losing followers | Lucky Otters Haven

I just saw this under “related posts” under my last post and thought it was good enough to deserve a reblog.

As a blogger, I admit I’m guilty of doing some of these things myself. So I’m writing this post as a reminder to myself to stop doing these things, and hope other bloggers can take away something from this list too.

1. Don’t allow comments.

Some blogs, especially those dealing with mental illness or abuse, don’t allow comments because negative comments can be very triggering to people struggling with these things, and you are going to get negative comments. It can’t be avoided. But as a general rule, it’s good to allow comments because it makes your blog more interactive. Real conversations get started that way and build a feeling of community, which can make your followers stick around and your blog more engaging.

2. Be a comment nazi.

Some bloggers don’t want anyone to disagree with them and will not approve or delete comments that question the blogger’s…

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As a blogger, I always worry when I lose followers, even if it’s only a few. For the past few weeks my number of followers has remained steady (and the number of visitors and views keeps going up, thanks to the search engines and continuing popularity of certain posts I wrote a while back), but this week I lost about 4 followers. Today I have 1314 followers; a week ago I had 1318.

I don’t know who these followers were, and there could be any number of reasons why they’re not following me anymore, including something as impersonal as a WordPress glitch (it’s happened before; in fact it happened to me yesterday: I had to re-follow Bluebird of Bitterness, who I never knowingly unfollowed). They could also be spam accounts who unfollowed me. But I worry just the same, and I always start fretting about what I might have said that may have offended someone.

But what sort of blog would this be if I never offended anyone? A boring one, probably. Of course I don’t intentionally try to offend, but whenever you state an opinion, someone might disagree with you. It really can’t be avoided. My blog is so I don’t have to keep my opinions all to myself! I probably didn’t offend anyone anyway, at least not enough for them to unfollow me, and even if I did why I am so worried about four followers who I can’t even identify and might have been bogus accounts anyway?

ETA: Twenty minutes after posting this, I gained three followers. 🙂 I don’t know if they’re the same ones or not.