Should We Care About Unsubscribers?
I am not sure if aliens captured me or if someone tried to do a lobotomy on me using a butter knife and a tire iron but it has been the kind of day where I can’t tell you what happened or how so much time has passed.
All I know is that the sun has set and I feel like someone has worked me over. Years of contact sports have made me quite familiar with many aches and pains so the ones that have chosen to visit me today are the familiar sort.
That is my way of saying that I am pretty certain the back pain comes from two hours of basketball last night and not the aliens, but one can never be sure ‘cuz the little green men are devious.
Readers Come & Go
I don’t pay as much attention to my stats as I once did, at least not on a global level. I tend to focus more upon subscribers and though I have a respectable number it is small enough that I notice when people disappear.
When people disappear I tend to shrug my shoulders and just move on because there are a million reasons why they might choose to go. The primary one is that these words don’t provide enough value to make it worth their time to continue coming by.
I am not going to lie and say that it never bothers me or that I never think about it because I do for personal and professional reasons.
If the goal is to build something bigger here and to turn this into something more than it is important to pay attention to what people do and to figure out what the draw is.
Once you know why they visit and what they want you do your best to give them more and then they recognize that they can’t afford not to keep visiting.
That is the theory and in practice it tends to work except I don’t listen to my own advice, nor to any other. I just keep marching to the sound of an a drummer who has no rhythm because I like doing things my way.
And I believe that doing it my way will lead to where I want to go, albeit at a slower pace than I might like.
A Lost Day
Remember up above when I said today feels like a lost day and I wondered about little green men? Well I feel like I should tell you that the Shmata Queen hasn’t seen Inception yet and she needs to. Maybe she’ll get lucky and see it with me,
Casablanca is still my favorite movie and I’m not sure that I would rank Inception in my top ten but it is good enough to merit watching.
Don’t ask me to give you a list tonight of my favorites because today has drained me and after walking through mud for 18 hours I don’t have a list to share.
But I will tell you that I watched The Notebook this summer and was pleasantly surprised.
Lost days like today make me a bit crazy. I don’t particularly enjoy this feeling of wondering where the time went because it is not associated with feeling like I was productive and that is not easy.
Not easy because I have this long list of things that have to be done and this sense that if I don’t figure out how to move them from “to do” to “done” something bad will happen.
It is probably not true but I have that little itch that makes me wonder and I am having trouble shaking it off.
What Kind Of Blogger Are You?
Maybe that uneasy feeling is what is pushing me to look at unsubscribers and to think about why they are moving on. Maybe that is what has me taking the hard look and asking what kind of blogger am I because success in blogging is related to knowing the answers to questions like that
Or maybe it is not.
Maybe it is the muscle spasms that never used to visit me but now consider themselves invited guests. Maybe it is tied into the ongoing fight with aging and frustration with myself for not adhering to a diet.
Or maybe it is not.
Might be something else entirely but what I am certain of is that writing always makes me feel better even when the posts I write aren’t quite as good as I hope them to be.
Readers come and readers go. If you show some passion and personality and invite them to join you on your journey many will walk with you for quite some distance and a few might even go all the way.
What do you think?
Lori November 22, 2013 at 1:50 pm
TheJackBÂ It is sad to see them go! When I look back at my old post and see all the old friends there it makes me miss my early days of blogging. But I think it’s like life (IRL) where people come and go. Why should we expect it to be any different online, much as we wish it were different.
TheJackB November 22, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Lori Hi Lori, that is a good way of describing it. We give and take and then move along our way. Although I think it is sometimes sad to see some of them go.
Lori November 21, 2013 at 5:34 am
Funny you should be talking about this Jack! I’ve noticed a sort of trend at my place. I liken it to friendships which exist for a while and then pass away, having served their “purpose”. If we are changing and evolving, which we are, then the “people” who resonate with us will change as well either by leaving and being replaced by others or by evolving in the same way. In that way, unsubscribes are a logical part of the blogging life. As long as there are new subscribes to replace them!
🙂
Lori
TheJackB November 20, 2013 at 10:49 pm
Natalie the Singingfool Clearly you have excellent taste in movies. 🙂
TheJackB November 20, 2013 at 10:49 pm
wonderoftech Hey Carolyn, I can imagine that “direct” approach is harder than when someone just has to point and click to be removed from a service.
Clearly they don’t know what they are missing and as soon as they leave I am certain all of their tech breaks down.
Natalie the Singingfool November 20, 2013 at 5:42 pm
Ah yes, unsubscribers. The exquisite agony. I’ve philosophically convinced myself to not care, as caring will send me into the depths of emotional torment. I agree with all you say on the subject – the right readers will come, and not because I forced them to stay.
Also: Casablanca is one of my favorites, too, and I really enjoyed Inception, so I think we should be movie buddies. 😉
wonderoftech November 20, 2013 at 4:35 am
Unsubscribers take that butter knife, stab me in the heart and then twist it. I find out about unsubscribers because there is no button to push, unsubscribers have to email me and request to be taken off of my email list. So I feel your pain every time I get one of those emails.
How could they not want to relish every word of our stellar content? Certainly they have nothing better to do with their time than be enriched by our eloquence. What’s so important that an email notification of a new article is an offense to them?
Perhaps they have been bodysnatched by aliens.