I’ve mentioned on my blog before that I believe in following back. Basically, if someone follows my blog and they have a book blog, I follow them back. I figure I won’t know if I really like their blog unless I give it a chance. Plus, I really like to support new bloggers, and lots of new followers are newer bloggers who are looking for ideas, support and relationships in the blogging community. I remember when I was a new blogger and each new follower was such a big deal – it’s something that I can do to support them.
BUT the one problem with this philosophy is that my Bloglovin’ account is a big disorganized mess and I finally decided that it was time for an overhaul. Bloglovin’ has lots of organizational features that I’ve been tempted to use, but the task of doing it just felt so overwhelming – I just couldn’t do it. Until this week. I don’t know why exactly, but I decided to tackle my Bloglovin’ feed!
The first step was to pare down on the blogs that I follow. Bloglovin’ said I followed over 1900 blogs!! Unfollowing was a big deal to me because it goes so against my personal philosophy, but when I really started to look through the blogs that I follow, I found that tons of them are completely defunct now. It truly amazes me the sheer number of bloggers who’ve come and gone in the three years I’ve been blogging! I was sad to see that the blogger at The Reading Obsession was no longer obsessed, the creator of The Reading Slump has been in a very long slump, the person behind The Procrastinator’s Corner has been procrastinating for years now, and The Book Hooker … apparently no longer hooking people on books (we all might be better off with that one!). There was part of me that wanted to just leave these since they’re not really clogging up my actual feed, but organizing the blogs I care about seemed like an impossible task with so many blogs that weren’t even in existence anymore!
So, I decided to just delete any blog that hasn’t had any new posts for at least the last three months. There were LOTS of them. Some bloggers suddenly mystappeared without a trace and some put up goodbye posts (I have to admit that I got a little sidetracked reading some of those – I don’t know why, but it fascinated me to read what was going on in people’s lives that made them decide to quit blogging), and some bloggers said that they were going on a “hiatus” two years ago and haven’t been seen since.
Next, I deleted:
Any blog that was not actually a book blog. Some blogs have the word “book” right in the title, but I swear there wasn’t a book in sight!
Blogs that aren’t in English. How on earth have I not already seen these in my feed and deleted them? I mean, I know I’ve been anti-unfollowing and all, but that was a bit ridiculous.
The last types of blogs I deleted were a little harder to decide on – blogs that featured content I’m honestly just not all that interested in. For instance:
Blogs that pretty much only post cover reveals and blitzes – I don’t have anything against those types of posts (I even post one every once in awhile myself), but I don’t typically read them unless something specific catches my eye about them, so if that’s the only thing on the blog, why am I following?
Blogs by authors who write in genres I’m not interested in
Blogs with only Waiting on Wednesday, Teaser Tuesday or (oddly) Feature and Follow Friday posts. (Really?? Why do you want people to follow your blog if you only post requests for more followers? I don’t get it!).
After all that, I got myself down to about 1100 blogs. I had deleted 800!! But, that number still seemed way high when I went to my blog list. That’s when I realized that Bloglovin’ was counting people in my count – AND that it was making me follow the person along with the blog every time I followed a new blog? Why? Now all those blogs I had just deleted were gone, but the people attached to them were still hanging out in my list. I don’t know why this bugged me so much, but it did. It took away from my feeling of organization! So, I went to deleting. Deleting people is faster – I’m not through my whole list yet, but my following list is now down to 866.
After I finish deleting people, my next step will be to put blogs in folders (UPDATE: Since lots of people had questions about this, I created a new post about creating folders, which you can find HERE) – I’ll create a Favorites List and I already have an Authors list (that I put authors into when I saw them). I’m trying to decide how else to organize them. Any ideas? I’d really love to know how you organize your Bloglovin’ accounts and what features you use. I use Bloglovin’ now, but it’s really inefficient and I’d like to streamline it if I can.
I follow a lot of bloggers via bloglovin. I haven’t given a second thought to organizing them thou. The way I use bloglovin, and this is definitely not the right way just the way I do it, is to skim the posts in the email I get from bloglovin everyday (or when I have time really) and then once in a while look at my feed and stop at posts that catch my eye.
I’m horrible. I know. If I really like a blog, I subscribe via email. I don’t even count my bloglovin followers as actual followers because I am sure more than a few are like me and only peruse the site sporatically.
