Stop frustrating your Readers!

Here's a bit of advice on behalf of your blog's readers, and today's Clear Blogging Tip: Stop frustrating your readers by doing these four things:

1. Partial sucks. Be it a partial post you have to click more to get the rest of, or worse, doing the same thing in your blogs's RSS feed, it's a bad, bad idea. Here's a rule of thumb well known in the newspaper business - 4 out of 5 people won't turn the page to get to the jump, the continuation of a story. Why do you think you're different?
2. If it moves or blinks, kill it. I'm talking about any sidebar object that changes it's appearance whatsoever, or uses ugly as a way of getting attention. If you want to start a "Me Wall" page with your blog's various awards, memberships, causes and counters, fine, go do it somewhere the rest of us don't have to look at it.
3. Too many ads is too many ads. Some bloggers seem to think the more ads, the more money and they're right - right up to when they go over the tipping point, their readers desert and they blog crashes and burns. How many ads are you running? Try pulling the runt of the lot.
4. Never, never, never, never tolerate spam on your blog. Spam comments are the leper bells of blogs - they ring out loud and clear that you don't care about your blog, so why should I read it? Do what you have to do, but never let spam annoy, frustrate and anger your readers.

The fewer ways you frustrate your readers - and the more ways what you write has value to them - the better.

Comments

[EastwoodDC]

Hi Bob, I just got your book for Christmas and I am liking it so far.
You have a good point about partial posts, but do you think this applies to comments as well? Currently people have to click a link to get to where they can see or make comments on my blog(s), and I'm wondering if I should have the comments on the main page too (I'm also wondering if it can be done).
The problem is that if there are too many comments, people might not scroll past them to see older posts.
Then again, maybe I shouldn't worry about getting too many comments just yet.