Reasons to Use Full-text Articles

• Increasingly, busy surfers and readers are viewing your RSS articles on a mobile device.  If they have to click on a link that takes them to a web site to read the rest of an article, their experience can be less than optimal:  no mobile version of the site, small web pages, and slow load times.

• Content is still king on the internet, not just at your web site but in your RSS feed as well.  Building a following and reader loyalty is often grounded in offering content that is useful and/or entertaining and not difficult to access.

• Full-text articles increase the likelihood that your message gets read–assuming that’s your point.  If you’re trying to get click-throughs or gauge metrics, there’ll be more to say on that below.

• Readers have already demonstrated they have an interest in what you have to say by subscribing to your feed.  By only providing a summary, you risk alienating them by requiring that extra click.

• Overwhelmingly, at polls and in comments across the blogosphere, RSS readers agree that they want to see the full text.  In fact, some RSS readers will not subscribe to a feed if it only provides summaries.

• If your readers are following lots of RSS feeds, they may not take the time to visit your site.  One of the primary advantages of RSS reader applications is that they aggregate feeds for the sake of convenience and efficiency.

• Users may be more likely to Digg, StumbleUpon, Tweet, link or otherwise share your article if it’s full-text.

• Some busy readers on the go like to cache their feeds and read offline.  In the same vein, if your site is down, the feed is still out there.

Objections to Using Full-text Articles

•  Many people who use summaries in an RSS feed are trying to ensure that readers also visit their site.  If you’re trying to get users to the ads on your site, first consider the enormous amounts of traffic that it takes to monetize a site with contextual ads and, second, consider putting ads in the feed itself.  On the other hand, if you have an affiliate site, then you really want an optimized landing page for people who want to buy what you’re selling, visitors that are typically generated through paid advertising and some organic search.

•  You’ll get more comments on your articles if the reader has to click through to the full article.  First, of course, you’ve got to get the reader to click through, which may not be that easy to do.  However, even with a full-text article, experienced RSS readers will know that the comments can often contain as much useful information as the original article and may click through to see these–especially if the comments are referenced in a future article or post.

•  If users don’t click through, then you can’t gather metrics.  Then again, some of the most metric-driven sites on the internet–professional bloggers and internet marketers–almost universally use full-text articles.

Exceptions to the Rule – There’s Always a Few

• A summary RSS feed is a good way to skim news sources that manage to summarize their content in the title and tag.  Readers can often get the gist of the news from a few short sentences.

• If you post several times a day, then it may be a kindness to your readers to use summary articles.  However, consider writing unique content for the summary instead of just using an excerpt.

• Sometimes the decision comes down to the length of the post.  Really long posts, or posts heavy on images, might best be left at the web site and a summary sent out that outlines the entire article.

There is no strict set of guidelines that publishers can use to decide whether or not they want to provide a summary or a full-text RSS feed.  However, one rule of thumb that webmasters have used successfully for years has been trying to imagine what they themselves would want out of a site.  By putting your readers experience at the forefront and offering content that is genuinely of value, you put your site on a much faster track to success.

Bonus Tips

• Whether you use summary or full-text articles in your RSS feed, subscribe to it yourself.  You may be surprised by what you see.  Not only can the formatting change, but be sure to check links back to your site, ads, and also social media share buttons.

• To change your RSS settings in WordPress, navigate to Settings > Reading, and then select “Full text” or “Summary”.

• To change your RSS settings in Blogger, navigate to Settings > Site Feed > Allow Blog Feeds, and then select “Full”, “Short”, or “None”.

• In LiveJournal, full text is the default.  If you want to change it, you’ll have to use the Admin console.

It also de-emphasizes the blog aspect of the site, since I do less of it.  More and more, I apply the time that I have to the work-in-progress and other writing duties.  I think it’s “putting the platform before the publishing” to spend too much time on blog entries and not enough on outlining, drafting, and revising.  The same goes for social media.

