This post is late, I’ll come up with a good excuse later. Will Holt nags like a stereotypical housewife, by the way.
Several weeks ago, I stumbled across a post by the $15k AdWords guy discussing the reasoning behind crippled RSS feeds. The post was spurred by a comment made on the Marketing Sherpa site:
#1. Don’t give it all away
Whether you’re promoting in a third-party RSS feed or using a feed yourself to get content from your site to users, the rules should be the same: entice them just enough to lure them to your site.
If your entire goal is to get people simply to read your feed, then fill it up with as much copy as you want, Lawrence says. But if you’re interested in actually driving traffic to your site, give just enough content to draw them further in.
This sums up the conventional wisdom. For people really interested in building site traffic, RSS should only serve as an advertisement would. RSS should be used like the modern day version of the crusty old system for sending email notifications about new content. If you give away all your content, people won’t come to your site. Meh.
Let’s try a new theory. For people interested in building site traffic, RSS should serve as a means for getting people to read the site when they otherwise wouldn’t. RSS should have include as much content as possible specifically for those people that would never visit a site otherwise, because getting content out in front of people will build site traffic. Yay!
Build site traffic, you say? Yes, and here’s why. There are a number of bleeding edge RSS readers who have subscriptions to several hundred feeds. The number is small, but like any other industry, they’re the influencers. Influencers are worth reaching. They’ll pass interesting content around to their friends, post about it on their blogs, and write it on scraps of paper that are sent out to sea in bottles. The thing is, chances of getting their attention are low without exceptionally good content. Even worse, if they have to jump through hoops to actually see the content, chances are they never will.
A buddy of mine falls into this group of influencers. He’ll spastically subscribe to RSS feeds when he sees content he likes (regardless of whether he’s ever heard of the site before). However, if he comes back to the feed in his aggregator, sees that it’s blurbs only, and doesn’t really remember what good it is, he nukes it. Esoteric site A just lost an influencer.
If you think I’m smoking crack, and don’t subscribe to the above theory, try this angle on for size. RSS feeds will soon be first class content distribution channels. Sites will be forced to ask themselves why they’re trying to so hard to attract users to an outmoded http:// location. What real advantage does a visit to a website have over a visit in an RSS reader? Infoworld is already delivering full fledged ads in some of their feeds. Every time I load up an Infoworld post (a site I’d never visit otherwise), they get an ad view.
There’s quite a bit more ground to cover, including the whole fear of copyright abuse using full text RSS feeds. I’m a copyright fiend, so I guarantee it’s coming at some point.