Once in a while I stop tweaking my blog and writing posts and I settle down to read other people’s writing. Tonight I did that and got to about 10 on my list of 34 blogs I read. The 4th one awakened me to the idea of optimizing the earning potential of my feed. Below is a cropped screen shot of my feed after optimization:
The author was showing excerpts only in his feeds. I’ll admit this used to bother me when bloggers made this choice. Tonight I saw a wisdom in it. It forces the reader to click on the actual site to read the full article. I don’t read the full article even if its there in the feed when I am not interested. On the other hand, when I want or need the information I will always click to the actual site. This is also true if I wish to comment. For this reason, I hunted around for a plugin that would insert something neater looking than just “Read More …” I found one. It’s called Oz’h Better Feeds and it works great at dressing up your feed appearance in a reader. It gives you some control over the way your feed is seen. Play with it and see what you think.
To close, I would also recommend when you can to use the “read more” function native in WordPress to encourage clicking to the permalink page. This places an emphasis on that article and if you track clicks it gives that article credit for being more interesting. It also adds pagerank value to that permalink which in turn helps the domain. Oh, and one last thing … if you haven’t already put Adsense on your feeds, you really should. There were major problems at first in the transition from Feedburner to Adsense but it appears they have their act together now.