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.

Do you have problems with your feed? In a feedreader does it sometimes say something similar to, “This feed has invalid XML.” Or maybe you’ll see a small graphic once in a while by yours or someone else feed in bloglines, fizzle or another feedreader notifying you of a problem.

This used to happen to me and I never knew why. If I continued to post it would eventually fix itself. At least that’s what I thought, in all reality it was the fact the I continued to post that fixed it. And here’s why.

Most likely you used Word to write your post and then copy and pasted it into your blogging software. I used to do this occasionally, one of the reasons was my love of spell check. This was before Firefox added spell check. By using Word, I would unknowingly be copy and pasting the erroneous characters that Word places into each post. That was what was ruining my feed.

I didn’t always use Word though and as I continued to post I would eventually knock the corrupted post off my list of latest posts. In wordpress I usually choose to list the last ten posts. Once the corrupted post was knocked off the list all was well with my feed. And right about that time I’d probably decide to use Word again.

I’ve learned my lesson. And maybe you just did too.