my new favorite reader: a Bloglovin’ tutorial

I recently broke up with Google Reader and switched to a new blog reader called Bloglovin’. For those of you who aren’t familiar with blog readers, they aggregate the latest posts from a person’s website subscriptions into one long email or web-based article. This makes blog reading less laborious and more discreet which, I understand, is completely necessary for those who enjoy a little blog-reading while on the clock at work.

If you’re an avid blog reader, you’re probably familiar with Google Reader. If you’re an avid blog reader and a blogger, you probably have a love/hate relationship with Google Reader. While it’s great for catching up on the 1,384 new posts you have yet to read, it also cheats your own blog out of page views. Lost page views means lost revenue since the reader’s eyeballs never actually hit your page and see advertisements displayed in the sidebar.

I’ve switched to Bloglovin’ for a few reasons:

1. It gives bloggers page views.
2. I can comment directly on posts.
3. It’s more aesthetically pleasing.

I put together a quick tutorial to show you the best features of this reader & why I won’t be going back to Google.

Below is a snapshot of the main page. Once you’ve created an account you can search for and follow your favorite blogs, categorize them however you like and read all unread posts either by date posted, category or blog name. One feature I like is being able to scroll through snapshots of posts from the main page.

Once a post is clicked on, another window will open the post with a nifty scroll bar at the top. From here you can move on to the next unread post by clicking “newer”, “older” or “oldest.”

As I mentioned before, the best part of Bloglovin’, from a blogger’s point-of-view, is that it brings viewers to your page which counts as a page view. Page views = profits from advertisers, something you don’t get from other readers.

Another thing I love about Bloglovin’ is that viewers can comment on posts directly since they’re already seeing the post from your blog. No more having to click through from a reader to comment. I can tell you I comment on way more blogs now that I use Bloglovin’, which I hear is also good way to get exposure for your own blog if you have one!

I know what many of you are going to ask. Can I import my current feed into Bloglovin’? The short answer is YES…

HOWEVER, Google Reader has recently stopped allowing you to download the necessary OPML file with all of your subscriptions. If any of you can figure out how to get your subscriptions into OPML format, let me know in the comments!

For you Google Reader users, it might be easiest to manually search and add blogs – a few at a time of course. See the first tutorial image for the search box location. If you use another reader, you should be able to figure out how to get that OPML file and import it.

UPDATE: Rachel figured out how to import from Google Reader! “I just used the Takeout export on Google Reader and saved it as a xml file and then imported to Bloglovin.” Thanks for sharing this, Rachel!

Good content is important but a big part of what I love about reading blogs are the visual aesthetics – the unique layout, colors and fonts that make up the experience of reading a blog. These are all  lost with other readers which displays posts in an email-type format.  This is the main reason I initially made the switch.

It takes a little bit of getting used to but now that I have my full list of blogs added, I’ll never go back. Hopefully this tutorial was helpful!

Questions of the day: What readers do you use? Do you read blogs purely for the content or for the overall experience of visiting the website too?

PS. How to claim your blog on Bloglovin’ (first link).

PPS. You can follow me here - post your link below and I’ll follow back if I don’t already!