Full text feeds
What is RSS and Full Text Feeds and why should I care.
The Current Standing of RSS
RSS has been around for a few years now, but because of the growing problems of e-mail content delivery, and because it provides many other business advantages as well, it is quickly gaining momentum.
According to the Jupiter RSS consumption March 2005 research report, RSS is already being used by 12% of the American online population and is growing strong.
Microsoft gives their full support for RSS in many of their programs now including Outlook and their new RSS reader. Both of these will make sure that RSS becomes as widely adopted as e-mail.
Even though many publishers have already started publishing and marketing with RSS intensively, the market is still not crowded … but it is growing increasingly so every day.
This is the best time ever to start publishing your own blog and content in RSS.
What is RSS?
RSS is a content delivery channel that allows you to easily deliver internet content to your target audiences, while eliminating a large part of the external noise and shortcomings of other delivery channels, such as e-mail. In short, RSS gets your content delivered.
RSS content is delivered through RSS feeds — simple files structured in a specific way [xml].
These files include some basic information about the RSS feed (such as RSS feed title, logo, description, URL etc.) and the actual content in the form of individual content items .
These content items are individual stories or articles (usually just descriptions of articles actually published on the internet publisher’s web site), presented in a linear list .
Simplistically explained, RSS enables internet content publishers to easily deliver information about their specific content to end-users.
In a way, this can be best compared to e-mail content alert services, which send you an e-mail message every time content you are interested in is published on a specific web site, letting you know that a new article you are interested in is available on the Web.
What the User Needs?
But in order to view your RSS content, the end-user needs to either download a special program, called an RSS aggregator, or use a web-based RSS aggregator through one of the web sites already providing this service free of charge.
An RSS aggregator is a special computer application that allows us to “subscribe” to RSS feeds, periodically reads those feeds to display their latest content, and let us view those same RSS feeds.
After installing an RSS aggregator or registering at a web-based RSS aggregator web service, the user needs to proactively add the link to your RSS feed in to his aggregator to view your content.
Every time you update your RSS feed (add new content items to the RSS file), the user is notified by that through his RSS aggregator, making the content immediately available to him, without it having to face any SPAM filters and other barricades on the way.
Bad News for Content Publishers and Marketers?
Yes, users do need to install new software or use specific web services to “use” RSS content.
That’s even more reason, why you need to educate yourself about RSS as soon as possible and start marketing with it even sooner.
This is no longer a question of preference, but an essential part of running an online business. Without RSS, your content delivery and internet marketing are in huge peril.
To successfully start marketing and publishing with RSS, you need the appropriate expertise. Yes, RSS is easy to use, but you have to adhere to certain best practices, which usually aren’t even explained by most people that write about RSS.
For instance, do you know that there are at least 5 ways end-users can subscribe to an RSS feed? Do you know, which of them works the best?
What kind of content can you publish through an RSS feed?
Putting it straight-forward: if you can break down your content in to individual and separated items or stories, you can deliver it using RSS .
MarketingSherpa.com, for instance, uses RSS to deliver their latest article summaries. Other web sites, such as the majority of news web sites, use RSS to deliver their news, just as it becomes available.
The key advantage of using RSS as an internet content publisher and marketer is that it actually gets your content delivered to its destination, without many of the obstacles present with other content delivery channels.
Other Crucial RSS Uses
Delivering content to end-users is not everything that RSS offers.
- Syndicate your content through other web sites, thus generating more exposure, traffic and recognitin. Using RSS, other web sites can easily publish your content and bring you more visitors. It’s easy, once you know exactly how to do it. Most don’t …
- Promote your RSS feed through various specialized RSS search engines and directories. These will generate even more fresh and high-quality traffic, the people that are actually interested in your content and your products. But do you know where to submit your RSS feeds to get the most exposure? There are more than 55 choices available …
- Use your RSS feed to increase your search engine rankings. For instance, RSS can easily get you in to Yahoo …
And there’s more, much much more …
- RSS, for instance, can be used to boost your affiliate sales. It’s a secret that practically no one on the market is using yet.
- You can customize your feeds for your visitors, giving them exactly the content they want. And of course use that information to target your marketing messages to them …
- Using RSS you can create digital catalogues that deliver latest product updates to your customers, just as they become available. This is something that Amazon.com has started doing not long ago. And it’s actually quite simple and easy to do …
Had enough yet?
And still we only lightly touched what you can do with RSS to hugely improve your internet business in a short time.
Case Study:
Dennis Kennedy has a nice post about the advantages of offering a full-text RSS feed, as opposed to a RSS feed with just an excerpt of your blog post.
…Excerpt feeds require that a reader click-through and visit your blog. Full-text feeds let your readers read the full post without going to your blog. Over the years, people who use newsreaders to consume RSS feeds often reach a point where they feel that they have subscribed to WAY TOO MANY feeds. They then decide to prune their list of feeds. Historically, one of the easiest ways to cut the feeds you subscribe to is to delete those that offer only excerpts of posts.
The reason should be apparent. You save yourself the time and effort of clicking through to see the rest of the post. If you read feeds offline with a stand-alone reader, as I often do, then you will prefer full-text feeds because you can read everything in the post.
Our blog has been in existence for over two years now but we always abstained from publishing full content RSS feeds for two selfish reasons (or you can call them fears) outlined below:
1. Since RSS Subscribers get to read the full blog content inside their newsreaders, they would never visit the actual blog site - the fear was lesser pageviews would impact the advertising revenue.
2. An ever bigger threat was from blog plagiarists and MFA Sites who would steal our content for their own sites. It takes just too much effort and time to deal with content thieves.
But as an experiment, last month we switched from partial feeds to full text feeds and the results have been beyond expectation both in terms of growth of RSS subscribers as well as revenue from blog feeds [see graphs].
Growth in RSS Subscribers - We added more than a 1000 new subscribers in less than a month - thanks to full feeds.
Revenue from Ads inside Feeds - Not saying the exact numbers here but the revenue generated from full feeds in the last month was more than the combined revenue of previous months. This is clearly a result of migrating to full content feeds - more ad impressions were generated translating to increase in revenue.
Not just the commercial aspect, regular readers are now participating more and more in the blog discussions - the level of engagement has increased as well.Now that we are serious proponents of Full content feeds, let’s look at couple of more reasons in favor of full feeds than short summary or teaser feeds:
» Most subscribers are annoyed when they have to click an extra link to read the full story. Unless you’re an A-list blogger like Scoble or Om Malik, a majority of readers won’t take the pain of clicking that “Read full story..” link.
» We all face those rare moments when our blog site is unavailable due to a server crash or network outage. Subscribers can still read your articles offline or inside their feed readers.
» Regular readers, who visit your blog via RSS feeds, are very likely to stay away from the advertisements because of the “Adsense Blanket” effect. They are aware of your site layout and know well what portions to avoid.
» If you break a story or write something interesting and engaging, RSS subscribers would still come to your blog pages to read comments left by other readers or write one themselves. Partial feeds may not excite them enough.
» Not everyone lives in a 24×7 connected world. They like to connect to the internet, download interesting stuff and read them offline without shooting the ISP bill. Full feeds are an ideal choice here.
Not convinced yet ? If you are still not willing to make the switch to full feeds, at least write a feed with a good summary text that gives a complete idea to reader about the underlying blog post. Never use the options like “Show first 200 characters” - they can create meaningless sentences.
