Full Text or Excerpts – What’s Best For Corporate Blog RSS Feeds?

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.

Photo Credits: 1

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

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Quick and Dirty Tips for Effective Corporate Blogging, pt 5

checklistThe last four blog entries (1, 2, 3, 4) have touched on eleven vital tips for crafting good blog entries and keeping your corporate blog going. In the last tip in the previous blog post, we talked about putting together a checklist to make sure that all of the most important details are touched on in the blog entries that you write. Rather than leaving you to craft your own checklist for this purpose, we have created a fairly basic one that you can use for your own purposes.

- Headline -

- Is the topic of your blog entry clear to someone who begins by only reading the headline of the post?

- Have you used a keyword in your blog post title, or have you used one of the catchy title examples mentioned in the previous article?

- First Paragraph -

- Does the lead paragraph in your blog post tell your reader who the story is about and what the story is about? Does it indicate to the reader why he or she should care about the blog post?

- Did you touch on the 5 W’s, Who, What, Where, When and Why in the first paragraph of your blog post? Is your blog post written in a journalistic style, and even more importantly, does it make an honest effort to be objective how you have written it?

- Post Clarity -

- Is the angle that you have used in your blog post one that is likely to appear newsworthy to your readers?

- If someone who knows absolutely nothing about your topic reads your blog post, will they understand what you are talking about?

- Is your blog post completely free of technical jargon and other confusing or unclear terms? If so, remove them now.

- Ending your Blog -

- Did you remember to ask the readers of your blog a question at the end? You need to make sure that you are stimulating your readers to write comments and offer up feedback. Ask them a question, ask directly for feedback or find some other way to essentially say “Hey, talk to me!” because blogs are excellent for the purpose of facilitating communication and correspondence.

- Did you remember to write the entire blog post while keeping your reader in mind? Do you remember WIIFT? Make sure that your readers are getting something out of your blog. If there’s nothing in it for them, why should they stick around and read?

- Finally, run through your blog: Is it free of errors? Run a spelling and grammar check and make sure that there are no glaring errors, because your readers can and will notice them!

Run through this checklist every time you write a blog, and if everything is satisfactory, click on “Publish” and sit back knowing that you put out a good piece of content that your readers will appreciate.

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-03-04 05:48:36. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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