What Makes Blog a Subscription Magnet

I recently cleaned up my blog subscriptions as part of my Getting Organized challenge. Looking through dozens of blogs made me think what is it that makes me want to come back to some blogs and unsubscribe from others. 

 

As I thought about it more, I decided to jot down some of the points. So here we go, in no particular order, what makes me want to continue reading a blog:

 

A well-defined niche that matches my interests - if a blog is too general or strays off topic often enough, I switch to something else. 

 

Regular updates –  I see blogs that go from daily posts to weekly ones or even once every couple of weeks. Worse yet, I see blogs with latest posts being a couple of months old. That’s not good. I might sign up for RSS feed from a infrequently updated blog, but I sure won’t sign up for a blog that appears dead.

 

Not too many posts – I simply don’t have enough time to read through multiple daily posts from the same blog. Ok, this is not entirely correct. I do make a couple of exceptions, but these are for blogs that are highly visual, with lots of images and links to resources.

 

Limited monetization – by this I mean promos of blog author’s own products and services or those of her affiliate partners, sponsored posts, etc. Some blogs get downright ridiculous – every link is an affiliate link, every other post is a promotional post, and the blog itself is plastered with banner ads. Yikes!

 

Great content – I’m not saying it has to be 100% original nowhere-else to be found content (although that’s a big plus). There are a few blogs I follow that have almost no original content, but are more like aggregators. They scout the web for interesting and relevant articles, products, questions, blog posts, images and videos and then put them up on their site, with proper credits and links. But people behind these blogs make sure that whatever they select to publish is really and truly great content!

 

Great presentation – images help, but I’m talking more about proper formatting - short paragraphs, lots of visual markers (sub-headers, lists) that help me to scan your content quicker. Some say blog posts shouldn’t be any longer than 500-600 words. My thought on this that it’s not so much the length of the post as the information value it carries. 

 

Full posts in RSS feed – some blogs’ RSS feeds are configured to only show a post summary. You have to click on the link to the original post to read the full article. That’s very annoying. I understand why it’s done, but I still don’t like it. A blog better be really outstanding and the summaries are very enticing for me to continue subscribing to and reading it in this case.  

Links to resources – my favorite blogs, the ones that I’ve been reading for over a year, have lots of these. Some have links to and reviews of books. Others point to events, happenings, webinars, etc. Others regularly put up helpful documents, checklists, templates, and reports for download and make them absolutely unconditionally free (they don’t even ask for an e-mail). Yet others post step-by-step instructions or upload how-to screencasts. And most of the blogs I subscribe to link to other great blogs.

 

With all this in mind, I’ll be taking a good hard look at my own blog. I’m sure there are things I can do much better that would address at least some of the issues I mentioned. If you have some blogging pet peeves, let me know!

 

Technorati Tags: blogging, business blog

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