RSS and the careful tease
by Sapphire (April 27, 2005)
I’ve been noticing that a lot of the really big important blogs don’t make it so easy for you to grab their feed through your favorite aggregator with one or two button clicks. Many offer just a barely noticeable link that says “RSS feed”. Then again, others give you several options, so apparently there’s a variety of opinion.
I’m suspecting that the issue is that feeds take your content offsite. Your visitors are reading your content, but there’s no chance they’ll click a link or sign up for something that could actually make you money. Plus, it’s really tough to track how many people are reading you when your feed gets loose in the wilderness, and even for a hobby blog, it’s cool to know your audience via stats.
But to me, denying people a feed option, or even just making it difficult, is counter-productive for a couple of reasons. It’s unfriendly. It’s likely to make some visitors pass you by and never return, whereas if you’d let them have the feed, maybe they would have clicked through anyway. Furthermore, some of the most convenient and popular aggregators, like MyYahoo, only show readers your headlines, forcing them to click to your site to read more. Why deny people that option?
I’ve been studying this problem for a couple of days, and here’s what I recommend.
(1) Set up your feed so that it only shows an excerpt of your entry.
In WordPress, you use the “excerpt” function available with 1.3 and up. With other blogging software, you may have to talk to the programmer, or read your documentation. This allows you to pick the very best snippet from your post to draw people in, and in that way is superior to the hacks that cause the feed to display only the first 250 characters or so, giving you no choice what to show, and cutting your entry off in mid-sentence. Trust me… it’s worth some investigating to find out how to do this if it’s not obvious in your blog software.
(2) Definitely offer people RSS buttons for services that only show headlines or excerpts.
This way, even if you’re unable to implement #1, you’re offering them several lovely options, but only the ones that also work for you. Of course, they can still cut and paste your RSS into their own feed service, which is why #1 is so helpful.
(3) Put something on your site that people might actually want to visit.
That way, when they do come by, they’ll have reason to start reading you on your own site.
Posted in Blogging
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