One of the first tips I give people when they are looking for advice for their blog, especially in regards to gaining readers, is to set it to the full feed.
Why?
Blogs are meant specifically to do a few things.
One, offer help and information. Two, build engagement and a community. Three, invite and welcome people to you, your business, and your brand.
Right?
So, to be helpful, nurture a community, and be helpful you need to make your blog content as easy as possible to consume.
And easy to consume content means offering your work, the whole thing, in a way that doesn’t require your reader to have to click, click and click, just to read it.
I know you want to get as many website visitors as possible, and that is probably why you only show excerpts of posts via your feed and email. Your rationale is that people will see the excerpt and click over to your blog.
Wrong.
Everyone is super busy these days, and you know what? When faced with an overflowing RSS feed or email inbox, if you want them to read it, you’ve got to give them the whole thing to read.
It’s pretty simple, really.
Plus of course, building your community means thinking of them first and putting their needs above your desire for site clicks and data.
I have advised people to offer full feed for years and have never had anyone come back to me regretting the update. In fact, I believe in this tip so strongly that I’m going to start only reading and sharing content that I can read the full post from on my Feedly.
Because, if I can’t read it, I can’t share it. Make sense?
Note; I highly recommend using Feedly to read all of the blogs you follow. When you follow as many (100’s+) as I do it’s a lifesaver. There are free and paid versions.
Since I learned about it over a decade ago my feed has always been full feed. I have to admit, however, that I’ve never had a feed product where I could write comments on it, so I have to click on the link if I decide it’s something I want to do… like I did with this one. 🙂 BTW, I use an add-on called Brief on Firefox to track my feeds these days; just another recommendation. 😉
Thanks for the add-on suggestion Mitch. I don’t know of a feed product that allows direct commenting, maybe you could make us one! Thanks for dropping by. 😊
Hi Amanda, Your idea and advice is fantastic. I say so because I have tried both strategies and settled for full-feed. I used to publish excerpts of my blogs on LinkedIn and Medium, hoping o drive readers to my site. But I realize that I wasn’t getting the traction. Instead, I was losing my readership. Then I started publishing full articles and my traffic began growing.
Yay, Moss! Good for you and I’m so happy to hear that your full-feed is growing your community. Thanks for dropping by and have a great week. 🙂