An appeal to RSS feed readers
Fri, 20 July 2007 9:07 pmIt has come to my attention that people who read my blog through an RSS feed reader do not count as people.
OMG.
I mean, they don’t count towards my blog’s unique visitor count. Which is dumb, but that’s how it works.
For the longest time (since I started blogging in 2003), I never really cared about such things. I was happy enough that there were people reading my blog, never mind whether it’s 10 or 10,000.
But I realised recently that I have to care because that’s where the world is heading these days. Everyone has a blog and everyone has ads in their blogs. (I’m generalising, of course, but the stats are high on that.)
Everyone hopes to earn back a paltry amount of money from blog ads to pay for hosting and domain, at least. And more readers means more moolah because that’s how advertisers assess the worth of a blog.
So I have to care.
Because every bit of income is very important, especially to a struggling artiste.
So, can you feed readers please become “real people” by clicking to open my site whenever I have an update, instead of just reading from your reader?
I know it’s a lot to ask because I myself am a lazy reader and like to read from feeds.
But if I know a friend has ads on his site, I will click open his site to give him the count. Bloggers should help bloggers mah. After all, it doesn’t cost the reader anything except a muscle movement to help a blogger he likes. It’s the advertiser who will have to pay for the extra visitor, and rightly so.
A friend advised me to configure my feed to show only the first few sentences, so, if a reader wants to read on, he will have to click open my site.
But I don’t want to do that (not yet anyway) because I want my readers to have a choice. I just hope they choose to open my site to give me their count because they feel I deserve it for my effort of writing stuff that they enjoy reading.
Of course, my blogs aren’t entertaining all the time, but I try my best. I enjoy writing and I hope people enjoy reading.
Besides, it’s nicer to read from people’s sites than off feed readers because feed readers kill off formatting and make the content ugly and reader-unfriendly.
What is your viewpoint? Do you think I should take my friend’s advice, or not?
And, if you’re a feed reader, will you be a darling and help a poor blogger out? =)
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21 Responses to “An appeal to RSS feed readers”
umm, i do visit your blog instead of reading it from rss feed.
=)
Looks like this nuffnang thing has gone to your head. While I would advice that you keep things real and not commercialised (is this blog all about the money or what you have to say?), here’s what I would recommend.
Engage your readers via the comments.
If you have a “read-only” blog entry. People come in, people read and people wait for the next entry. Your yield is like 1 visit per read per reader per entry.
Now, if you can engage them in comments and coming back often, then you can bump up your “No of visits per read per reader per entry”.
Maximise your yield.
Still, I would still ask you to focus on your writing rather then fussing the dimes and nickels that you are going to earn from ads.
As they say, content in king. Everything else is secondary.
If you have a lot of Feed subscribers, you may want to take a look at those Ads Networks that provide Ads for Feeds as well - one example is http://www.feedburner.com.
So you will make money from both your blog and feed.
Aiyo, so much advises… haha, Qiaoyun say Click Blog and read, then just do it lor…
why give this and that … haha
Me simple human, if a click is all it needs to read, then it shall be done ;)
besides, I haven’t figure out this RSS thingy (yet)…
Er…does that mean I’m your customer? :D No worries! I’m a loyal customer…
There. I am back to make a second comment and in order to do that, I have to come to your blog a second time.
Better yield than just 1 visit per entry right?
Jaywalk: If making money out of my blog has gone to my head, I wouldn’t just have a nuffnang ad. :P I’d also have google adsense, payperpost, advertlets, etc etc. I’d be full of ads! Haha.
But I support nuffnang because nuffnang is friendly. It is Singaporean. It has a community. It retains a spirit of fun while being a commercial entity. So since I’m supporting it, what’s wrong with making the best out of it? I’m not even asking people to link me or promote me to get more readers. I’m asking people who are already reading me to make my unique visitor count more accurate. :P
Engage through comments: I already do engage readers through comments, don’t I? But I don’t think comments are the way to go. It’s a well-known fact that a huge majority of readers prefer to lurk. Even Xiaxue, who has 30,000 readers, only gets about 100 comments on normal posts.
