Micro Persuasion: Want People to Read Your Blog? Go With a Full Text Feed
Steve Rubel scratches the surface of a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Does usign full content RSS feeds actually drive more clickthroughs than using the teaser approach? The knee jerk answer is that short teaser text, that requires the user to clockthrough to your site to get the rest of the story, would drive more clickthroughs. After all, if they want the content, they have to come to your site to get it. And since they’re viewing your feed, they must want the content, right? Seems fain enough, but what about all the people who don’t subscribe to your feed because the content is so lean? If the number of people you’re repelling is greater then the numbers of people who clickthrough, then you’ve got a net loss.
I only recently began using a real feed reader, as opposed to a personalized homepage to view RSS, and I’ve definitely clicked through to more sites because I’m continually engaged by their rich, full featured feeds. The feeds that I am interested in, that don’t have full content, such as Wired News: Top Stories, get almost none of my attention in a feed inbox that’s always filling up with unread content. Steve Rubel’s blog is a great example. I would stumble upon his site every now and again before I was using a reader, but now I read at least some of his content every single day. If his feeds were just one line and a link, I probably wouldn’t have him in my main folder. So because Steve is “giving away his content” I’m visiting his blog way more then before.
