Do you set your blog feed to full or summary?

[gnorf]

I have been agonizing over this, and don't have two blogs with which to do split testing, so I'm going to ask the more experienced folks here...which is the best way to maximize traffic, click-throughs on your monetized links, & overall happy readers: setting my RSS feed to full, so they get the whole post, or to summary, so they have to click through to my blog?

Common sense would suggest that a summary is better, because they are more likely to visit the site, and eyeball my ads & whatnot. But from personal experience, there are some blogs that I won't bother clicking through to just because it annoys me that they won't let me see the whole post in my reader. Does anyone have any split testing data on this? Does it seem to vary at all from niche to niche? Any other helpful hints?

 

[frankjames]

I have been agonizing over this, and don't have two blogs with which to do split testing, so I'm going to ask the more experienced folks here...which is the best way to maximize traffic, click-throughs on your monetized links, & overall happy readers: setting my RSS feed to full, so they get the whole post, or to summary, so they have to click through to my blog?

Common sense would suggest that a summary is better, because they are more likely to visit the site, and eyeball my ads & whatnot. But from personal experience, there are some blogs that I won't bother clicking through to just because it annoys me that they won't let me see the whole post in my reader. Does anyone have any split testing data on this? Does it seem to vary at all from niche to niche? Any other helpful hints?

Just the summary so they come and read the rest

 

[Monopoly]

I don't do much auto blogging but the ones i do have vie done the full text purely because i hate seeing blogs which use summaries personally.

If you got them to the individual posts however the ads could be more specified and more likely to convert.

 

[anwiii]

it really depends on what type of blog you're running. personally, i have all my blogs showing full text. normally, if you did seo correctly, people will be going to your sub page for your article/post rather than your main domain page where your blog is set up. the reason why i show full text on my main page is because showing just excerpts has an unfinished look to it. actually, the best thing you can do for your site is setup a static page for your main site rather than showing your latest posts. this will give a more professional look to your site and home page.

 

[jeppo]

I think it depends on your niche. Some will work better with just a summary and others with the full text. Best way is to test and see which one works for you.

 

[Nfark]

Hey I didn't get totally but I do this, to increase click through.

I make 2-3 lined posts simple and short, then saying click here.
The "here" part is linked so that increases my click through.
Though having many ads or walls of texts kinda drives traffic away...

 

[msh_xp]

Hey I didn't get totally but I do this, to increase click through.

I make 2-3 lined posts simple and short, then saying click here.
The "here" part is linked so that increases my click through.
Though having many ads or walls of texts kinda drives traffic away...

well that's great but the anchor text has to be relevant as well and "here" is not... you should add some extra description

 

[itakeoverworld]

a quick brief summary is best because people's attention span is very short nowadays and also for the benefit that you want people to go to your website as often as possible. you're not in the business of selling your rss feed.

 

[trust57]

It depends what you are trying to do. If you have an offer in your blog content (something like, "Get my ebook" or whatever)- then you can do full feed because you are making sure they see the offer in your full feed. If you don't have anything like this, I would set it to summary and make them click back through to read the rest- so at least they see your ads or however you are monetizing on your site. It depends on how you are monetizing (or plan to monetize) your blog and then you can test which is more effective. I typically put offers in my blog content so I go with full feeds.

 

[aweha]

For me, if it's a kind of file sharing blog then i would give full feed as it will spread my link even further.
If it's an adsense blog then i will set the feed to summary in order to maintain the unique content.