Tell Me Something Tuesday is a weekly discussion post hosted on Rainy Day Ramblings where we discuss a wide range of topics from books to blogging. Weigh in and join the conversation by adding your thoughts in the comments. If you want to do your own post, grab the question and answer it on your blog.
This week’s topic:
What types of things on blogs make you not want to follow them?
This one is tough. I’m pretty easy to please.
The first thing that pops into my mind is content overload. If I open your page and your actual post is swallowed amongst images and ads, I get frustrated. That was not what I came by to see. I wanted that days post. I know some blogs have a lot going on, but maybe smaller links, put the extras in pages or even just make the extra not as distracting.
Kind of extending off the first one is disorganization. Like I said, I want the days post. If you have links relating to that post that will lead me through the site, that’s great. But if all I see are ads for books that aren’t even in the same genre, or have absolutely no relation to the content. I can’t stay. It shows me that I was only interested in that one post and the possibility of a lot more of content I’d be interested might be few and far between.
Images are a big deal. I like images, don’t get me wrong. In fact, I’m jealous of a lot of great work I see. What drives me nuts is when the post is made up of images. A sentence here and a pic, another sentence, and another pic. Maybe it’s my jealousy of the images that makes that bother me, but it does. The pics show me how you feel about the topic, but not really the “why”.
An About Me really helps me decide to stay too. I like to know a bit about who is writing the post. What their interests are. If we have our reading interests in common, there is a good chance we have other things as well. Makes me want to come back and interact with that person more.
I’m on the fence with this one. How much posting is TOO much posting. Sometimes I feel like I’m totally overwhelmed with my email subscriptions, or when I see the unread posts in Bloglovin I cringe. Others get forgotten because they hardly ever post, if at all. There has to be a happy medium. I’ve found that if I’m overwhelmed with a particular blog’s posts, and they are not like a daily thing, but come out with every post, they get unsubscribed and put in Bloglovin. I may not get to them in a timely manner but it helps me skim through without overloading my email. I am aware that I could possibly be one of the problem children. I’ve been trying to decide if I should just do my email once a week instead of daily. I’m really bad about weekly wrap-ups, but the email may be part of the answer. Definitely something to think about.
I think the last thing that really drives me nuts is the subscribe pop-up. I’m scrolling along, reading your post, and bam, this pop-up takes up the screen wanting me to subscribe. First, you just interrupted my reading. Second, in most cases, I’m already following. I know most blogs have their email subscribes in the sidebar, why do I need this total in your face reminder?
Really, besides my biggy of overload, I will follow if I see enough posts from your blog that I can relate to. Also if I see a lot of comments from you, or I get a good feeling from your About Me, you’ll probably get followed.
So here is where I get curious. Is there something about my blog that keeps you from following? What about other blogs, is there something that just turns you off altogether?
