When this site was on the Blogger platform and had a members section, I had a bunch of feeds, some were full text, some were partial, some had both. At the time, partial feeds meant less scraping and more more page views.

Now, I wonder if page views even matter when the bottom line is really getting read, not getting displays – unless of course you’re running a site where you don’t get paid unless the ad is clicked or at least displayed, on a web page. And I hear the de-emphasis of the page view as a measurement echoed across the Net.

So a couple of days ago where I read that Steve said “Want People to Read Your Blog? Go With a Full Text Feed” it got me to thinking. Here’s a quick quote – short because I think you should go read the whole thing. If you’re a blogger or a blog reader, weigh in.

Someone should commission a study on bloggers who choose to syndicate the full text of their posts in RSS feeds vs. those who abstain. Something tells me they’re read more. Consider the contrasts between these two bloggers.

I thought about the time when I had about a third of my audience following me by feed instead of around 14%. And the big difference was the full text feed. I’m thinking about jumping into the deep end again…

What will determine that is what you think. Would you rather have my posts in full? Or are you pretty much cool with the way things are? Or do you not care at all?

Holla back…

My name’s Tinu, and I’m a feedaholic.

I love the sophisticated surfers I get to my site via my own feed, I love how much the search engine spiders love my feeds, and I simply adore reading sites via their RSS Feeds. I do the majority of my research for my column that way.

If your site doesn’t have one and you want to be featured in one of my daily columns, you’re out of luck. It isn’t that there aren’t great sites out there with great tools out there that aren’t feed-capable, it’s just that now that I use web feeds as my primary source of news, unless your site was featured in someone else’s feed, it just wouldn’t occur to me.

To folks like me, your site is effectively invisible, unless you happen to come up on the first page of a search, and since I know where to go to find the information I want quickly, I don’t use a search engine on a daily basis.

True story.

But why should you care. I’m just one isolated surfer, a special case, a techie, a feed nut.

Wrong friend.

We feed readers may be in the minority for now, but we’re a powerful, educated, relatively wealthy group of consumers. In my free course about RSS , I’ll tell you the demographics as quoted from a study done by blogads.com – it’s a little skewed because of the pool of consumers they surveyed, but it’s no less telling of the group studied.

Some hints: we’re a middle-aged group with the money to spend on your premium products. The way you might skim past a product priced at $3.99 is the way we might skip over a $25 ebook – particularly if we can hire someone to do the work for us, for the same reason: we’re looking for a balance of quality and price.

I’m not pointing this out to be mean, or insinuate that your site is less than top quality. I’m just telling you what you’re missing by not having a feed on your site.

Mull that over while I post the next tip.

Part One of this step is Choosing Your Topic, otherwise known as “What the Hell Am I Going to Write About?”

With choosing your topic, you want to strke a balance between writing about a popular topic and not writing about the same thing everyone else is writing about. For example, I sometimes write a lot about Google, RSS Feeds and Yahoo, and Alexa Internet.

Now, a lot of people write about Google, or Yahoo, here and there about RSS Feeds, and not so much about Alexa. But I picked those three topics because they are things people want to know about. Then I took those topics and illustrated how I solved a problem I had or a challenge I was facing with one of those topics.

So get out a piece of paper (or launch a text file), and put at the top, the heading “There Should Be a Book About” and think of topics related to your product, service or web site that has to do with that title. Then write down five things you think there should be a book about.

Next, write the heading “This Week I Learned An Easier Way to…” and make another list of things – try to stick to things problems other online entrepreneurs face.

Third, write the heading “My Product/Service/Site Solves the Problem of…” and finish that sentence up to ten ways.

With what you have before you, go to Wordtracker.com, and find some keywords related to that issue – find some really both a low traffic general one and a high traffic targeted one – not the top general keyword, a lower rated one with high KEI (their factor for indicating that you’d have a low competiion keyword with high traffic).

Now let’s look at what you have.

With your list, you can pick several topics to write about. You may even be able to combine two. The ones that relate to the minor keyword that you can repeat one or two times in the article, and could perhaps write a sentence about including that keyword, will help you the most.

Use the low traffic keyword you found to make your title. So if you found that “Britney Spears poster” is a low traffic keyword, and one of the topics is “Where to Find the best Britney Spears poster” is your article title, and you know you can mention Britney spears and the word poster several times in your article, you’ve got a winner.

In the next step, we’ll write our article. Hang on to that high traffic keyword info, we’re going to use that later.

If you’re still not getting the idea about using RSS Feeds to increase your traffic, I have a free site for you with lots of good information. Robin Good’s .Really Simple Syndication

Okay, you’ve got a tracking system, and you have your pages prepared to test, now what?

