Top three things that will make me read your blog

Published by Jennifer | Filed under Post

I haven’t had a whole lot of spare time in, well, the last few months or so, and my online reading time has been very much curtailed. Because of this (rather unsurprisingly) I haven’t been reading a lot of blog posts. Particularly, I haven’t been reading almost any library related blog posts – I’d rather have the time to read them properly when I do, so I’ve been putting it off. Trying to trudge through this backlog of posts has made me think about how I read blog posts, and what makes me read a post when I’m short on time. And so (and because I don’t have time to write a real post – soon, I promise!), I present my top three things that will make me read your blog post when I’m short on time.

1. Give good head(line)

I read my feeds using Google Reader, and I have it set to show me just the headlines. If I don’t have a good idea of what you’re going to be talking about in your post from the headline, chances are I’m just going to skip it. I want to know if it’s a review or a short link or something not really relevant at all, and I want to know it without clicking through to the whole text (this is particularly true if you’re posting conference notes – there’s almost nothing more uninteresting to me than conference notes, unless it’s real-time conference notes, which are even worse).

2. Name your blog well

I have my feeds listed alphabetically, and I expect most people do too. It’s lazy, but it works. And chances are, if your blog starts with the letter T or below, by the time I get down there I probably have done all the reading I want to. The library community repeats itself a lot (hell, the blogosphere repeats itself a lot – it’s how the whole thing works), so if I’m reading en masse, I’ve probably covered most of the major recent issues by the time I get about half way down the list.

3. Don’t update too often

Whilst there’s something to be said for posting a lot, if I look at a feed that I haven’t looked at in a week or so, and it has double-digits of unread posts in, I’m probably just going to mark them all as read. Or at least not skim them very hard. Marking all as read goes double if you fill out your feed with useless things that I don’t want to read (I’m primarily thinking Twitter and del.icio.us updates here) – if I want to follow what you’re doing on other services, I’ll follow you there. Put the links in your sidebar and don’t bother me with them again.

Ok, ok, so these are all pretty self-explanatory, and mostly just go to show that I have too many feeds to read (a perennial problem of mine), and that I need a better way to manage my information flows (I’ve been playing a bit with Dapper lately – any thoughts on it?). I’d like to hear other thoughts though – what makes you stop in your tracks and not read something? Or what always will make you click into a post?