Readers leave a blog for many reasons and it’s your job to find out what those reasons are and make sure readers are not leaving because they are annoyed.
Speed Kills
One of my pet peeves is slow blogs. I’m very intolerant of websites or blogs that take more than one second to load the page. If I have to wait, for pictures or ads to load or the server is over utilized, I move on to the next blog. My intolerance for slow sites has increased with the increase in competition on the Internet. I only have so much time to read each day and there are always more articles then I have time to read, I don’t have time to wait for a slow site. If fact, after I have found a slow site, I will usually avoid going back to it again even if an article title catches my eye from that site.
Here are some other things that can annoy readers;
1. Flip-Flopping
The best blogs are written by seasoned experts in their field of interest. If you are building a blog and you want to become a credible expert, then you need to have consistent positions. One of the quickest ways to reduce your credible authority is to change positions on topics that you previously wrote about. This is a dead giveaway of someone trying to ‘fake it until you make it’. While it is true that a strong consistent position will cause those who disagree with you to become annoyed, they will still respect your opinion more than if you flip-flop and those that agree with you will increase their respect for you as you reinforce your position with article after article.
2. Clutter (trackbacks, widgets, ads, unorganized sections, etc.)
New bloggers seem to make these mistakes as they are learning and experimenting with the many different tools and services available to bloggers. The only problem is that many of these are not perceived as useful information to readers, and they are certainly not unique. Readers are primarily looking for useful and unique information.
3. Comments
Making readers login before leaving a comment
Only 1%-5% of readers leave a comment when reading a blog article. Comments are very important to blogs because they provide the interaction that other readers are looking for, while extending the conversation an idea. Comments open the door for more readers to find unique and useful information on your site. Readers hate having to login before leaving a comment and many will just leave without commenting at all – stopping the conversation and limiting your blogs attractiveness for other readers. The best way to increase the conversion on your blog is to make commenting as easy as possible. The only downside is that blog owners have to spend time responding to readers, deal with comment spam and answer questions, which can be very time consuming.
Forcing readers to enter a captcha (requires that the user type the letters or digits of a distorted image that appears on the screen) when leaving a comment
Again, comments don’t like to have to enter a strange letter sequence when leaving a command, if you feel the need add this to limit spam, then it should only happen once and after then, you blog should remember the person by name or email address and not ask them again.
Delaying comments from being posted
Readers like to read their comment as it would appear right after they post it. Delaying the posting of their comment forces them to try and remember to come back to your blog to verify that their comment was posted. This may be no annoying for readers to continue commenting on your blog.
4. Navigation - not being able to find what they are looking for (no search, no menu, no categories, no archives, etc)
After reading an article or two, many readers will begin to wonder around your site with your navigation options. If they cannot quickly find what they are looking for, they will become annoyed and leave.
5. Missing information that the readers expect (partial RSS, number of comments on each article, the date that the article was written, advertising page, about us page, etc)
Blogging has grown into an entire industry, which has developed into blog standards that blog readers have come to expect. Make sure your blog meets your reader’s expectations.
6. Page jumping up/down while you are trying to read
I can only think of a few blogs that have widgets that take so long to load that I’m usually half way down the page, when the page load completes and jumps the page position to the top of the page. This is very annoying as you can imagine.
7. Not fully supported in your browser
This is a common issue that can quickly be tested. Most of the blogging platforms have accounted for this, but keep this in mind when you move to your own custom blog or customize your template.
Here is a list of tools and techniques that I used to measure how annoyed my readers.
How to measure how annoyed readers are:
1. Test your own features and navigation
2. Ask your readers for feedback
3. Check your bounce rate with Google Analytics
4. Check your page per users with Compete.com
5. Check your speed with Alexa.com
6. Test with multiple browsers
Style
These tools are great to discover were you can improve your blog. The only other thing to address is style. Everyone has a different favorite color and a favorite style that is reflected in the blogs that they like. With that in mind, your blog will always be annoying to someone. All you can do is try to minimize the number of people that are annoyed. Style also goes with topics. For example, if your blog is about hunting you may need to use camouflage colors like green, brown and black to your target audience. Style is a game changer, because depending on your target audience, your perception of what is annoying to readers may be completely wrong.