AlwaysArousedGirl says it’s not enough to just have an RSS/Newsread on your blog so that your readers can use blog subscriber/aggregator like Google Reader or NewGator to keep up with you. It’s also important to use the “whole post” setting in your feeds and not just teasers, snippets, or headlines-only.
Photo by Flickr user orangejack.
Used under a Creative Commons license.
Here’s how she puts it.
After ages of reading blogs through my blog roll only and adding blogs by hand (and very reluctantly), I finally switched over to Google Reader. This makes writing the Tuesday Fleshbot Sex Blog Roundup ever so much easier for me.
At least, it’s easier for me if you do one very small, very simple thing. May I beg you to publish a full feed? Please don’t tease me with an abbreviated feed or worse, just the title of your post.
“But I want people to click over and read on the blog itself,” you might be thinking, and I thought the same too for a long time.  But the fact of the matter is that many people won’t click over. Blame it on time constraints, blame it on laziness, blame it on the momentum one acquires when paging through the dozens if not hundreds of items that land in one’s feed reader daily.
It doesn’t really matter why people won’t leave the comfort of their reader. A sizable portion won’t, and that leaves you with a decision to make in regard to potential readers who like you well enough to add you to their feeds: If they’ve already made the decision not to click over, would you prefer that they read your whole post or just a fraction of it? If your only concern is how many hits your blog gets, then by all means continue to publish only a partial feed. But if your concern is having people read your words, for fuck’s sake publish the whole thing.
She’s right. It’s pretty important to publish that whole feed and not just teasers. If I can read your whole post in my newsreader then… well… I do! I almost never just breeze past a non-teaser post.
It’s not a trivial point either — if you rely only on tools like StatCounter or AWStats or Google Analytics to track visits to your site you’re almost certainly missing a lot of traffic. When Google Reader scans your site it shows up as just a single visit whether there are two subscribers to your feed or two million! (Note: I don’t think many blogs have either one or one million subscribers but you know what I mean.) All I know is that one day when I was spending a little time hand-washing my server logs I discovered I had more than twice the number of readers I thought!
Chances are pretty good that if you’ve got a teaser-only feed you don’t have as many subscribers… but you may not have as many readers either. Just sayin’
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Now, that said, if you’re viewing this post on a newsreader you’ll see a little link saying “Continue reading…” That might seem a little hypocritical considering I’m asking everyone to do just the opposite. On the other hand, since I only use the “Continue reading…” for the photos I sometimes post, and because those photos are usually only incidental to the content of the posts, and because that created problems for some people who read this blog via newsreader in public places, I feel that’s an ok exception. It’s fine if you do likewise. But please leave your generally wonderful prose out where everybody can find it.
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Quick tip: since about 85% of the blogs in the world seem to be hosted on Blogger/Blogspot, and since about 80% of the teaser-only feeds I read are on Blogger/Blogspot, here’s a quick how-to to change your feeds to full text. (If you’re on a different blogging system that defaults to teaser feeds, and you’re not sure how to switch to full-text feeds, and you actually want to then drop me a line in email or comments telling me what blogging software you use I’ll do what I can to track down a how-to for your system.)
Oh, a quick pre-postscript: If you make the switch and let me know I’ll post your URL in a thank-you.
For Blogger/Blogspot blogs
1) Go to your Blogger.com dashboard (blogger.com/home)
2) Click “Settings” in your “Manage Blogs” area
3) Click “Site Feed” in the row of links under the “Settings” tab
4) Select “Full” from the “Allow Blog Feeds” list
5) Click “Save Settings”
Thanks!
Submitted by 2684 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-01-31 14:48.
Amen! A partial feed is more likely to make me unsubscribe from your blog than it is to "force" me to click over. Trust me, if I've got something to say, I *will* click out of reader to come comment! You don't need to publish a partial feed to get me to do that.
[Thanks, Jenn. --fl]
Submitted by 2684 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-01-31 19:31.
I, for one, read your posts mostly in a newsreader. I do think it would take just a little more effort if I had to click to read the whole article -- especially since you tend to post so prolifically! So I agree, full article is best, although I can understand why an author/publisher would want to force actual page views to support their site via, say, ad views.
[Yeah, that's the thing -- clicking through over and over just to see *if* you want to continue reading gets old surprisingly quickly. And yeah, I can understand that the publishers of, say, Slate Magazine's The XX-Factor blog would like me to visit their site since they're advertising driven. But in practice I don't bother, with the result that I a) never read the posts there and therefore b) never link to them in my own posts which means c) they don't get ad impressions from me or any of my readers. Oh well. Thanks, Monique. --fl]
Submitted by 2684 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-01-31 20:10.
I started to use the feeder mostly as a notification although I didn't limit size, then I found it was quicker to read through the reader, especially when my broadband had snow days.
["...especially when my broadband had snow days." Yes! Feeds are also great for reading offline! And reading teasers off line is worse than not reading them at all. Thanks, Five. --fl]
Submitted by 2684 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-02-02 09:28.
When two such respected bloggers as Figleaf and AAG recommend something, who could refuse? I've changed mine and will wait with interest to see if it makes any difference.
[Thanks, LR. It's kind of funny because with newsreaders subscribers aren't visible in things like StatCounter. But I think over time you really will get more readers... if not more evidence of page loads. --fl]