May 23 2008
6 Things That Will Make Me Leave Your Blog
Ok folks, this one has been at the back of my mind for a while but I just experienced it again so I’m putting it out to the world.
Blogging is SUCH an important part of building your online presence. However, there are things you can do that will detract from your visitor’s experience. Here are a few things that I’ve run into lately on some blogs that make me want to not go back:
1 - Advertising. Too much advertising is a *huge* turn-off. Particularly if the ads blink or move in some way (anything moving and blinking is a no-no) or the ones that are the double underline of the word with an ad that pops up of you hover over it. The amount of money you make may not be worth how many people you send away.
2 - Pop-ups. Pop-ups are evil. Please don’t use them. And in this I’m also including the ’snap view’ or whatever it’s called that wordpress.com blogs default to. It’s the little box that pops up when you hover over a link. Annoying in the extreme.
3 - Music. Unless you’re a band, there’s no reason to have music on your blog. If you feel you *must* have music, make it really, really, really obvious how to turn it off.
4 - Comments. Comments are the life blood of a blog. It’s how you get your readers engaged with you and coming back. If you set your blog up to only accept comments from people who have to be members of a certain service (i.e. blogger.com blogs) you’re going to lose a lot of people. I have a blogger/gmail ID, but it’s not linked to my business, it’s personal and I don’t want that linked to my business comments. Make your comments so that ANYONE can comment and just moderate them.
5 - Contact information. If you’re running a blog for a business, you MUST give your visitors a way to contact you - particularly if you don’t allow open comments. An email address is easiest, but if you’re not comfortable with that, at least put up a contact form. Otherwise you might as well just put up a post that says “I don’t want your business”
6 - RSS feeds. If you have a blog and you don’t have an RSS feed you’re making a big mistake. I’m still seeing a lot of blogs out there where you can subscribe to a newsletter, but not to an RSS feed. Well, I don’t do newsletters so, while I enjoyed your blog, I won’t be reading it again. Sorry.
So, to the blogger who had a bad experience that I wanted to commiserate with but who didn’t have contact info or wouldn’t let me comment - sorry that happened. I’ve been there, it gets easier.
So…what are your blogging pet peeves?
I’m glad I’m doing a few things right.
I agree with you, especially on the music issue. You have to realize that there’s a good chance that your tunes are not the same as my tunes. Don’t mess with my music, man! hehe. perhaps a good compromise is to have the player there, but off by default. Supply a play button, and tell me what song(s) you have in the playlist
I agree with most of this stuff but I wonder what you think constitutes as too much advertising. Alot of people are trying to build traffic and make a living. If you are a good enough writer you should be able to do that. Content on the Internet is pretty much free because of advertising. Would you rather pay for it?
@ Aaron, the advertising that most bothers me is, as I mentioned, the kind that’s flashing neon colors in my face. I’m also not a fan of having to scroll past 3 inches of google ads to either start or finish reading a post.
I understand the call for advertising on a blog. However, when the blog becomes more ads than content then I think it’s too much. IMO, the ads should never interfere with what should be the purpose of the blog - which is the posts themselves.
Flashing Neon is annoying but I can’t hate on somebody who is just trying to maximize their CTR. Google ads are better than pop ups. I agree that the purpose of the blog is the content. People spend far to much time worrying about getting hits from social media websites and optimizing their advertising. If everybody worried about content, there would be a lot more really great high traffic blogs. Thats what I am trying to do with mine. Its tough though. You really have to hold yourself to a high standard and stay committed.
I agree with much of what you’ve said here. I would, however, caution people against using contact forms for 2 reasons:
1) Usability studies have shown that forms are avoided by many people because they seem impersonal and require too long to fill out, as opposed to clicking on an email address link.
2) An even bigger issue at this point in time is that most processed forms provide an open doorway to injection attacks. If you decide to have a contact form on your site, you would be advised to have it protected from injection attackers by a professional web developer.
Even though it is not 100% reliable, one resolution would be to include an email address link which has been protected from spam harvesters by a simple javascript.
Regarding ads: Yes, they indeed are an integral part of our web experience. They are necessary, but they need not be evil. Again, when this issue is addressed by a web professional, it’s possible to display ads in an attractive and unobtrusive manner so that they do their intended job without causing visitors to quickly exit your site.
-Lynn
@ Lynn - Thanks for your thoughts. What you said about contact forms is interesting. I wasn’t aware of the 2nd point and the first point makes sense. I much prefer an email address to a contact form, but I believe a contact form is better than nothing at all.
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Great read. As a new blogger, myself, I appreciate these tips.
Could not agree more.
Thanks for this. Great Post.
Music - I’ve often had my system on way to loud and opening to a page that screams at me automatically results in a “close! close! close!!!”
your about page doesn’t work
i assume that is where you contact details are?
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I agree with almost everything except I think the “snap to” feature on Wordpress.com blogs is pretty neat, actually. I’m a huge fan of images - I think it helps solve the problem of blogs that have way too much copy and nothing going on visually.
I agree 150% about contact, though. Dynamic Drive has a free online email riddler tool that you can use to protect your email address against spam, should you choose to provide it. I go back and forth (really) almost weekly on the email vs contact form issue. I haven’t had any problems using a contact form - I get more contact now with the form than I did with just my email address. But either way, something is better than nothing.
Cheers,
Tia
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[...] was inspired to write this after I read and commented on VagabondetteVA’s 6 Things That Will Make Me Leave Your Blog post on May 23. Rather than talk about the things you shouldn’t do, I figured I would give [...]
Music … it drives me up a wall! Secondly, arrogance … a blogger puffed up with his or her own importance. The blogger universe is all about egalitarianism.
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Good article and while you talked about Adverts in general (especially those that don’t relate to the subject matter of the blog) I am surprised that you didn’t comment about Adsense. Nothing turns me off a blog faster than trying to read the article and dodge around intrusive adsense campaigns.
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@Lynn - Something to consider regarding usability and forms is that many people use web based email (Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.). If you are only providing an email address all of these people must take extra steps to send you an email. They have to copy and paste, or type your email into their email in order to send a message to you. This can introduce data entry errors ensuring that their communication never reaches you. Your email link is only going to work for people who use an email program on their computer and it is configured correctly.
On the other hand if you are providing a contact form you have just saved the webmail based user a ton of steps and increased the likelihood of them making the effort to contact you. My advice is to use both and make sure that the form script you are using is secure, or as secure as it can be and still work.
As far as protecting your email link another free method is Recaptcha’s Mailhide. You can check it out at http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/. It is the same technology that makes sure it is a real person filling out forms where you have to type the words shown in the images. The added bonus is that the words they are using are part of a project to help digitize books.