On Tuesday, I spread a lot of passion and positivity by talking about my love for monsters (which you can read if you clickity-click *wink*). Today, I want to have an informative (I hope) and slightly passive-aggressive talk about something a little less positive. I want to talk about why I’m not going to follow your blog.
We can’t be followed by every single blogger in the world and not everyone is going to be mutual with us. There are a lot of reasons why someone else won’t follow a blog, but these are my main five reasons. And no, I am not pointing fingers because I am not that kind of girl.
Your blog is difficult to navigate
Probably the first thing that I look for with a blog is whether I can navigate it easily. Is everything marked out clearly? Do your links all work? Are your most recent posts easy to find? Have you made it easy to comment? All of these things are not just important to me, but to every single visitor to your blog.
Another navigation thing I want to bring up is if you use a mobile site, that has to be easy to navigate too. I recently bought a different blog theme because the previous one I used make it impossible to click on links to pages if I displayed my social links in the navbar. Instead, it would take you straight to my social media accounts, which is not what I wanted to do. I’ve seen mobile blog sites that are so difficult to navigate because the images have not been optimised properly and we end up with teeny tiny text and gigantic images that make it difficult to read the actual posts.
Your blog hurts my eyes
I don’t wear glasses, but I do have very sensitive eyes that are affected by terrible colour combinations. Bright green text on a black background is not going to do any favours for my eyes or anyone else’s eyes. In fact, any colour text on a black background will always hurt my eyes. I’m probably the only person in the world who doesn’t think that dark mode on websites and apps is easier to read than light mode.
Another thing that I look for is your font choice. If I have difficulty reading your posts because the font looks like a doctor’s scrawl, I’m not going to stick around for very long. The same goes for if your font is really small. I don’t want to have to squint and strain my eyes while reading something on a screen because the font is too small.
You post only reviews or promo posts
I am primarily a backlist reader so I’m not the best at keeping up with upcoming releases. I also don’t read reviews because I would rather form my own opinion before going into a book so blogs that post only reviews are just not enjoyable to me. When I started blogging way back in 2011, pretty much everyone posted 90% reviews and then a meme or two and then a weekly book haul. Because of that, I wasn’t the most active in the community because I just wasn’t interested in reading those posts.
As for promo posts, it really comes down to me being able to interact with the post. A lot of promo posts that I see are for books that I’m not interested in so when I’m on my commenting back rounds, I’m very likely to be discouraged from following if the vast majority of your posts are promotional posts for books that feature half-naked men on the covers. This brings me right into my next point.
I’m not interested in the same books as you
There are a lot of bloggers in the world, and we don’t all blog about the same kinds of books. I’m primarily a YA reader so I prefer to read blogs that focus mostly on YA books. Thankfully (for me at least) most blogs that I do come across are YA book blogs because the YA blogger community is so incredibly welcoming and social. However, there are times where I come across blogs that focus on books that I don’t read (adult romance, erotica, non-fiction, literary fiction, religious books) and those blogs are not bad – I would never say that a blog is “bad” because that is entirely subjective – I just don’t have any interest in the books they talk about. I’m not a fan of seeing a sea of chiselled abs when I click on a blog. I certainly appreciate some chiselled abs but it’s not necessarily the only thing I want to see on a book cover.
I can’t comment on your posts
This is a gigantic make or break situation for me. If I love your post, I am going to leave a comment. If your blog makes it difficult for me to comment, it’s very unlikely that I’m going to come back. A few years ago there were a lot of blogs that I couldn’t leave comments on because they used Google+ comments and that would give away my last name and my personal email, which I don’t want to ever do. Google+ isn’t around anymore, which I’m thankful for, but there are still blogs out there that require you to log in to leave an account. I have a WordPress account, I have a Disqus account, and I still have a Blogger account. I should not have to make yet another account to leave a comment on your blog. Way back in the day there was a war on captcha, now I’m declaring war on making me constantly create accounts on different comment systems.
talk to me!
What makes you not want to follow a blog? What makes you immediately stick around and read more posts?
FWIW, I didn’t read this post as passive aggressive at all. We all have different interests and tastes. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having firm boundaries about what you add to your RSS feed or want to read in general. 🙂
Author
You’re absolutely right!
Great post! At the beginning of blogging I just followed everyone but now I’m more selective — personally I follow people I feel like I can connect with an not just scroll past their posts because there’s nothing I find interesting — and that doesn’t mean their blogs don’t have interesting content! Only that we don’t have much in common and that’s okay. In real life, you don’t try to befriend every person you pass on the street either 🙂
Author
I used to follow everyone too but it just became too overwhelming to handle. Plus, I just ended up with a feed full of posts that I had no interest in reading.
I agree with you about dark mode! I hate it. It makes me go cross-eyed. I also won’t follow a blog if I can’t leave comments. I’m a blogger because I want to interact with people.
Author
I feel like interaction is such a huge part of blogging for me. There’s not really a point in my sharing my views if I don’t want to hear what other people think.
I love to read YA novels! I do find it hard to follow someone who has the same exact taste in books as I have…I’m kind of all over the place, haha. Which makes it hard to follow blogs sometimes!! I enjoyed this post!
Author
I’m pretty all over the place too 😂 I’m usually good at finding other bloggers with similar reading tastes, there are occasions where I’ll find a blog that has nothing in common with me at all.
These are all good reasons. I don’t like it when blogs force me to use Facebook, because then I have to use my real name. My real name isn’t really a secret (you can easily find it if you do enough digging) but I don’t use it unless I have to.
I also usually only use Bloglovin’ to follow blogs, although I’ll follow blog authors on Twitter because I’m always there. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t regularly go to someone’s blog if they have other follow methods up.
Author
Ooh yeah, Facebook comments anywhere outside of Facebook are the bane of my existence. I’d rather keep my profile private.
I’ve hardly ever come across a blog that I can’t comment on, but there are a few that constantly put my attempts at comments directly into their spam boxes. Doesn’t stop me from following though. Mind you, what bothers me more is when I can’t “like” a blog post. I mean, I might not want to comment on every blog post (I follow over 1000 blogs), but at least let show you that I visited by letting me like your post! Very annoying! And by the way, I will read blogs of bloggers who read different genres than I do – you never know when something not in your genre will suddenly make you want to try one of those books.
Author
I never really thought about liking blog posts before I switched over from Blogger to WordPress. I like that the feature shows that there are still people interacting with a post even if they don’t leave a comment.
I agree with you on pretty much all of these, especially an eye hurting color scheme and promo posts.
Author
An eye hurting colour scheme is a definite deal-breaker for me.
Yep to all of these, especially that first one. There are some blogs that I go to and I just can’t even figure out how to find the newest post. It drives me CRAZY!!!
Ah yes I love this post SO MUCH and agree with 100% of it, actually, ahah. There are some blogs I stumble upon and I just can’t for the life of me FIND THE BLOG POSTS and it is so frustrating. A blog needs to be easy to navigate, or I’ll quickly give up. I also agree with the kind of content the bloggers are posting, too: I’m, like you, primarily reading YA books book blogs, because they’re the kind of books I’m currently interested in, so they’re the kind of blogs I’m currently drawn to, more 🙂 AND YES YES to the commenting thing. If I have to jump through too many hoops to chat with someone, it’s just, nope. :/