Nerve Endings Firing Away

Admittedly, I was one of them who considered visits to your websites as preferable as compared to reading off a feed reader. But the number of websites and blogs with great content has exploded and there are far too many to keep track of. RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed readers, online or otherwise saved a lot of time allowing us to read content of only those blogs that have been updated. Of course, that would mean you didn’t visit the blogs in their pristine web format all the time except to comment. But if you believe content is king, that shouldn’t bother you. Of course, occasionally blog authors make drastic changes to their template and solicit comments which many of us are glad to oblige them with.

When using or offering feeds became almost mandatory if you had a blog of decent standing, some bloggers held on their belief that visits to websites are important so offered partial feeds. I was one of them too. I am also a big fan of using the <more> tag on the homepage for long-winding posts, which I am often guilty of. WordPress 2.1 truncated posts in the feed when you used a <more> tag but the Full Text Feed plugin fixes that bug. In fact, the Collapsible More tag that I now use even lets you open the full post without refreshing the page thus cutting down load time. This applies only if you visit my homepage to read the blog.

However, one downside of offering full feeds is it lets your content be plagiarized either by feed aggregators or unscrupulous bloggers. Frankly, the convenience of full feeds for your readers far outweighs this danger which can be handled by other means. In fact, ace blogger John Chow sees content scrapers as a blessing in disguise because they get you inbound links but also admits that it can affect your Google ranking because of duplicate content.

But the question often asked is why should we offer full feeds when we have ads on our site that we wish our readers click on? Or even for the geeky reason of getting an accurate count of visitors to your blog. Well, let us first examine typical reader behavior. Feed readers are still kinda associated with technical jargon so an average Web user doesn’t use one. So, a feed user is a regular reader of your blog and is probably ‘technically adept’ at using and managing feeds. They like your blog enough to keep a tab on your writings and generally like what you write. They usually will not visit your ‘web blog’ except probably to drop comments. Forcing them to visit your blog for any other reason by offering none or partial feeds will simply turn them away to other sites. No blog’s content is irreplaceable and there are always plenty of options available. Would you rather lose readers than offer full feeds?

A genuine concern is loss of revenue because readers aren’t seeing or clicking your ads. But regular readers of your blog are ads-blind anyway and are least likely to click on your ads. Clicks on your Adsense ads come mostly from Google visitors who are looking for specific information. In fact, putting ads on single posts rather than your homepage works far better because Google searchers land on single post pages. If you are still concerned about revenue, there is feed advertising offered by Feedburner Advertising Network, and Pheedo. If you qualify, even Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network offer feed ads. If configured appropriately, they can make up for your so-called lost revenue from feed readers, which anyway wasn’t going to be much anyway.

As far as counting your visitors is concerned, Feedburner provides a complete solution and I think the problem of offering category feeds as pointed out by Chetan has been solved by the FeedBurner Stats plugin (I’ve disabled the Feedburner Replacement plugin now and everything seems fine.) Google Analytics, I am told also does a good job.

Amit Varma recently offered full feeds to all sections of his new India Uncut departing from his long-standing stance of offering partial feeds (in unrelated news, Gaurav Sabnis now lets you comment on Vantage Point posts.) Even the ever-so-excellent The Acorn at National Interest offers full feeds now. So I guess things are changing. In fact, if you are a regular reader of my blog, I strongly advise you to subscribe to my feed to keep a tab on my writings ramblings and drop in occasionally frequently to comment :) You wouldn’t be bothered with ads in that case too.

There has been lot of talk in the blogosphere on why feed readers tend to subscribe/unsubcribe from your feeds or how to manage those pesky dozen-posts-a-day blogs. More thoughts on that later.