How to put me off your RSS feeds (and probably other people as well)
I suscribe to a lot of RSS feeds. On any given day I might have 100 updates. However I can’t and don’t read all of these. The ones who I often don’t read usually get removed within a week or two. The biggest problems I notice are:
- Too long. If your blog posts usually extend beyond two pages in my RSS reader, I won’t bother to read them and will just scroll past them unless you have a good mix of images and text. I don’t have the time to read too much text and as for posts consisting entirely of 30-50 images, I get bored.
- Too short. The opposite is also through. If your post is a one line comment, it should probably be on twitter or another similar site.
- Teasers. This is the most annoying problem I come accross. If your RSS feed is just a heading and a description of a post, I won’t click through to read it. I’ll actually delete your feed from my RSS reader. If you won’t put the whole post in the feed, have at least 1/3 of the content in the feed.
- Too many posts. If you post 9-10 articles a day, I will delete your feed from my reader. In my opinion 1-2 is a good amount per day. Some people do like posts that many times a day but for me, once my feeds go above 100 a day, I can’t read them all and start feeling like blogs with loads of posts are spamming my feed reader.
- Don’t post all your social network info to your blog as soon as you post it. If you must put your twitter post, flickr photos or other content on your blog, do it as a weekly summary, not an on the spot post.