Blog Tipz

Subscribers, or people who wholeheartedly enjoy reading and staying up-to-date with the most recent posts from your blog are extremely important to you as a blogger.  Annoying those faithful to you, the followers who cogitate over your hard work and success, aspiring to one day be like you, can be one of the most costly mistakes you could ever make as a blogger.

photo credit: `?ccdoh1?

Much like people who favor particular television shows, newspapers, magazines, or even websites, your subscribers essentially drive you to create new content, keep the blog running by commenting, and potentially beget a small revenue stream for other projects or for other purposes.  When blogging wasn’t recognized as a career, instead as a hobby, subscribers meant little to bloggers besides providing feedback on their posts and similar experiences that they may have faced.  Today, with the advent of paid content (advertising and sponsorships), the amount of subscribers that you have is largely indicative of the content and/or services that your provide on your blog.  In recent months, blogs sold were appraised based significantly on the number of subscribers the blog had and how valuable they are to the buyer, with some estimates as high as $30/subscriber.

If you’re concerned with your subscriber count, you likely try your hardest to produce the highest quality content each day and invest time into replying to comments that visitors have placed on your site, not to mention please the needs of people who request information.  Letting the subscribers decide how to run your blog, on the other hand, may not be the right course of action, as it is your blog. 

Following the course of this post, there are certain traits that visitors look for in each and every blog, and when you do everything wrong, you’ll likely leave them grasping for something more, something that you can’t fulfill.

The wrath of the subscriber vs. publisher (or traits exhibited by blog owners affecting visitors and subscribers):

1. Provide false numbers representing your actual subscriber count.  This leads visitors to think that you have more subscribers, and thus, better content.  After subscribing, they realize that there isn’t many quality traits about your blog.
2. Transfer your feed to different addresses then asking them to re-subscribe.  It simply doesn’t work.  Settle on a single feed address (preferably with FeedBurner), then stick with it.
3. Add dozens of links to the feed – links from FeedFlare, advertisements, links/images from your blog (more social bookmarking) and other useless “content” that should be kept out of a relatively minimalist area.
4. A lack of updates for a link time, then a sudden increase (three or more one day, then none for a few days, then three another day).  It provides readers the sense that they can’t prepare posts ahead of time or effectively manage time to create a semi-updated website.
5. Promising that he or she will return, only to leave the blog abandoned for three months, then to return again for one post.
6. Leaving promises in the form of new content or add-ons/features to the blog.
7. Providing too much in the form of post updates throughout the day.  Creating a series of relatively short posts and firing them off at spontaneous moments throughout the day can leave subscribers quickly wondering whether you can manage your post frequency – a balance between length and content/uniqueness.
8. Frequently changing the feed type – full or abridged feeds.  Generally, I prefer reading full feeds in my RSS reader, however, I don’t mind reading partial feeds should the site provide shorter content posts/excerpts.
9. Constantly update their readers on their personal life (unless it is, of course a personal blog).  Stick to the purpose of the blog 95% of the time, or readers will lose interest.  
10. Running contests over 80% of the blog’s lifespan.  Contests can be useful, especially for new blogs to get the word out about their blog and build some links/readers/traffic, however continuously being updated by contest stats can be mind boggling on the end of the reader.
11. Format content correctly before it enters the feed.  In other words, don’t format the post so images and text aren’t scrambled and not aligned properly.
12. Lying to your readers.
13. Telling your readers that you will be stepping down/away from the blog for some time.
14. Offering something to readers only to never distribute it to them.
15. Reproduce (or begin reproducing) content from various sources around the web illegally (scraping).
16. Start acting as though you are the most important person as you (may be) more successful than your readers.
17. Dramatically change your posting schedule/style/topic – readers subscribed to get what they saw on the blog for a particular purpose, didn’t they?
18. Distract from the original purpose of the blog.
19. Not providing a feed at all.
20. Quickly increase ads and useless content on both the blog and feed.
21. Content that is all “paid” – sponsored PayPerPosts or full of spam links.
22. Solely covering news stories in fields that are unrelated to the niche of the blog.
23. Leaving a copy of a post that is barely dissectible: content that hasn’t been proofread for two minutes and full of grammar and spelling mistakes.
24. Incorporating tags and category links into the content, unless feedback has indicated that it would be a beneficial addition to the site.
25. Inappropriately dividing content using the more tag for shorter posts.
26. Excessively using images that aren’t associated with the post content.

Conclusion

The list above represents just a fraction of the ways that people may annoy their blog readers, however the list doesn’t end there.  On an ending note, don’t try to do any of these tactics to get new subscribers – you’ll be on the course of losing subscribers if you excessively do any of these.