BLOGGING: Don't Assume Your Blog Followers ...

There always seems to be a LOT of presumptions and assumptions thrown around and about blogging these days. That you need to blog a certain way, feature certain things, you have to be in it for the money. It often focuses on us, our blog, our writing, our style, but what about those that read your blog, those followers that come back time after time. Why are we making assumptions about those?!

Across the board it's time to stop the assumptions of finding this perfect reader we all seem to be after and remember why we started blogging and more often that not, just blog for ourselves.

So stop assuming that your blog readers;

Only use bloglovin
Please please please, I say this as a reader, link out your blog URL during a blog chat, not your bloglovin page. I'm pretty clued up and I'm sure if you're blog savvy you'll have a BL link on your page. While BL is really popular, it's not the only way to follow a blog, I know because it's not my preferred way (I only "follow" a blog on there because of the pressure of having to look like I follow your blog and so I can enter all your competitions - I actually use Feedly to read everything). Linking your BL link is just an extra annoying step for me, and my time is precious.

Want you to constantly talk blog

Obviously as a blog reader myself, if I have a liking for your blog I'm more than happy to follow you across different social media. Mainly because I'm nosy but I want to see what else goes on in your life - the things that you might not always get around to blogging about. But constantly talking blog all-the-time gets draining and I'll unclick. Throw a line out to your followers, engage with them, see what they get to too, it'll certainly help breach that reader - blogger bridge.

Are dumb

Regular readers are pretty wise, a hint of an undisclosed sponsored post can be smelt a mile off or a sudden 180 to constant PR posts. Integrity is a huge part of blogging, to me at least and regardless of how long you've being doing it for, you have to keep it real. So don't try and sneak out a sponsored post and pass it off like you didn't get something in return, your readers trust your words (or they should if they don't have any reason to doubt you) so respect them.

Are always following for the right reasons

Cynical to say but some "followers" may not be there for the right reasons, they might be fake, they might be just following and pay no attention to your blog and just hope you follow them back or because you wanted to reach a milestone and they are part of your follower quota. In other words, do things to make people follow you for the right reasons - you're approachable, your personality, your topics and just maybe because you let your blog grow organically over time.

Will always be happy

You can't please everyone in life so why expect to do so on your blog. You'll have readers that love some topics and hate others. Then you might have others that love every single thing you do, or they might just dig your photographs. Basically what I'm trying to say is that you can't make everyone happy with every single post (although if you do that's pretty awesome) so don't stress about trying too. Blog to make yourself happy - share the things that make you tick, that make you smile. 

Mind if you take a break

Life gets in the way of blogging at times, it's just a factor you have to deal with, but don't assume your readers need you to blog every single week if you can't handle it. If you can that's a high five to you, but sometimes we all burn out, we get bloggers block or you just go on holiday and you want to leave your blog standing for a while. It's fine to walk away for a week or two, most readers may not even notice because while we might love your blog, we're probably following far too many others to even note when one might not blog for a couple of days.

What do you wish people wouldn't amuse about blog readers?
What as a reader, do you wish more bloggers did or didn't do? I'd love to hear!