Blogging Tips

RSS – Full or Partial Feeds?~

feedHave you ever subscribed to some RSS feeds that only shows you the partial feeds? Or are you one of the blog authors that provide partial feeds to your readers? Partial feeds only show a part of the content of a post, mostly around 50 words of the starting part of it. Well to be honest with you, I get very annoyed with those kinds of feeds. Yes, very annoyed :P.

The reason of most blog authors that provide partial feeds to their reader is that they scared that their traffic to their blog will decrease. To them, the RSS feeds is just something that inform the readers that a new post had posted in their blog. But the fact is, it is a big no no to a blog. Like I said, partial feeds mostly starts with the first 50 words of your post. Let’s say you want to write something about a car accident that happened to you today…

Today I woke up quite late because I slept around 3am spending the whole night on my project. It was a tough one and I had to finish it by today. Then… blablabla…

Sorry for the stupid story 🙂 . Did you see my point here? The point is, for 50 words of the start of the blog posts, the feeds did not focus on any of the main point that the blogger is trying to point out. Readers just won’t get attracted to click on the link to the blogger’s site to read the whole post of it. As for my personal experience, I would think like this after reading the title and the partial feeds,

Yeah right, you involved in an accident, what’s the big deal…

Then, I skipped to the other feeds. This gets even worse if the blog post is full of photos. The feed will only show the words of the post as most of these posts are just one liners of words after each photos. And then the evil inside of me will ask me to skip the feeds again.. heheh..

Full RSS Feeds?

Most readers enjoyed reading full feeds. Why? Readers, like me, don’t need to visit the blog just to read the whole post as the post can be read in our favourite RSS reader. Bloggers might worry about the drop of traffic because readers will just read their posts without visiting their site. In my opinion, if the blog’s content is good enough, people will stick to it. Then, the readers will start interact with the bloggers by commenting in their posts. This actually increases the interact between bloggers and readers. Words spread out and readers keep increasing for the blog. Don’t believe me? Just try it.

Of course, there are pros and cons of providing full feeds and partial feeds to readers. Still, I fully recommend that bloggers should provide full feeds to their readers as there are a lot of readers that are lazy to visit a blog just to read the full feeds (like me… ). Unless the blogger can write something interesting in the first part of the posts to attract the readers, no one will visit the blog.

I hope enjoyed my post here. I’ve been struggling to finish this post because I was lack of vocabulary and I find it hard to express what I actually meant. 🙂

An engineer which have a lot of interests in gadgets and technology stuffs. The blog varies from life events to gadgets reviews and hacks.

4 Comments

  • Daniel

    I would go will full feeds. I am not subscribed to any blog that publishes partial feeds (except for shoemoney I think), and the partial feeds do not make me go check the site instead, they just make me forget the site altogether.

  • menghua

    Full feeds will always be the first choice for the readers because we can read the content without visiting the site. I’ll always vote for full feeds.. because I’m lazy.. 😉

    [quote post=”546″]I think Partial more better:) this will make reader to visit the original content [/quote]
    If you are the author of a site, mostly will vote for this. But make sure that the partial feeds can attract the reader to visit the site. Or else, you will lose the reader.

  • How to Blog

    I’m with you. I do a full feed, and there’s only one blogger that I’m subcribed to that does partial, and he’s not very popular lol, maybe that’s why.

    Jonathan Muller

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