Marketing Profs: From Teasing to Pleasing

By on May 13, 2006 in Blogging, RSS Feeds with 7 Comments

Marketing Profs Daily Fix has started offering a full feed. Sweet, now maybe I’ll read some of their posts and even comment now and again.

They’ve got a great group of writers, but as I scan feeds, I often choose to pass on partial feeds – which is a shame, because I’m sure I’m passing up on some great stuff. I was actually thinking about unsubscribing to those not offering full feeds.

Recently, ProBlogger went to a full feed. I’d be interested to hear his thoughts on how that’s working.

A few blogs that I like to read (partially) are Jack of All Blogs, Community Guy, and Lorelle on WordPress. Most of the time, I read only what comes up in the feed. Both author and audience lose in this scenario.

If a full feed is offered, I believe it’s more likely that a reader will comment – which gets them to the site – which was the goal of the partial feed, right? Jack even has a "Add a Comment" on his FeedFlare, though I’m not in a position to comment on a 70-word tease.

Maybe your reason for a partial feed is avoiding plagiarism. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen regardless of partial or full feeds. Steve Rubel leads an active conversation on the subject.

If you’re offering a partial feed, please let us know the strategy. Maybe there are benefits to the reader I haven’t thought of yet.

Nevertheless, thank you MarketingProfs for offering a DailyFix instead of a DailyTease. One suggestion – since you’re using FeedBurner, take advantage of the FeedFlare, you can even create your own Flare Unit to point readers to your excellent seminars or premium content.

Now if we can just get the IABC Communication Commons to do the likewise.

Related Posts:
- Optimize Your Feed for Engaging Conversation
- Create Your Own FeedBurner FeedFlare
- Brand Your Feed

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  • http://lorelle.wordpress.com/ Lorelle

    Personally, the number of feed content thefts dropped almost immediately after switching from full to excerpt feeds. My traffic, though, stayed the same. In fact, it has continued to grow.
    I’m still monitoring this, as well as monitoring the efforts of others to analyze their traffic as they experiment with one or the other with their feeds, and I may change back to full feeds, yet.
    I switched to excerpt feeds because of the high number of rip offs, but also because I tend to write long articles and I heard from some people that this messed up the look of their feeds and made it difficult to read. Since I don’t foresee shortening all of my articles, for now excerpts allows people to scan and then click and read the whole thing if it interests them.
    Many tell me they will print it out to take it with them to read and not just read them on the web, which is nice, but also works better when onsite rather than printing the feed. Limited as my blog is by WordPress.com WordPress Theme choices, I do wish more Theme designers would remember the print.css and make their Themes print better. ;-)
    Good question. I’m interested in seeing what the others have to say about this.

  • http://www.converstations.com Mike Sansone

    Thanks for the great feedback and insight, Lorelle. Great pooint on the print.css – something I need to work on myself.
    So here’s a case where content theft dropped, but readership didn’t. One last question, I guess, is whether readership continued to grow after the change? Every audience will be different – and every author should know their audience.

  • http://www.sbishere.com/ Greg Balanko-Dickson

    My RSS reads dropped by 20% in the first month and looks like they will drop another 30%-50% in May if the trend stays the same throughout May.
    The way I use my feedreader is to scan for stuff I want to read. If it is a digest I click through to the site. I will comment if I have something to say. It matters not whether it is a digest or a full post.
    Not sure what I am going to do with my RSS feed, I may turn the full feed back on in June to see what happens.
    Probably a good idea to ask my readers what they want and how they feel.

  • http://www.converstations.com Mike Sansone

    Interesting numbers, Greg. Were you using full feeds prior to the drop?
    As one of your readers, you probably know how I’d vote:-)
    I won’t unsubscribe to partial feeds – I’d miss too much. Thankfully, those who use partial feeds usually are great headline writers.

  • http://blog.marketingprofs.com Ann Handley

    You’re welcome, Mike…and I like the description:
    “…DailyFix instead of a DailyTease…”
    : )

  • http://www.sbishere.com/ Greg Balanko-Dickson

    Hi Mike:
    Yes I was using full feeds prior to the drop.

  • http://www.converstations.com Mike Sansone

    Thanks for the smile, Ann.
    And Greg! Thanks for offering both full and parital feeds on you site. Great stuff.

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