Total Article Blog

Not so much “full text” focused but generally worth reading as to the benefits of all RSS to content producers. Here is the clickz.com article via Pheedo.com’s blog (as a side note, anyone’s opinions on Pheedo.com would be appreciated, I’ve used their blogsnob ads for other sites and it seems to generate almost no traffic).

Key positives for RSS:

Drive traffic to your content. For media entities, this can be important if content lives behind a firewall and isn’t spidered by search engines. Be sure to promote your top stories on the relevant pages to encourage further reading, as visitors don’t entered your site through the home page.

Increase e-commerce. Target product information feeds to meet customer needs and interests. As with e-mail marketing, where product is pushed to customers, ensure presentation, promotions, and timing are relevant. Leverage existing offerings on your site, and you may not need additional creative development. A regular content schedule is important. To keep RSS users and attract new ones, develop special RSS-only promotions.

Extend advertising and branding. Readers perusing your headlines on a regular basis helps keep your brand top of mind. Further, branding can be incorporated in the way feeds are written. From an ad perspective, you can wrap branding into an RSS reader or buy advertising on RSS feeds using a service such as Pheedo. If your advertising, whether video, audio, or static, is engaging, consider using links to encourage users to view and interact with it.

Distribute corporate communications, press releases, and investor relations content. Keep a broader constituent base informed. When disseminating corporate information via RSS, bear in mind the user decided to get your content, and your feed is public information. Make feeds short and informative to ensure recipients read them. Remember, you may not have control over the information environment in which your content is consumed.

My key takeaways continue to be that it expands your audience, and publishers should make their content available in as many forms as possible so that the user can decide how they want it. I’m simple like that.

1) Improve user experience by allotting them the control to view the information which you share, in the way that works best for them.

2) Improve your relationship with your users. They will like you. Some will even love you.

3) Avoid losing your feed traffic as your users will not make a flight to substitute sites who are offering full text in their feeds.

4) Facilitate the development of a more mature RSS feed advertising model.

5) Save the world from inefficiency and wasted time by using RSS that is not crippled. Keep in mind it takes longer per a post for someone to have to click your excerpt, analyze it, determine whether it’s worth clicking through, wait for the page to load, then read the full post, then return to thir News Aggregator. It may be a 20 second expenditure, but that micro cost adds up when a person reads dozens and even hundreds of feeds.

Is the world better served by having every subscriber to your non-full text RSS feed spending 20 more seconds on every one of your posts or by spend 20 more seconds reading and analyzing more content? Think of all the positive externalities you could generate!

6) Get your content out to the users who have the least time and correspondingly, are the biggest informational relays. Per capita, these people consume more websites. These are the people least likely to keep a crippled feed on their blogroll, or at least, are less likely to pay attention to one. These are the people most likely to share interesting links/information/sites with people they know and get second and third order exposure for your site.

7) And because you will not make our list of shame.