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If you’re just starting out with your own blog, one of the things that you must make a decision on is whether you’re going to offer full feeds or partial feeds to those people that read your blog through a feed reader, like Google Reader.

What’s the difference between the two? A full feed shows your entire blog post in your subscriber’s feed reader. So people that subscribe to your blog via a feed reader don’t have to visit your blog in order to read your blog posts.



On the other hand, a partial feed only provides an excerpt of your blog post, perhaps the first couple sentences or the first paragraph in your subscriber’s feed reader. In order to read the rest of the blog post, your subscriber then must visit your blog to read the rest of the post.



So what’s the best choice for your blog? This is a question almost as old as blogging itself. At first glance, providing a partial feed to those that subscribe to your blog through a feed reader seems like the best choice because that then makes people visit your blog.

However, most popular blogs provide full feeds instead of partial feeds. A lot of savvy blog readers HATE partial feeds. I myself don’t subscribe to blogs that provide a partial feed…unless the content is really, really, REALLY good, and I unsubscribe from those that start doing so. A lot of blog readers I know feel the same way.

Why do a lot of blog readers dislike partial feeds? Think of it this way…if I’m taking the step to subscribe to your blog feed, I’m telling you two things:

  1. I’m interested in what you’re blogging about and I want to keep updated
  2. I prefer to read your blog through my feed reader (because it’s convenient, it saves me time, etc)

By providing only a partial feed to your blog you’re making it inconvenient for your subscribers to read content that they’re already interested in reading in the way they choose to read it. Putting up roadblocks to reading your blog is not a way to encourage loyal readers.

Okay, so how do you encourage those who read your blog to visit your website if they’re getting your content through their feed readers?

1. Offer an email newsletter. RSS subscribers are still pretty anonymous…you don’t know who they are and you can’t contact them directly. Not so with a traditional email newsletter. If you also offer great content through email, those RSS subscribers will be happy to join your email list.

2. Give your RSS readers exclusive offers to visit your website. If you’re running Wordpress, there are several plugins you can install that allows you to attach a special signature to your blog posts that only your RSS feed subscribers you can see. This is a great way to make your RSS subscribers feel welcome and to place special offers that encourage them to visit your website. One RSS signature plugin that I’ve used with my Wordpress blogs is called “Feed Footer“. You can check it out here.

3. Give your RSS subscribers a reason to visit your website in each blog post. At the end of your blog posts, provide a “call to action” to encourage those that are reading your blog through an RSS feed reader to come visit your blog. You can invite your readers to leave comments, sign up for your mailing list, sign up for a giveaway or contest, or participate in a poll. Just because these folks prefer to get your blog content through their feed readers doesn’t mean that they won’t visit your website if there is compelling reason to do so. Provide that in as many blog posts as possible.

So what’s your opinion? Do you provide full or partial feeds for your blog? Why or why not? Leave a comment and share your opinion!