If you are putting together an RSS feed for your corporate blog, you may be wondering what way is the best way to deliver that RSS Feed. Should you use full text so that your subscribers can read the entire post in their feed reader without having to click on any links, or should you use a post excerpt so that readers are forced to visit your corporate blog for the rest of the story?

If you subscribe to RSS feeds that relate to blogging or internet marketing subjects, then you will probably discover that the full text feed philosophy is the one that wins a lot of debates on the subject. On the other hand, you may have noticed that many popular news sites like ESPN, AP News and CNN are using the excerpt method instead. Some of these news sites only display the headlines in their RSS feed and do not show any of the story until you visit the actual website. So which method is the right method for your corporate blog?

The real answer to this question is that the best method is whatever best suits your business model.

For example:

Major news websites and sports websites have the same business model that they have always used. The more people they have reading their articles and content, the more they can end up charging for advertising. For this reason, their primary objective is simply to drive people into their websites so that they can retain the highest readership numbers possible to reach the highest possible advertising rates in the process. By offering only a short excerpt or only a headline forces the reader to either click to come in and read more, or to move on.

Is this how you want to regard your readers?

One of the number one goals for most internet marketers and bloggers is to gain the trust of the largest possible audience. Your readers are not only potential customers, but they are also your supporters. Because it is so difficult to obtain high readership numbers, doesn’t it make sense to try to retain your readers at any cost? Most people like to read all of their websites in a single place which is what RSS aggregators are really all about. If you make reading easier for your readers, they will appreciate it more than you realize.

Does the monetization strategy for your corporate blogging effort depend on attracting viewers to your website? The excerpt feed method may be best if you depend on people actually coming to your website, but it takes a lot of traffic to make a living in this manner so you should not necessarily depend on it.

Another consideration to make is this:

Does your website have enough authority to draw people in just based on headlines or small excerpts alone? Even if you are an authority in the field, it is unlikely that your blog has gained enough experience, credibility and exposure to rival the attraction websites like CNN can generate. You should not hold anything back from your readers, so give them everything that you can in your RSS feed. If you give your readers exactly what they subscribed to, you will benefit from an increase in RSS subscribers, more posts getting bookmarks on sites like Digg, Delicio.us, Technorati and StumbleUpon, more viewer comments, and more viewers talking about your blog in theirs.

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Originally posted 2008-10-28 05:35:31. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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