5 Plugins to get more out of your feeds
First of all wanted to say that I have been sick most of last week and haven’t been able to put in much effort into the blog, but as I am getting better now I will be posting regularly.
RSS Feeds are one of the best innovations where people can read content at their own leisure without having to take much efforts to visit websites. But then providing RSS Feeds would mean that you are losing out on page views, advertisement opportunities and interaction with your readers.
Today we will focus on 5 feed related plugins that let you do more with your feeds. The plugins will be divided into different sections so that they are grouped according to their usability.
Give More To Readers
Full Text Feed is a plugin that converts your partial feed to a full content feed. By default WordPress 2.1+ does not add text that comes after the more delimiter, the full text feed overcomes this and delivers the full content to the user.
Many users argue that showing full feeds to the users will eventually cut your traffic, but it has been proven otherwise and many users now use full feeds rather than partial feeds.
I for one do not subscribe to feeds that are partial as it defeats the purpose of me subscribing to the feed in my feed reader.
More Choices To Readers
ST Add Related Posts to Feed is a plugin which will allow you to add related content to your feed items, giving the users more options to read from. Related Posts not only give the users more choices it also drives them back to your web site.
You can only use the plugin in conjunction with Related Posts plugin so be sure to install both the plugins.
Advertise in your Feeds
Not all of us are lucky to get feed advertising, but you can nevertheless advertise your affiliates in your footer using Feed Footer plugin. The plugin allows you to rotate up to 10 advertisements or announcements in your feed’s footer.
Very handy option if you want to make money from your feeds.
Publicize Your Website
Many feeds do not have any footers at all. Footers are a place where you can have copyright notices, site navigation, about us options and more. Better Feed is a superb plugin that allows you to add copyright notices, read more links, links to categories and much more. In fact you can add absolutely anything to your feed footer.
Using this plugin you can drive more traffic to your website from the feeds.
One Site One Feed
Every site has different options to allow a user to subscribe, it could be a RSS option or ATOM option. Keeping a track of users over different subscriptions is a bit of pain. FeedBurner FeedSmith is a plugin that detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to FeedBurner feed so that you can track all your subscribers at a single place.
These are some of the plugins that will allow you to take more advantage of your feeds. If you have any other ones that you use I would love to hear about them in your comments.
Aseem Kishore
November 19th, 2007 at 5:32 pm #
Excellent collection of plugins you got there! I really want to try the advertising one especially! Thanks
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Innovations & Interesting Ramblings
November 19th, 2007 at 11:39 pm #
“Many users argue that showing full feeds to the users will eventually cut your traffic, but it has been proven otherwise and many users now use full feeds rather than partial feeds.”
- How has it been proven and what is the rationale behind it? i too provide full feed of my content but there is always the risk of sploggers automating their sites with full feeds of other bloggers.If only there is an innovative way/plugin to prevent such automation by sploggers…it would be great.There is an ever increasing trend of sploggers resorting to such automation.Many bloggers do provide partial feeds for this reason.so never ignore subscribing to sites that provide partial feeds,if the content is good.
As for the argument that partial feeds defeats the purpose of me subscribing to the feed in feed readers, i don’t agree.For me,All i need in my feed reader is the title and first few lines of a post.if I find it good ,then i click thro. to the main site.i just need one place(my feed reader) to get notified of all latest posts in the blogs that i follow.this would avoid bookmarking or typing the urls of all the site i follow in the browser bar.From my feed reader i could always click thro. to the main site , read the content and close it.It is not a big deal,isn’t it?
Keith – i don’t see the full feeds of this site in “http://feeds.feedburner.com/India-Technology-Blogs”
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keith Reply:
November 21st, 2007 at 2:16 pm
@Innovations well many users simply unsubscribe from partial feeds since it makes little sense to look at data in two places. I agree that sploggers make full use of this but there is not real way you can stop these from occuring.
Every different person has their different opinions and so I am not too much into partial feeds as I feel that I would rather subscribe to those feeds that provide me with full content.
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Madhur Kapoor
November 20th, 2007 at 11:17 am #
Nice plugins buddy. I will be implementing them shortly.
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Haris
November 20th, 2007 at 11:55 am #
I only use FeedBurner FeedSmith and Related Posts. Will also try the rest. Thanks for the list
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GET - MORE - TRAFFIC
November 20th, 2007 at 3:58 pm #
Hi, I love supporting bloggers who use the TopSpot plugin but your widget is very low on the page. It’s not exactly worth anything that low and for $10 that’s crazy for how little exposure you give it.
Put it in your Sponsored section right at the top and I’ll purchase a spot today.
Just a tip!
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keith
November 21st, 2007 at 2:13 pm #
@Haris – Glad that you liked it.
@Madhur – Yups these are worthwhile plugins to use.
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