Focus on writing: I’m not sure how focusing on writing and wanting feed readers to read from my site are mutually exclusive. Whether readers read from a reader or from my site, I still write in the same style and write the same kind of content that I love writing. Wanting feed readers to come to my site is not going to compromise the quality of my posts, is it?
In fact, I think it works the other way round. If I see my reader count increasing, that would make me happy because I like having people read my writing. That, in turn, will encourage me to strive to improve and write better blogs. And readers will get better content. I think it’s a win-win situation! ;)
nay min thu: Whee! Thank you! =)
Ryan: Ah, thanks. :) I didn’t know feeds have ads too! :) But, if you read what I said to Jaywalk, I don’t really want to be an ad machine. I subscribe to Nuffnang because I love the people who run it and I love it’s philosophy. So I just hope to get the best mileage out of it. :)
Wind: Thanks for your support!! :)
Steffi: Thank you for your support, too! Haha, I guess if you want to look at it that way, you are all my customers, then. :P
heya
I do have RSS feeds of your blog from my blog. But I will read your posts from your blog from time to time. Like now for example. =)
Dun worry, your content is king. Your blog’s the bomb. I love it! Keep up the good writing!
Oh…besides, having your blog’s RSS on mine introduces you to my readers and u get more exposure and hence more readers to your blog too. Bloggers help bloggers =)
Hmmm… I use my Yahoo Messenger as a feed reader… but I only use it for me to be notified if there are new blog entries. I wanna keep up to date, because — “a day without an entry is an empty day.” LOL. :D
Hey there… *gasp* I’m not a person. I read most blogs through my feed reader. Usually, I’ll look at the site only if I want to:
1. bookmark it or
2. leave a comment
I’ve never been one for clicking on ads unless it’s something that I want to explore.
Making money through blogging is not easy. Despite the hype, not many bloggers have enough clout or readership to do so. I wouldn’t worry so much about it lah.
Oh, don’t switch the the truncated feed, unless you plan to write a really fantastic opening paragraph each time. I am even less likely to click through via a summary feed as most people don’t write well enough to give me reason to continue to read.
I subscribe to plenty of feeds, for personal and professional reasons (primarily monitoring trends), so the cost of clicking through to the blog adds up.
Heheh… okay lah. I sound quite inflexible. Most of the web, I read through the filter which is my feed reader.
But hey, I see you have a Feedburner feed! That supports ads. (And they are now owned by Google, so…) =)
Oh, and FeedBurner has a WordPress plugin so that all your subscribers are channelled to the FeedBurner one. Simply put, your FeedBurner stats will be accurate.
Jzin: Thank you very much for your help! Greatly appreciated! :) And thanks for putting my feed on your blog! I’m honoured. :)
modchip: Hehe. Thanks. I will try my best to give you a daily dosage. lol.
acroamatic: Hello, non-person. LOL. No worries, like I said, I understand it’s tall order to ask people to click on all the blogs on their feed readers, especially if they have hundreds of subscriptions. :P So, even if you click once a while, that’s good enough for me. Thank you! :)
Thanks for the other advice too! I probably won’t do the feedburner ad because I’m not really very into ads. I just like Nuffnang only. :P As for the subscription channel, I think I saw something like that before but it was too complicated for me to understand because it involved some DIY hard coding. But the plugin is new is it? Shall explore it when I’m more well. Thanks! :)
I’m reading through a feed, but comments are what keep me coming back!
+1 hit. =D
Whee! That’s good news for me. Haha. Thanks! ;)
perhaps you would like to remove the rss feed in your skin. that way, no one will use rss feed to read ur blog, but to visit your blog.
btw, i dun use rss to read blogs.
Hmm… that’s a good idea. Haha. Will think about it!
But nowadays people don’t need RSS links. Feed readers can find them automatically. So, wouldn’t solve everything also.
RSS is a good thing and a bad thing.
you have seemed to change your RSS to just the excerpt?
MikeM: Everything is good and bad.
rn: Yup, I did.
I has you on an RSS feed but I have it set up so when I read it, it adds a hit to your site
Care to comment?