After cleaning out a bunch of superfluous RSS feeds in my Bloglines account, I'm now down to tracking just 54 feeds. Although it's still two screens full of stuff, this seems to be a manageable number. A partial list of my feeds can be found in my blogroll on the right.
In the course of flushing the least valuable feeds, I discovered a pattern. Here are four five ways to dramatically increase your chances of getting kicked off my RSS feed list:
- Post every ten days, or less frequently if you're feeling especially dangerous.
- Only syndicate the first paragraph or X characters of your posts. This really drives me bonkers. Imagine you called me on the phone and I told you 25% of what you needed to know, and then said that if you wanted to know the rest, you'd have to come over to my house. I realize you're just trying to drive traffic to your blog, but please, find a better way to do it. Maybe post a whitepaper or something and tell me it's downloadable or visible in the nav bar (like I did by mentioning my blogroll, above).
- Write paragraphs longer than five sentences and use bullets sparingly.
- Turn off comments.
- Underdeliver. Just post links to stories with little or no commentary. Go nuts.
I won't put up with item number five for long. But if you have something interesting to say, I'll humor you on points one through four.
Updated at 8:38 a.m. EST
2 comments:
I agree with the point about cutting off part of your blog...come on, don't make me go to your site to read this story because most likely I am not going to! NYTimes is a great example! Sorry guys, but I am not going to boost your advertising dollars by clicking on links. You're a headlines only blog for me ;)
Yeah, I really don't appreciate the truncated feeds, either.
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