For our example, I’m going to use the article that was recently republished on Site Pro News. Using this method, when I get published for free in a major publication like that, it’s as good as money in the bank. And they’ve been gracious enough to publish me five times just this year.

If you take a look at the article – 5 Reasons Why Your Site Needs To Publish A News Feed – you’ll see that there are 3 major links leading back to my site in the article, the one in my resource box, that points to my blog, my feed (after the link for Pluck, which really leads back to the Pluck downloads page – it’s just a forwarder for easy subscription, so that one doesn’t count), and the one minute tutorial.

Each of these links addresses my audience in a different way, and leads them to a different method of using my site, and ending up as part of my audience.

The first link in the article will give anyone who cares to learn more about me the subscription link to my feed. They can use it to check me out, and decide if they like my content enough to join my audience. In the article, I even tell you how to use it.

If they get so engaged in the feed, they’re already subscribed and can come back to the rest of my content later. Great.

The second link in the article leads to the one minute tutorial. These are the people who my book would really help the most. When they get to that link, they can read through the instructions, but at the end of my post is a link to my free five day ecourse.

The last link at the bottom is just a link to my blog. That day I had an alternate way for people to sign up for my eCourse with a longer explanation of why they’d want to have a news feed and a few hints on how easy it is.

So how can this work for your site.

It’s a little concept I like to call the garden path.

People are busy. They won’t always feel like they have time to read your whole site, and most people skim the Net, they don’t read it avidly as often as we’d all like to think when we’re creating our entralling content.

So how can you make this fact work to your advantage.

In every traffic campaign I begin, whether it is free traffic or some that I paid for, I set up my in-coming traffic to meet three objectives.

First, I want to provide enough value to create a return visitor.

Second, I want the person who comes to the site to sign up to be contacted again. They can join the members resource area, subscribe to one of the feeds, sign up for the newsletter, or purchase a product.

Third, I want to spark some form of interaction between them and my site.

With the garden path, every time I promote or market, I make sure that the target page (the page they land on) gives them the opportunity to chose to come back. The next step will let them see the products I am offering, with incentive to decide now.

If they reject that opportunity, that’s fine. They’ve already said they’d be back. We’ll find out if I can help them later.

If they accept, I want them to be engaged, I want them to get as much value out of their decision as possible. Then we’ll both be happy – I made a sale, they made an investment in their business they can be proud of, that will produce the results they desire.

So when you set up a campaign, you’ll want to make adjustments to the landing page so that that it’s focused on the action you want them to take. If you want them signed up to your newsletter, the only thing that should be on that page is information about it, and quick, easy sign-up. If you’d like to make a sale, in my experience, the page they land on should capture their information and Then lead them to your product.

This is because conversions for getting a newsletter sign-up are typically much higher than they are for making a sale. So instead of converting, say 3% to a sale immediately, you can get that 3%, plus whatever percentage of the 30% or so that signed up for the ezine to buy later.

I’m writing a more specific guide for this in my upcoming book, and due to space and time limitations, I can’t really go into details now.

But for the moment, as you set up your next campaign, think about it, what do you want your prospect to do when they get to your site, and how can you set up your pages to lead them to your desired course of action?

The rest of the day will be focused on extras. The sun is shining out here in Nevada, which means it’s almost time for me to take a break.

Until I see you next, have a happy day!

It’s Freedom Friday!

Before you cheer, you may want to know what Freedom Friday is. Today is the day of the week you’ll learn about free resources you can use on the Net, some will get you free traffic, some will free up your time so you can focus on getting yourself some more free traffic, and sometimes, we’ll just talk about freedom in general, as it relates to your site and your business.

Today our focus will be on free tools for studying your traffic, like the URL Info tool I read about in SEO Scoop, and tools that make RSS Feeds easier to work with like FeedBurner.

Today’s site of the day is Wilson Web.

Waiting for a phone call, I was searching my bookmarks in Mozilla Firefox, trying to find out if sites that I no longer had time to visit had RSS Feeds. I haven’t been to Wilson Web in a year, and that was my bad, because Ralph F. Wilson has been talking about RSS Feeds and Marketing since last year.

The site has changed a lot over the years, but one thing definitely hasn’t – there’s a lot of good, free information, though some of the content is for paid subscribers only.

It seems that a lot of people are confused about the feed fuss – what’s so great about feeds? And I still feel the best solution for understanding what a great tool a feed can be for your site, is in seeing what other people are doing with theirs.

Today’s feed of the day is Free Marketing Ideas. To view it, right-click the link and paste the feed in your favorite feed reader, or add this to the RSS Headline area in your “My Yahoo” page. .

If you don’t have one, create a free account in my member section, and cut and paste the link into “My Headlines” on the first page. You can also get a free online reader at bloglines.com.