing your content. People care about what you write. The better you write, the better your chances are of increasing your readership.

Virginia did go on to say:

I don’t think there’s a universal right answer for you about which way to go. My goal was increased traffic to the blog. I tried it both ways before I decided on partial feeds. Perhaps that’s my universal answer: decide on your goal for your RSS feeds, and test it for yourself to see what works.

Can we have a decision Virginia?

I say go full RSS feed. If you have a different experience with using partial feeds, stop by TechMiso here and leave us some soup de la comment.