Blogs: Why Readers Unsubscribe

Posted by: Tabish Bhimani on: November 16, 2007

• In: Communications | Economics | Information | Media | Society | Technology
• 7 Comments

Not too recently, I read a post about why people unsubscribe from blogs. This is a relatively big problem especially if your blog is supported by advertisements, (for example, Google AdSense) and you’re trying to make somewhat of an earning. Now, alot of people may not agree that blogs provide lucrative profits – and for the most part, they don’t. There are however, exceptions to this: Blogging Fingers. Although these may refer to your fingers, it is actually a blog which was sold for $6000. CashQuest claims that blogs may sell for up to ten times the original investment and I don’t doubt it. What we’re going to discuss here then, is how to keep your users subscribed and interested, giving you a higher potential to sell your blog and make some money.

Modern early blogging may have started as back as 1994, and although it was a manual update of a site, blogging spread like wildfire after 1999. So we can understand that blogging has been around for longer than we know it.

ProBlogger in early March wrote “34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog.” It discussed according to viewer polls, why people unsubscribed.

The number one reason? Too many posts. Number two? Infrequent posting. So keep your blogging moderate. Do not post too much, but do not post too little. To help you with moderating, think if a post you write is going to be worth writing. Will you feel good about yourself? Is it important? Is it something that people may learn from? We want to tell our life stories on blogs which include the tiniest thing we saw or heard. But that isn’t good. So control. Filter out the things that need not be written about and do not deserve readers’ time.

Speciality Blogs: If you’ve claimed to specialize in certain topics, for example communication or sports, be consistent in writing about those. That does not mean you have to write just about those, you may go off-topic (this is a personal sphere, after all), but your readers may have subscribed due to your blog’s speciality and if you keep going too off-topic, they may want to reconsider their decision.

Advertising/Clutter: Make sure your blog is not too full of ads or other clutter (like alot of MySpace pages). This is modern times, computers have become fast and so has browsing, and in a technologically determined kind of way, we are alotting less time to each activity. Minimalism therefore becomes an important part of your blogging technique. The most important content should be directly in sight of the viewer and they shouldn’t have to travel around to find something. Keep it clutter free and make sure you don’t post too many advertisements which pull away from  the purpose of the blog.

These are the four reasons I found most important and agreeable. Although the results of polls may vary according to demographic and time period, I think it is safe to say that these are the most important factors we may want to consider.

Just a little extra bit of info, CashQuest said that “Nobody ever completely leaves.” They may read less but they never leave. Their article is interesting too, and worth a read. You may find it here.

Till later then, cherios!

Tags: Advertisements, Blog, Blogging Fingers, Blogging Tips, CashQuest, Make money, ProBlogger, Sell Your blog, technological determinism, Technology, Unsubscribe