Excerpts or full text on your blogs home page?

I can understand this reasoning behind the idea however I don’t think you personally need to worry so much about people clicking through. I read your site via a feed reader but I still click through on most posts to see if there are any comments and I definitely think if people come to the site on the front page and see there are comments made they’ll most likely click through to. You always seem to have at least one comment on each post!

I sometimes wonder if excerpts on either front pages or in rss feeds can put people off reading a blog as often (no I’m not looking to get into the pros and cons of full feeds in RSS - been there done that!). But at the same time it’s an interesting experiment and I’d love to hear of any differences stats wise

The point you make regarding excerpts on RSS feeds is an interesting one Sarah. I’m just not sure how to tackle this one. I’d like to think that people click through, and to be honest, my feedburner stats aren’t that spectacular anyway. They only account for a fraction of readers overall. (Most come from SE’s)

I’ll be keeping a close eye on the stats over the next month or so to see whether it’s made any difference. It’s going to be hard to tell though, as so many other factors contribute to traffic stats.

Thanks for dropping by!

Interesting idea for encouraging page views, alexa ranking and so on, but I must say from a personal perspective I find it really irritating (on blogs in general) having to click through to finish reading an article.

If a post is particularly long then I’ll usually only display an excerpt on the index page otherwise I’d just end up with a long index page and visitors would be forced to scrollllll.

Tom - a lot of readers come through from an RSS feed which takes them to the permalink of the post, which is the full article. I’m not sure how many people come to the home page first up?

The more I look around, the more I see that nearly all the “big” bloggers do this very thing. I would imagine that if you’re getting a million PV’s a month, and you can increase this by 20% by doing this, and you’re getting CPM ads from someone at $2/k, that adds up to an extra $400/month.

I can see why they would be doing this! (Although they’re numbers I can only dream about!)

Will, I’m not sure whether visitors would rather scroll or click, time for a poll I think! (Look top left of the page)