This is pretty much exactly how I was using Bloglovin’ (and email). But I just suddenly decided I would like to be more organized about it. We shall see if it actually pays off.
I had do something similiar a while ago. It just felt disheartening everytime I opened my bloglovin’ and saw how many unread posts I had. I decided I’d rather be an active follower and just follow those whose posts interest me. I did feel guilty unfollowing people though. But like you said a lot had stopped blogging in the meantime anyway.
I use favourites folders now as well and it helps a lot.
I have total guilt over unfollowing, but I think this makes the most sense. Do people really want followers who aren’t actually ever looking at their blog? I actually have lots of those, and while the number is pretty to look at I’m much more excited about the followers who come and visit and even chat now and again!
I go to BL and see my feed. Any that I don’t want to read I hit Mark as Read and then go to the ones I want. If it looks like it will be involved I save it and I have my saves in several different categories. Then I go and read the ones I want to get to immediately. I wish BL had a feature that could tell me what blogs I rarely or never click out to. Then I’d know better who to delete. I didn’t know that about the people being separate from the blog. I’ll have to check that out.
That sounds like a very reasonable process. Mine has been very willy nilly up till this point and I’m hoping to make my Bloglovin’ time much more efficient.
i had to do it too i put folder for favourites, authors test ( for teh new blog i’m not sure where to categorise them) one folder for blog in my native langage and it’s get clearer really soon ^^
A test or newly following folder would probably be really useful. That way you could monitor them for a while.
I really, really need to organize my Bloglovin feed. I actually didn’t even know you could separate them into folders. I need to take advantage of that feature! At one time, I was following about 700 blogs but many of them had not had a new post in ages. I got rid of them and I am starting to get rid of a few blogs I rarely read. I mean, if I find myself just blindly marking the blog as read every time there is a new post, then I should probably delete it. If they never, ever post anything that interests me or make me want to comment or even read it, then why bother? I really hate unfollowing people, but I hate following people I never read also.
Exactly! That’s how I was feeling. I stand behind my decision to follow back, but after a certain trial period if the blog isn’t something I’m interested in, I shouldn’t just keep following blindly forever, right?
I follow blogs on Bloglovin, and I think it’s great when people follow me if that’s how they keep up with new posts, but I’ve never really looked around the site and figured out all the features. Thanks for the tips though on how to be a bit more organized. It would be nice to put people into folders based on TYPE of blog for me, I think.
-Lauren
That’s one thing I’m considering. At one point, I started categorizing into types (paranormal, contemporary, mix, etc), but that’s when I decided I really just needed to pare down my overall list before I could attack that.
Oh, I feel your pain, Nicole! I have my bloglovin’ feed organized like this:
Authors
Fave bloggers (those I know I will probably visit several times every week)
Young bloggers (just because it was easy)
Bloggers who post new stuff three times per week or less
New bloggers
I hope you’ll find a way to organize your feed to make it easier for you 🙂
Those sound like really useful categories. I especially like the idea of the New Blogger category. This would help me to both support new bloggers and kind of monitor them for a little while until they figure out what type of blog they want to be.
I didn’t even know you could organize your blogs in folders on bloglovin, haha. Apparently I only follow 53 blogs, but I already feel very disorganized. I can’t imagine the chaos of over 800 blogs!
I know, it’s crazy, right? And that’s way down from 1900!!
We can organise our Bloglovin feeds? That would be so helpful 🙂
One day I am going to read the instructions for something as soon as I sign up for it, not stumble along for months when the solution is already there :-/
Yeah, well, sometimes things are too hard to figure out at first and it’s just way easier to let someone else do it first and tell you how! 🙂
I do like Bloglovin’ for following blogs. I couldn’t deal with all those separate emails! I don’t really separate the blogs into categories, but I scan my feed every morning and either look immediately at the ones I’m interested in, or mark them using the “save” button and put them into a category to look at later, usually “comments.” I also use the “comments” category to keep track of posts I’ve commented on and want to check on later. I also have categories for things like “August Faves,” “Discussions,” “Books to Read,” etc.
When they added the categories feature for saved posts, it made BL far more useful for me. (Although I wish they would make them accessible from the sidebar and not only from the profile page. So annoying to have to click through two pages.)
See and I didn’t even know about the categories for saved posts – that does seem useful! I also wish that you could categorize blogs without having to go to the edit blogs page!
