Keeping Up With Your Favorite Blogs and Bloggers

Have you started a blog in order to share your work with like minded creatives?

Did you start a blog to promote your Etsy store or other sales venues?

Maybe you started a blog just because you had so many great ideas to share? Or you just like to write?

Blogging has changed in the last 4.5 years since I started but it seems like the changes are coming fast and furious lately. Maybe it’s the webs’ way of weeding out the weak. You know, blogging survival of the fittest.

I’m not sure, but I know that being able to keep up with your favorite blogs and bloggers has been more difficult lately and it’s about to get worse…

If you are the writer of a blog who depends on page views for advertising, sales and other promotions life has gotten pretty darn sticky. You need your readers but how do you let them know about the changes?

What are you to do as a blog writer or reader?

1. Do you read keep up with your favorite blogs in your email inbox?

There is a possibility that blog posts could be disappearing from your inbox. Feedburner, the service that many bloggers use to handle email subscriptions, is going away and as of right now there is no easy, free alternative. The most popular services available all charge a fee. FeedBlitz charges based on how many subscribers you have and another services I saw is only for blogs with 50,000 plus subscribers. If you are on wordpress you might look at Jetpack’s Subscriptions plug in. It’s easy to use and provides a few statistics but doesn’t allow for monetization like some other services do.

What do you do if you LOVE a few blogs and don’t want to miss their content? For a while you’ll have to visit the blog to see updates. At least until the author of the blog finds a new feed service.

I have, myself, started up my monthly newsletter again to try to keep in touch with my readers. You may see if your favorite blogger has a newsletter or you might consider starting one if you are the blogger.

 

2. Do you follow your favorite bloggers on Facebook?

As some of you may have seen, Facebook has made it more difficult to reach all of the fans on pages. Page owners can reach more people by paying to promote posts, but small craft businesses and bloggers can’t afford to do that for every post.

If you want to see the content of your favorite bloggers’ page you’ll have to do a couple of things.

A. Open the bloggers fan page, hover your mouse over the gear symbol in the “Like” button and when you see the pop up box, select “ADD TO THE INTEREST LISTS”

B. When you see posts you like be sure to “LIKE” by clicking on the thumbs up symbol, leave comments and in other ways interact with the page. This will help the content to show up in your feed more often.

C. DO NOT, under any circumstances, click “HIDE FROM FEED” after reading content. Basically, by clicking on “HIDE FROM FEED” you are sending negative feedback and telling Facebook that what you just saw is inappropriate or offensive and you don’t want to see any more of it.

Those are just two of the big changes that the average blogger and reader are seeing lately but I have a feeling they aren’t the end of it. But then life, and business, are constantly changing. My advice is to be flexible, be willing to learn and change, and stay positive. 

 

What about you? Are you a blogger who has lost some of your readers? Do you have any insights or ideas for reaching out to them?

Or are you a reader who can’t stand to miss a single blog post? How do you plan to keep up with your favorite bloggers?

I’d love to see your thoughts and feedback in the comments.

By: Vicki O’Dell , The Creative Goddess