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1. 

   Maria Staal
   Member

   I use feedburner as a feed for my email subcriptions and initially had just the excerpt of my post in the email.
   Then I read somewhere that it is better to have the whole post in the email feed and changed it accordingly. I also noticed that on other peoples email feeds, they changed from showing just the exerpt, to the whole post.

   Recently a friend questioned why I had the whole post in my feed. She argued that because she could read the whole post in the email, she didn't need to visit my site anymore. One less visitor to my site.

   I like to know which schools of though there are on this subject - pros & cons etc. Do I leave my feed showing the complete post, or do I change it back to an excerpt?

   Thanks,
   Maria

   Posted 1 year ago #
2. 

   Trisha Miller
   Administrator

   Generally speaking, I agree with your friend - although it seems like you're doing a service for your readers, if you give them the full post in your feed, they'll be less likely to visit your site, or comment. This can make your traffic numbers lower than they should be, which can also effect both your site's Google Page Rank and its ranking with other blog-ranking sites (Alexa, Technorati, Compete, etc.), but it can also effect what you can charge for advertising.

   I'd suggest going back to using excerpts, and if you're using WordPress for your blog - make SURE you're taking advantage of the "Excerpt" field below the Write box - if you don't use that field then your RSS feed excerpt as well as the WordPress excerpt function (usually used on archive pages and some home pages that show an excerpt from recent posts) will show the first paragraph or so of your post, BUT if you DO use the excerpt field, then what you put in there is used instead - use it to craft a really good 'teaser' that will make people want to read the full post, OR just be sure your first paragraph is very compelling so folks will want to read more.

   Posted 1 year ago #
3. 

   Maria Staal
   Member

   Thanks, Trisha. That is very helpfull. I didn't even realise I could write my own excerpt. I will make sure I do that in the future!

   Posted 1 year ago #

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