I can’t get over 1900 blogs.. LMAO I thought I had a lot at around 500.
I have about… 8 “folders” on my bloglovin feed. I put certain blogs in groups on how often I visit, which blog is following (lilybloom or after hours) and even where I found them. It’s like a TRIAL folder. Some recommends a blog to me — I add to the RECOMMENDED folder and it sits there for about 1-3 weeks until I move it to another folder LOL it’s a funky system.
I also have ones for non book blogs, touring companies etc.
I believe the word for my 1900 blogs is “insanity.” LOL! I think I will create a Newly Following folder for new blogs too – that system makes a lot of sense.
I don’t have nearly as many blogs that I’m following on Bloglovin! That is quite the organizational task you’ve taken on. I really rely on my daily email update from Bloglovin, and I scan through that to determine if there’s anything I want to read that’s been posted that day. I try not to let myself get more than a couple days behind on that though, because it quickly becomes overwhelming.
Yes, I use that email too, but I figured that I could be utilize the site better if I got it more under control. We shall see if it makes a difference!
I created folders and it has been working out well, I check posts there daily and look for posts that stand out and interest me.
Sounds like a good plan to me!
I need to seriously organise my Bloglovin feed too it’s such a scary mess right now. But I have deleted blogs that just do the memes as well, I honestly don’t see the point in blogging if that’s all you do. Great post Nicole. 🙂
I like Top Ten Tuesday posts, but those are the only ones I really ever read. (Oh, and Sunday Posts, but that doesn’t really feel like a meme to me). I know there are people who love all kinds of them, though – to each his own!
Great post! I really need to do this because I often see blogs that no longer hold interest for me when I’m scanning through my feed. I didn’t even know there were an option to create folders. I’m definitely going to make some changes. Any other organizing features we don’t know about?
Lory told me about the fact that you can categorize your saves too – I had no idea about that. (I haven’t really used the save feature in the past, but maybe I will now!)
I did a mini-version of this not too long ago, and it IS daunting, and sad really. Especially when I noticed that there were some blogs that I REALLY had liked that had disappeared. Those I kept on, in hopes of an eventual return (I am not holding my breath though), but it is HARD to unfollow. I tried to follow back like you did for a long time, but then I realized I was following blogs I flat out did NOT want to read. And the problem was, the ones that posted ONLY pre-fab posts (blitzes, cover reveals, etc) posted a LOT of them. SO those blogs were clogging my feed much more than others- AND I didn’t want to read it to begin with. Sadly, they had to go, because I was missing posts I DID want to read.
Now I want to organize into favorites and such, but I am worried because I know some features are public, and some are private, but I definitely don’t want to confuse those 😉 If you figure out how.. let me know!
Also- 1900 blogs!? HOW!?
Yeah, I was tempted to save a few (and actually did if they were relatively close to my three month cutoff). It was sad! I had the same problem with my feed. There are some blogs that post like three promos a day (or more!) and I just had to rid myself of them. There were a few that I kept that were borderline – there were a few reviews sprinkled in here and there. I figured I’ll monitor them in case the bloggers are just going through a slump at the moment and mostly only have time for promos. But if the ratio stays the same after a month or so, I’ll probably unfollow. I was being pretty conservative, but I got my following number down to 824, which is much more manageable! I think I’ll write a post this week about what I ended up doing with my folders because it seems to be working well.
I’m also in the process of organizing my Bloglovin’ feed. I made a “Favorites” folder for the blogs I visit almost every day. Then I made a “Rarely Visited” folder for the blogs I don’t look at often but don’t want to unfollow. I’m not sure what to do with all the blogs in between those categories.
Yeah, I’m trying to figure that out too. I have a few folders that were easy, but there’s still a good number of blogs that are uncategorized – I’m still working out what to do about those.
That sounds like a lot of work cleaning it out, great work getting that done. I have a bazillion blogs/people I follow too but I don’t really open my feed like ever so I don’t know how bad it has gotten.
Ha! I try to pay attention to my feed, though I can’t be as consistent about it as I’d like.
I actually like to keep my bloglovin feed as updated as possible. I only follow blogs which I am genuinely interested in reading and if I am able to connect to the blogger’s voice. This helps me a lot when I go blog hopping, and this way, I won’t miss a single blog in my feed when I go on my blogging rounds.
Good luck with the cleaning, btw! It requires a lot of time and hard work, tbh!
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