In yesterday’s post I shared my research of the day about feed readers and FeedBurner that allow people to subscribe to blogs so they can read the posts without going to the blog. Free newsletter subscriptions, often through FeedBlitz, are one way of subscribing. Another way of subscribing is to use a feed that brings the link right to a feed reader that you have on your desktop or web browser.

Flowers X, Digital © Diane Clancy

Today a reader shared another tidbit with me for making effective use of feeds. This reader stays linked in to a lot of feeds every day; he makes great use of them and has studied what works and what doesn’t – at least from his perspective.

He is suggesting that the feeds contain only a summary rather than the whole post. That way it still gives people motive for coming and visiting the blog. He added that it is different for people to read a post on the blog where there is a whole effect – I agree.

You may have noticed that I like bells and whistles and have several ways of displaying where people come from. I am totally thrilled that people from Australia, Europe, Asia, and Africa have visited this blog. I like that the tracking, maping extras show me that people come here.

I cannot, as of now, change my settings to summary – my server won’t let me. For myself, reading the feeds I have subscribed to from other sites, I am mainly using my own new feed reader to see if people have posted yet so I don’t have to go to their blog just to check. Then I like to go read the post in the context and atmosphere of their blogs. But I would like to keep knowing the different places people come from to look at my blog.

You might want to check out these two posts for more information – Ryan Healy and Chris O’Byrne.

~ Diane Clancy

Technorati Tags: feed readers, FeedBurner, FeedBlitz, technology, Chris O’Byrne, Ryan Healy, blogs