Wanted: More Traffic, More Subscribers
Often when I have an extra 30 minutes or so to catch up on my blog reading, I’ll sit down at that computer and open my feedreader. I’ve recently cut my feeds down to a very reasonable amount, so 30 minutes should allow me enough time to read through most feeds and even comment on one or two that may have really interested me.
Every single one of the blogs in my feedreader is one I enjoy reading. This should be obvious otherwise I wouldn’t have subscribed to them, right? Yet, there is something that bothers me about a few. As enjoyable or informational as these blogs may be two or three of them only allow a summary of their post rather than the full text.
Now here’s my confession, many times I only read the few sentences and decide not to click over to their blog for the rest of the post. If those first few words don’t completely suck me in, I’m gone. To click the READ MORE link just seems like too much trouble. I am so partial to full text posts in feedreaders that I rarely continue to stay subscribed to a blog without them. I always wondered if others felt the same. Was I alone in my true disdain for summaries or did others feel the same?
I think I got my answer the other day when I read Darren’s post at Problogger, “The Secret to Increasing Your Traffic Overnight – Hint, it has Something to do with Going on Holidays.”
It’s a good read, as are many other posts you’ll read there. If you’re interested in growing your blog traffic, I suggest three things you simply must do: first subscribe to his blog, then don’t miss his excellent series called, 31 Days to Building a Better Blog.
The third? Seriously do you have to ask? Change your posts to full text, of course.
September 1st, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I agree, I really hate it when the posts are cut short. I don’t want to make ANOTHER click. And I am on high speed DSL!
However, lately I have been a little curious about using that feature on my blog because when I write longer posts you can’t see the other new posts I wrote. And there are posts I want people to see that may not be seen because a long post just gets in the way.
Now I understand the reason using that, but I still don’t like it as the reader.
October 15th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
I agree. I did read somewhere that bloggers do that to increase the actual clicks to their site so that the can give that number to potential advertisers (that they get x number of clicks a day). That makes me feel a little used. Plus it backfires — as you said, if something doesn’t grab me in those first few sentences, I don’t click over, and if I stop being motivated to click over enough I delete their blogs from my feed reader. Not to be obnoxious — there are just multitudes of good blogs to read, so I can’t keep up with the ones that don’t interest me enough to click over.
I do, however, click over when the full post is allowed on the feed reader when I do want to comment, which is more often when I can see the whole post on the feed reader.