This is my second blatant attempt to get more people to subscribe to my RRS feed. The RSS feed is now a full feed. That means you can read my blog directly from RSS without having to come here. The RSS feed has no advertising.
I’m doing an experiment to see if having a full feed RSS will increases or decreases the blog traffic. Logic would seem to point to traffic going down. If everyone can read my entire blog from a RSS feed, why would they need to visit the blog? While that makes sense, there are a few factors to take into consideration.
The first is a RSS feed is not done in real time. A new blog post won’t show up in the RSS feed until, well, I’m not sure when the RSS feed updates. Therefore, readers who want to read the latest post will still click through to the blog to see if the post on the RSS feed is the current top post.
The second factor is reading comments. Unless you also subscribes to the comments RSS feed (also a full feed), you will still need to visit the blog to read comments, or to make a comment. One of the nice things my RSS feed does is show the number of comments left by readers and since this blog is pretty active, with lots of comments on each entry, I think many RSS readers will click through to read them.
The last factor is one of personal preference. I read many blogs that offers full feed RSS – Tech Crunch, Pro Blogger, and Steve Pavlina just to name three. Even though those blogs offer a full feed, I still click through to read their entry on their blog because I like to read from a blog instead of a RSS feed. I use my RSS reader to as a quick check to see which blogs have done updates. I’m sure I’m not the only person who does this.
You can monitor the number of RSS readers with the Feedburner button at the top of the blog. The number goes up and down everyday. Right now, it shows 860 subscribers. It will be interesting to see if offering a full RSS feed will increase the RSS subscription. It will even be more interesting to see the impact on traffic. Will it go up, down, or stay the same? What do you think?
Oh, and in case you miss the link to sign up for the full feed RSS, just click this very big ReviewME RRS button and subscribe!
