Weekend Reading: RSS is Your Friend Edition
There are a ton of new personal finance blogs popping up lately, which is awesome. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that many new bloggers (and even some experienced ones) fail to set up subscription options. And it drives me INSANE. I hate being that person who’s all, “Um, hey, I want to read your posts without actually returning to your site,” but I simply read too many blogs to visit them all manually.
I need a subscribe button that’s easy to find (buttons for Twitter and Facebook would be great, too), and for the love of cheese, PLEASE allow your entire post to publish via RSS. I know people want visitors, but I refuse to click through when I only get the first 40 words of a post. I just unsubscribe instead. Pro tip: You can set up Analytics for your FeedBurner account. Then the people reading via RSS or email still get counted in your totals.
Anyway, the new Yakezie teams started this week, and I’m pleased to announce that I had no difficulty finding the RSS buttons to subscribe to their sites. A few of them, however, better be glad my laser eyes are broken - partial RSS feeds mean I refuse to subscribe and may miss some of their awesome posts.
If you have a blog (or you’re thinking about starting one), please don’t commit blogging crimes. Set up a FeedBurner account and use it to publish your FULL posts. Then put buttons on your blog. And if you aren’t subscribed to So Over Debt, whether or not you’re a blogger, there are some handy buttons at the top right of this page.
The Links!
Lisa from Cents to Save is participating in a Declutter Challenge - something I should STRONGLY consider - and updates us on her progress. I swear, my closet could swallow a human and I wouldn’t notice. Intervention needed!
YFS at Your Finances Simplified gives 5 financial tips from MTV’s Jersey Shore. I’ve been fortunate enough to never see an episode of this show, but the post is definitely worth reading!
Ultimate Smart Money notes that Netflix is finally making a comeback from its 2011 disaster - is it time to buy Netflix stock? Personally, I’m a little skeptical, especially since the streaming selection has sucked lately!
Joe at Retire by 40 is giving away a $25 Amazon gift card! He has some ambitious social media goals for February and needs your help to meet them. Head over and enter - there are lots of ways to win!
Karl at Cult of Money thinks coupons, promo codes, and extreme couponing are doomed in their current forms. You guys already know how I feel about coupons, so I can’t say I’m sad to see this line of thinking.
Aloysa at My Broken Coin has the coolest idea ever - instead of making lists of things you need, make lists of things you DON’T need. I actually did this and learned that I have enough canned vegetables to survive a zombie apocalypse.
Elise at Black Freelancer provides 3 tips to overcome tax anxiety. Man, where was this post when I was doing my taxes? 2011 was my first year with non-W2 income and I thought I’d have a stroke before I got finished.
Thanks for the tips. I starting blogging just as a diary and some how other people read from time to time. I should definitely make more effort to encourage them though as i do enjoy the comments.
Hahah.. I'm a person who has "summary" RSS feeds. I'm trying it out for February to see if my traffic spikes a bit. I will look into your Google analytics option on RSS feeds as well.
I'm so clueless when it comes to feeds and all that - I think I have one on my blog, but I don't know if it redirects to the right place. I do have a blogging for dummies book that I obviously super need to get on reading.
Andrea,
I respect your opinion very highly. I read this post and immediately went to both my blogs and fixed the posts from summary to full for the RSS. I hope this will encourage others to subscribe.
Hooray! I'm so excited - I will be re-subscribing to both.
I also hate partial feeds on RSS! It makes me angry when I have to click through and most of the time, I'll just skip over it. Whereas if I had been able to read through the whole post, I normally click through to comment!
Same for me. I just refuse as a matter of principle. If the content is good, I'll click through. But not because someone is trying to bribe me into it!
Andrea,
Thanks for the smart perspective. I was contemplating whether or not to send partial posts in my email subscriptions because I wanted people to come to my site. Your point of view made me turn back and focus on the site's main purpose, what the reader wants. They don't want inconvenience. They want to see the full post and not have to click through to my site.
Thanks again!
Kraig
Great tips! I'm going to check mine now.
Thanks for the reading material!
agreed!
I actually follow my own blog in my RSS reader to make sure it shows up properly lol
I do the same thing - I'm subscribed via both RSS and email. That way if there's a problem I know about it.
I paranoidly checked my feeds after reading your post because I could not remember if I have a partial view of my feeds or full posts. Thankfully I have full posts. Then I subscribed to my own blog! To make sure everything works fine. Thank you for bringing it up. I never even thought about it.
Also, thank you for the mention! Appreciate it!
Thanks for a great post! I set up an RSS feed on my blog, but I haven't started using Feedburner, Feedblitz, or anything similar. I've noticed that most personal finance blogs use Feedburner, so I've been looking into it. But it seems like there have been a lot of technical issues with it over the years. Anyone have any insight or recommendations?
I haven't had any problems in a year of use (of course that doesn't mean it may not happen tomorrow). The subscriber count fluctuates wildly, so you never really know how many readers you have, but other than that it has worked well for me.
I COMPLETELY agree about the 40 words on an RSS feed. I also immediately unsubscribe. If you're not going to make it easy for me, I'm not going to waste my time!
Thanks for the tips Andrea. I'm still so new at this, it takes time to learn it all!
I think you'll find that one reason a lot of folks don't put their full RSS feed via feedburner is because of content thieves. What they'll do is subscribe to your full feed and use a tool to import your new posts into their site as their own. Then you end up having issues with duplicate content penalties- and hassles of reporting the other sites to google/etc. Because of the hassles many choose not to publish the full feed, despite the hassle it causes regular readers.
p.s. I still publish a full feed despite the problems I've had because of it.
That's a good point. However, plenty of people steal directly from the site too. I hate seeing my content scraped, but I can't spend time worrying about it or it'll drive me crazy.
Hmmm, as a blog reader and writer, I prefer the summary posts. When I'm clicking through my reader, I just want quick tidbits, then I open in a new tab the blogs I want to settle in with. BUT, upon your recommendation, I switched to full posts in the RSS-I'm not afraid of change!