…and, more importantly, why I chose to truncate my blog posts on BlogLovin.

First, I wanted to say that if you’re a reader of my posts via BlogLovin, my apologies for making this small change. Hope it won’t be too much of an inconvenience, but it’s with good reason and am hopeful everyone understands after reading the “why” behind my decision.

I personally love BlogLovin and use it myself to stay in touch with my favorite blogs. They make it easy to read your favorites in one convenient spot, save posts within their own system or save them to your Pinterest boards. They have made it too easy in fact that bloggers are losing page views / commentary / connection with their readership.

You see, BlogLovin makes it convenient for you to read an entire blog post within their own site / app. Meaning, my blog isn’t getting the credit in google analytics. And when my analytics are skewed, it affects opportunities behind the scenes. Just the other day I was denied entry into a program based solely on my page view numbers. It was a program that would highly benefit my readership and myself. When I received the denial notice, I gave it some thought and realized I could easily take back ownership of my page views by redirecting people to my site to read a post in its entirety.

Confused?

Here’s an example of my blog post on the BlogLovin app before I made the adjustment. You can keep scrolling down to read my entire post…

And here’s how it looks now…

Those 3 “…” after the word oreos means you need to click through to my site to read the rest of the post. I am so grateful to have nearly 10,000 readers following along over there…and those potential 10,000 click throughs for each post will certainly give me the boost needed to keep opportunities coming in for my site.

What BlogLovin is doing is basically scraping my entire site / posts. The reason I left Blogger, for example, was to have more ownership of my content. Not that BlogLovin is controlling my content…but they are certainly controlling my analytics and page views. And that isn’t making me very happy.

If you blog on WordPress and wonder how to remedy this for yourself, it’s SO easy! Just a couple steps involved. First, from your WordPress dashboard, locate settings and then click reading…

Within the reading settings, click “summary” instead of “full text”…

One thing to note is that if you have readers signed up for e-mail delivery of your post, this will likely affect them. My e-mail delivery is via ConvertKit and it was simple enough to copy / paste my blog posts into that broadcast for my readers.

IMPORTANT: If my readers sign up for e-mail delivery, I’m going to continue sending the full blog post content in an e-mail. So if you are one of my e-mail delivery friends, not to worry! If you would like to continue reading my posts in their entirety and are reading via BlogLovin, this is an option for you – and of course, I’d love to have you join my e-mail list to receive those.

Again, sorry for any inconvenience! Some have very strong opinions about truncated posts in their feed readers and I totally understand. It can be annoying. But what I would kindly ask is to keep in mind that it’s simply one extra click to pop over to my site to read the post…and it’s for a bigger, better purpose = to help this blog keep running and bring new opportunities to this old blogger.

Hope you are having a great weekend!