Since starting this blog in 2012, I have spent a lot of time trying to help other bloggers. After struggling a lot myself, and getting advice from blogging friends, I tried to pay that forward, by posting advice and suggestions about how new bloggers could possibly get a more rewarding experience from blogging.
Some of this advice has taken the form of gripes about the way some bloggers go about the process of blogging, and how an increasing number of bloggers treat it like the more instant social media platforms, like Facebook or Instagram. But I was always trying to help, I assure you.
The two biggest irritations have been mentioned by me more than once, and one of those was a subject of a ‘reminder’ blog post very recently.
‘Please follow my blog’, or ‘Please read my new post’ are not valid comments to leave on the site of another blogger. If you have read something they have written, then you should comment on that subject, not just ask to be read in return, or followed back because you have liked a post, or followed a blogger. I cannot even remember how many times I have complained about this previously, yet just this past week it has happened no less than a dozen times on my blog.
So to anyone thinking of doing this in the future, I have this warning.
If you do this on one of my posts as from tomorrow, I will not only refuse to ‘Approve’ that comment, I will mark it as ‘Spam’.
That’s how much I am fed up with people who constantly do this.
My most recent advice was about how to connect your site to your Gravatar image. On the same day I posted that, I had no less than six new followers who had failed to do this. So I could not find their own blog. Since then, I have counted more than three new followers every day who have not bothered to attach any link to their name or Gravatar image, so cannot be ‘found’. I know that these are not ‘Email only followers’, as WordPress kindly lets me know if someone is only following by email. Annoyingly, some of those bloggers had even ‘liked’ my post advising them to do this link, but had patently not bothered to read it.
My recent post about positive blogging spoke highly of the great community we have in WordPress, especially the committed new bloggers who have arrived in 2019. But there is still the ‘follow me back gang’, and the ‘no link followers’. It doesn’t seem to matter how much advice is put out there, they choose to ignore it.
After all this time, I do start to wonder why I bother.
beetleypete 