Of course, now that I’ve relegated the blog to an interior page of the site, I blog.  It must be that I feel the pressure less.

The fact is that writing something long (like the WIP) has accompanying longish periods where, were I to blog about it, I’d say the same thing from day to day, week to week, and even month to month.

Enough of that.  Time to write.

What was bothering me?  It started with the dashboard RSS feeds hanging on “loading …” and then never loading.  I wasn’t horribly bothered by that, since I don’t look at those RSS feeds alot.  But then, I wanted to automatically update a plugin that had a new version.  That upgrade hung on “downloading” the zip, but the zip file in the plugin folder on the server was always 0 KB.  Likewise for an automatic re-install of WordPress.  It would just hang.  I finally decided that I’d better better get to the bottom of these weird problems and see what was really happening.  By that I mean, I started Googling all kinds of strange words and phrases.

Then, luckily, something in my dashboard really broke.  Yes, luckily.  When I tried to configure one of the RSS feeds that wouldn’t come down — just change it to show a couple of posts instead of five — I got the almighty 500 error – Internal server error from my ISP, 1and1.  Hallelujah!  I thought  maybe I was running out of memory and maybe needed to allocate something more for mySQL (oh, this whole process started with me backing up the mySQL database through phpAdmin, just like WordPress recommends).  So, I started Googling the 500 error on 1and1 along with WordPress and I ran into a great thread at drupal.org.  It recommended editing the .htaccess file by the adding the following:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Apparently, Apache will use PHP4, unless you ask it to use PHP5.  Wordpress, of course, wants PHP5.  So, I made the change to the .htaccess file and, all of a sudden, after many hours of chasing down everything that wasn’t wrong with the site, everything started working again.

Wow.

Now it’s time to — you guessed it — put all the plug-ins and widgets back in place, while compulsively checking the dashboard and the front of the site, diddle Atahualpa yet again, re-create some customized widgets, and on and on.  And compulsively check the dashboard and the front of the site.

As I awaited word from the editor at Simon & Schuster regarding my mighty tome, I decided to create what is today called an online platform, but at the time was just a web site, when blogs didn’t exist.  It wasn’t something I was doing just for fun, although I did enjoy it.  Creating a web site was one of things that I had said I would do in my proposal as part of my promotion and marketing plan.

To that end, I acquired my domain name, selected an ISP to host it, and created a small site called TattooSymbol.com that crowed about the upcoming publication, although I had no release date.  There was some information about the book, some information about me, and some information about Greg (who did the illustrations for the book, in case you’ve missed the previous posts).  I gave a couple of examples of tattoo definitions and then left it at that until the book got close to release.  Initially, I coded all of the HTML by hand, switched to an entirely PHP driven site when it started to get unwieldy, then switched to GoLive and all of its tools for updating a large site, and now I use Dreamweaver.  I also select and prepare all of the images myself.

That web site has gone through a few major morphs, but it somehow attracted attention from the start.  I did nothing in terms of publicizing it, nor have I ever, but it’s about tattoos, and that’s just a really popular topic, especially on the web. Today, it gets about 7,000 unique visitors every day, over half-a-million page views per month, and I still add fresh content there on a regular basis.  In fact, 15% of the visitors there are returnees.

Today, I call the fledgling TerisaGreen.com site my online platform.  Using WordPress, the Atahualpa theme, and several plug-ins, I was able to easily incorporate all kinds of cool features, including a blog and comments.  At its heart, the TattooSymbol.com web site is for people who are considering getting a tattoo.  My intent for the TerisaGreen.com web site, however, is to make a dialogue possible, about all sorts of topics – including how to get a book published.  So, let’s get back to that topic.

In month twenty-seven of my effort to get a book published, after creating a web site and traveling steadily if laboriously down the road to a real live book, there finally came a bump.  I received dire news from my editor at Simon & Schuster.

Next post:  Step 10.  Working With The Publisher