Should i offer full text RSS feed or not?
Many established bloggers say that offering a full text RSS feed would allow your site to get a lot more subscribers than if you were having a partial feed. Let’s see if this is true or not.
Why shouldn’t you offer a full feed RSS? Well, people fear that having a full text RSS would diminish the number of visitors on their sites, thus resulting in a smaller generated income. Yeah, this might be true in a way, but remember, you can always monetize your feed, by putting ads in there. TLA has an interesting service that does exactly that, called Feedvertising. And I’m sure there are others too.
And now we should see why is it a good idea to post a full text feed. Grab yourself a cup of tea, cause there are a few reasons..
- People hate to do extra clicks if they don’t have to. That’s why the full text feed would allow your subscribers to read the full posting without having to make extra effort, thus also saving their time. And they would love this
- Some people don’t have 24/7 Internet access. That’s why they would like to be able to download a feed’s content and then read it offline. Full text RSS allows them to do so.
- Also, a downloaded full text feed would allow your subscribers to read your feed even when your blog is down, cause we all know this happens from time to time
- Considering the monetising part, take into consideration that most readers nowadays have ads blockers. Thus even if you would force them to come to your site to read the full article, it would do you no good, financially speaking. So better don’t.
- If a reader likes your story, he might click the link to get on your site, to see the extra comments or maybe because he has something to say himself.
So, what are you waiting for? Start offering a full text RSS for your readers and you’ll see the difference.
Your subscribers numbers would surely increase if you’ll use a full text Feed
If you’re using WordPress, choosing Full Text RSS from the Options/Reading menu won’t be enough, as the feed will be cut if you use the <!–more–> tag. That’s why you might want to use this plugin here, Cavemonkey Full Feed, and there you go.
Oh, and starting from today this blog also has a full text RSS, so.. SUBSCRIBE 
Very interesting. I offer full RSS feed but I just wanted to give my users a choice of either visit my site or they can read it “on the go”. I want to help them and maybe if they like it enough, they’ll help me promoting me.
I was offering the feed from my car news blog, but it ended up getting picked up and posted on spam blogs all the time. Really bugged me!