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People have asked why we don’t publish full feeds on SEO Theory and Best SEO Blog. In the past I have provided two reasons for publishing only partial feeds:

1) Web spammers (content scrapers) cannot easily replicate our articles if we don’t publish the full feeds.

2) Forcing people to visit the Web site in order to read full articles acts as an audience filter. If you want the critical information from an informative post, you have to do us the courtesy of actually visiting our Web content.

RSS feeds are replacing email newsletters. Many people like subscribing to RSS feeds so they can scan the article headlines and decide whether to read the content in full. They don’t have to reveal much about their private activity if the full content of articles is pushed to their desktops.

Internet marketers realize they need to monetize their RSS feeds. Some people sell advertising in their articles. Some people sell links. Some people embed links to their monetized content.

The challenge of drawing converting traffic from a full feed is that you have to continually publish new content. You’re competing for attention in an increasing crowded market, where the market is not comprised of you and your business competitors but rather of you and every other feed publisher. You’re not competing for sales but simply for attention.

Forcing the RSS-feed subscribing public to choose between visiting your site and not learning something new acts as a prequalification steps. You know that anyone who visits your site through a feed really wants to know what you have to say. You stand a much better chance of monetizing your Web traffic by analyzing what your hard core audience responds to.

That is, filtering out light-interest feed subscribers from hard core feed subscribers who actually click through to your site helps you evaluate what type of content people really want to know about. The number of subscribers your site has is meaningless if few people actually read what you have to say, much less consider buying whatever you’re selling.

RSS feeds are proving to be no more effective at building loyal customer bases than the free .PDF eBooks were a few years ago. Numerous marketers put together beautiful eBook content to entice people to visit their sites. In many situations, after serving 10s of thousands of downloads, the marketers realized their eBook “customers” were not buying anything.

If you’ve built your blog around the concept of pushing content to a full RSS feed, what is your goal? What is your business objective? How do you measure success (other than number of subscribers)? How loyal are your subscribers? You can test subscriber loyalty by asking your readers to participate in a poll or buy something — to take an action that requires them to actually visit your site and interact with the Web again.

If you achieve better than a 10% response to any test, you’re doing better than most full-feed publishers. If you achieve 10% or less response, you have to ask yourself if simply pushing content out to people who don’t care enough to actually read it is helping you.

A recent forum discussion between two RSS-feed junkies went something like this:

Junkie 1: I get 400 feeds a day but I hardly read them any more.

Junkie 2: Yeah. I’m up to almost 600. I hardly look at the reader any more. There are just too many feeds.

Junkie 1: I actually visit about a dozen sites a day. They are the most important to me.

Junkie 2: I think I look at 5 sites every day, including this forum. The rest of the time, I just depend on random surfing.

I’ve paraphrased the comments to protect the commenters’ privacy. I have heard many people say much the same thing offline. They subscribe to too many feeds to read, so they no longer bother to try keeping up with their feeds.

Before deciding that full feeds are the only way to manage a blog’s RSS service, you should set up a periodic test schedule to track the quality of your readership. You may be shocked to learn just how few people are actually reading what you have to say.