Should You Truncate Your Posts in Your RSS Feed?

If you read a lot of blogs, chances are you read them in a feed reader. I use Google Reader as my reader of choice, I can read my feeds on any computer or on my iPhone.

You can set up your blog to publish the full post in feed readers or just a partial post, a little teaser if you will. You must click on the title to be taken to the actual site to read the rest of the post. Most blogs I read use the full post method, but a few are partial posts, like the blog in the image below taken from my feed reader:

My question is, what is better for business, a partial, teaser post or the full one?

The obvious benefit to a partial post is more people will click over to your actual blog to read the rest of the post.  You will get more traffic to your website, more eyes on your ads, perhaps clicking on your ads.  That seems like a pretty big benefit, doesn’t it?

The problem is, as I have read, various bloggers have tested this theory out, and when they truncate the posts in the RSS feed, they actually get LESS traffic to their sites.  So not only are people not reading your entire post that you worked so hard on, but they aren’t even thinking of visiting your site.  They are ignoring your fabulous posts and blog.

So is it worth it to put up your entire post and have people read it in their feed reader and never visit your site?  Well, it looks like yes, it is worth it.  People will read your entire post and some will click through to comment.  Others will click your affiliate links in your text.

You can post links to the site (not your feed)  in your social media campaigns to drive more traffic to your site.  You may have to have more call to actions (Click to get your Free ____ report), but in the end, you should have better results.  Should?  Yes, you will want to test everything for your specific market, your results might be different.

Personally, as a new mom (and WAHM), I am busier than I ever thought possible (single mamas and mamas of multiples – I bow down to you!!), and I just don’t have time to click through to posts to see if it is worth my time reading.  If it is a great post, I will want to comment, so I click through.  If I am reading it on my phone, I will not want to click through unless I know the site well.  I just don’t have time to add another step on, and I have been deleting blogs with partial feeds from my reader with great abandon.

When I set up my new blog, I checked to see what other bloggers did, and all of the big names publish the whole post, so I am blindly following their lead. I figure they must know something about successful blogging.  I am not confident enough to test this theory out on my own yet!

Have you tested this theory?  What works the best for your business blog?