Blog Ease of Use, RSS, and making money

Author and blogger Karen Shanley has a great post called Five Ways to Set Up Your Blog To Chase Readers Away. It's well worth reading, and has given me some ideas to think about on my various blogs.

I'm a recent convert to using an RSS reader rather than just regularly hitting my favorite blogs and sites. Part of what tipped the balance for me is the increasing use of feeds by non-blog sites. When I had a semi-regular schedule of sites I was checking for updates, it didn't make a lot of sense to me to handle blogs differently. Now most of my favorite regularly updated sites have feeds and I'm much happier using a reader.

There are two major differences between reading feeds and reading the actual site that are of particular interest to me as a writer and IT professional. First, feeds are content without presentation. They are essentially just words and illustrations - all that fancy site formatting and presentation is gone. As someone who works in both fields, I can tell you that the pay rate for web design (presentation) is usually much higher than the pay rate for writing (content). Yet more and more people are using feeds and reading just the content. Hmmm...

Second, although there are all sorts of signs of change, feeds are pretty much an advertising and marketing free zone at the moment. This means that if someone reads your feed, they never see your page ads, links to other projects, the personal promotion in your "about me" box, etc. I've seen people putting these things into their posts, but too much of this tends to make your blog unreadable, which definitely chases away readers. I've thought about handling this by only providing a truncated feed, but Shanley makes a convincing argument against this. Quite honestly, we all know that most web users - myself included - want things to be as easy as possible and the point of using feeds is to get information with minimum work, so truncating the feed probably is, in fact, counterproductive. Promoting affiliate products within your text isn't affected though.

So, what does this mean for those of us writing on and for the web? I'm not sure. I can hope that it will mean increased pay for writing and better affiliate sales, but that's probably a pipe dream. I suspect that we'll start seeing more ads in feeds - if they are of sufficient quality (ie content linked), I think that will be a good thing for everyone. On the other hand, I'm sure enjoying reading my favorite sites without obnoxious flashing banners... With luck, we can bring the best of web advertising to the feed world, leave the rest behind, and allow writers to make an even better living. That may be a pipe dream too.

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