Friday, October 3, 2014

Let's Talk About... Email Subscriptions

Thrilling subject matter, huh?

Oddly enough, the idea of email subscriptions has been bumping around in my head for the past couple of days. To me, it always seemed like your email subscribers were the gold standard of subscribers. Anyone who subscribes to your blog is great, but those who choose to get notifications in their email were the hardcore readers, the ones who actually pay attention to what you're writing. That's how it was always sold to me, at least.

BUT, I've found that I'm rather annoyed by getting emails for blog posts. Now, I don't have many (one of them is my own, just so I can be sure my emails are coming and they look okay), but I don't even open the four or five that I do get from other blogs. I delete them. Every. Single. Day. I rarely even read the subject lines. Part of this is that I'm pretty inundated with email between the four accounts I maintain and I like to keep my inbox clean, but the other part is that I just don't want blog posts in my email. Where do I want blog posts? In a reader.

I open my Feedly reader at least five times a day and read posts. I like that every post is in the same place and that it's kept updated throughout the day. These aren't necessarily posts I'm going and commenting on, but I read just about every post that shows up in my reader. Feedly marks it as read once I'm done and if I want to save a post, it's simple to do so. (Obviously there are alternatives to Feedly--I generally like Bloglovin' too, but I find the Feedly app works better on my tablet--and I'm not saying Feedly is the greatest out there; it's just the reader I use.)

So I'm curious: Do you subscribe by email to blogs and actually read them? Have you been given the same impression about email subscriptions? How do you read posts, in general?

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