This morning is when I did my Welcome Wagon Friday post for Cozy Little House. After I choose three new blogs to feature, and I publish the post, I go back to find their email address so I can let them know. And two out of three this morning didn’t have their email address on their blog.
I ended up on the new Google+ pages for them. And that page drives me nuts. I can’t figure it out. Why couldn’t they have left it simple? Instead Google+ to me is an aggravation when I have to sift through the info and profiles there. I simply don’t like it. Is there anyone else out there that finds Google+ to be aggravating?
And to make it worse, I still didn’t find their email addresses.
And so then I go to Option 2, which is leaving them a comment on their latest posts. Two out of three had Word Verification enabled. Now I doubt these bloggers even know it is enabled in their Settings. But it causes me a lot of time and I seldom can get them right. This morning, possibly because I had not had my first sip of coffee, it took about ten tries to get it correct. By that time I was thoroughly aggravated.
Folks, you never know when a magazine editor or someone important is going to find your blog and want to contact you. HAVE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS WHERE IT CAN BE EASILY FOUND. If they have trouble figuring out how to contact you, they will likely give up and you will have lost a feature or whatever they had in mind for your blog.
Go to Settings and Comments and disable Word Verification. I promise you you will get more comments. Many bloggers will attempt to comment once on your blog, and after they’ve taken the time to leave you a comment, and they then get to the next step, Word Verification, I promise you they are ticked off. Because they’ve already written the comment. They don’t want to see it go down the drain. They actually liked your post enough to take time to do this. And then that box pops up with the letters and numbers that look like someone wrote them after a bottle of wine, and who on earth can read this stuff?
If you don’t want your email out there where someone can simply copy it, then do it like this (I’m using my own email address here for teaching purposes: brendakula at gmail dot com. They can’t copy that. They will have to write it out. And spammers don’t want to take the time to do that.
Do these two things and I promise you you will have done yourself a huge favor.
