I didn’t partially subscribe. Don’t partially deliver.

You can probably take a guess what today’s topic is. It comes by special request: partial RSS feeds and how we feel about them.

I have to be honest. I never had an opinion one way or the other about RSS feeds. I set up my feed through Feedburner just like practically every other blogger in the world. I never gave it much thought and didn’t even check into the options that were available when I set up my feed.

I subscribed to more blogs than I could ever read and every so often, I actually checked my Google Reader and read through the posts. For some of my favorite blogs, I actually subscribed through email (however, I quickly learned that there are better ways to keep your inbox clean unless you really, really want to read a blog).

I found that I almost always read the full post in my reader. If I felt compelled to comment, I would click through on the post and leave a comment on the blog. If it was a partial post in my reader and the post was interesting enough, I would click through, finish reading, and comment if I felt compelled.

I never gave it much thought until I started caring about traffic. I investigated. If a person reads my post in their reader, how does that affect my traffic? It doesn’t and herein lies some of the problem.

Some bloggers make a conscious choice to deliver a partial feed of their blog posts. The theory is that the reader will be enticed by the “teaser” that’s delivered and click through to read the full post. The blogger gets the best of both worlds, in terms of numbers. You are counted as a subscriber AND deliver traffic to the site. Sounds good, right?

Apparently not.

If you’re not familiar with blog etiquette, this is a practice that greatly annoys many, many readers out there. In fact, Stacey Nerdin, she of Tree, Root, and Twig fame and also Mabel’s Labels and now ShePosts (yeah, she’s a busy girl), takes personal offense to the practice and isn’t afraid to talk about it:

“I think it’s universally understood that the only reason (other than ignorance, which is sometimes the case) a blogger uses a partial feed is to try to rope in traffic via click-throughs from people wanting to read the full post.

This just feels disingenuous to me. First of all, I am a loyal subscriber, and even though you may not get direct traffic from me every day, you still get to claim me as a subscriber when you submit your stats to someone. That should count for something, right? Second, if you write compelling content, I am likely to click-through on my own to either share your post through Facebook or Twitter, or to even leave a comment. You don’t need to schnooker me into coming to your site, and if you try, it makes me feel like your traffic is more important than your audience. I promptly unsubscribe from all partial RSS feeds. Which is ironic, isn’t it, because now you don’t get my traffic, my comments, my ability to share your post, or my subscription.”

As I mentioned, I can actually claim full ignorance when it comes to setting up feeds. It’s why I want to help you, as a blogger, avoid this snafu and make sure you keep all the readers you can get. I’ve got two rules to help you.

1. If you are one of these traffic mongers, STOP. Your tricks might work some of the time but in the end, you’ll end up annoying more than you actually retain.

2. If you are simply ignorant like me, let’s fix this problem.

• Log in to Feedburner (assuming that’s what you use).
• Select your feed.
• Select the Optimize tab.
• Click on Summary Burner.
• If you see the Activate button, you’re good. If you have the ability to Deactivate, shame on you. Go ahead and deactivate.

If you’re still not convinced that this is the right way to handle your feed, let Feedburner’s own words convince you. In the Summary Burner section, they specifically tell you what the service is for:

“Sometimes you just want to be a tease. Offer a short summary of your hyperlink-free content and direct your subscribers to your Web site for the rest of the story. You can also append an optional “Teaser” message to each content item.”

I ask you, do you really want to be a tease?

Tagged as: feedburner, losing blog subscribers, partial rss feed