A lot of websites today offer a RSS feed. Still a lot of those feeds are partial feeds, but should you actually do that? Below are 5 reasons why you should better offer a full RSS feed:
It saves people time. Plain and simple. Your reader doesn’t have to visit your website, and can browse trough your content real fast. If people are interested in an article of yours, they will still comment on it by clicking trough to your website.
The overview is way better. How often do you come across a website full of advertisements, flashing banners and other crap which will only distract your from the most important thing: the content.
Your reader will return reading your articles. How often do you remove a RSS feed from your RSS reader? When I look at myself, the feeds who didn’t offer me anything new to read after a month or 2, will be kicked out of my list. If I don’t like the article what is being offered, I just scroll trough but will keep you in my list.
The chance that your older posts will be read will be much greater. When you are writing on a blog or other type of website for a while, you have such a huge list of articles that won’t fit on your frontpage. If you are new on that website most of the time only the articles on the frontpage will be read. Inside a RSS reader you just scroll down to the next article. If the content is good ofcourse!
People will share your articles much faster. Most RSS readers have an e-mail this or blog this button. How easy is this to get even more attention to your blog or website? When a reader is sharing your content you have a new potential reader following up!
If you are interested in my articles, why not add my full RSS feed to your RSS reader?
For the Maxmint.com weblog I am using 2 types of analytics software. One is Google Analytics 2.0 and the other is Statcounter. Both are free and not visible what I actually really like, plus they have a couple of very nice options so I can monitor who and why people are visiting me. Always nice to know eah
Yesterday I also started a niche website, posted some articles on it and also put up both analytics scripts in the template. After plugging that website to some Social Bookmarking sites, it even got visitors. All very great. But now comes the weird part, those visitors aren’t visible in Google Analytics. Statcounter is the only one who has seen them. I even double checked if the visitors on that site wasn’t me. Now I know that that this niche website isn’t crawled by Google yet, but that shouldn’t be a problem at all. Analytics is receiving data.
Why am I mentioning this? I just came across a post on the Seer Interactive Seo Blog where Wil Reynolds is stating that Google Analytics will dominate the analytics space. I have to agree that Google has a very big potential to take out the competition in the analytics market, I still wouldn’t be betting on one horse though. I want accurate data! If one counter says 10 visitors and the other stated 12, ok I can live with that. But if one says 1200 visitors and the other 1000, then something is wrong. What guarantee do you have if these statistics are accurate?
Then after reading Wil’s post, I came across a comment in the post Wil is referring to, where Rob Saker also states after comparing raw log files against Google Analytics and WebTrends, Google Analytics is underreporting traffic. But ehh Rob, even a hobby site wants good data and not some lottery numbers.
Questions:
How many of you are betting on one horse?
Are you using one or more analytic scripts for your website and do you compare them?
Why does Google Analytics not give out the correct statistics?
In my previous post i explained how i got to my first topic, make a mint. The second topic will be covering SEO. This topic got me hooked after watching a video from Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive. He is explaining some myths about SEO. The funny part of the video is where Wil is explaining how to uncover the ‘con artists’ in SEO which i will show you below. On Googlevideo is the full version of 60 minutes, for the smaller parts you can visit Youtube’s Wil Reynolds Channel.
