Forbes and Harvard Business Review are two of the largest and most interesting business publications out there. Yet, every time I visit their blogs online there are annoying intermediary pages that I have to click the “skip” button. I am on about ten social media platforms and I visit them each several times a week. I found that an article I published on Twitter about how meditation changes your brain became very popular with a crowd that was interested in marketing of all things. So, I published yet another article about spirituality with a title including the word “mindfulness” and how it affects your brain. Another success. The very next day, I decided that my Stumbleupon followers would love to read about meditation and the brain, so I sourced some articles from Google.
The first articles that showed up were from Forbes and HBR. Unfortunately, the page that first came up from HBR was completely black with a “skip” button and a pop up. I think they were trying to strong-arm me into joining their newsletter. When I published the article on Stumbleupon, the photo section showed a black page — how unattractive. HBR might be getting lots of followers on their newsletter, but they are basically outcasting themselves from having a chance to ever make it on Stumbleupon! Forbes basically does the same thing except they make you wait twenty seconds before you skip their advertisement. How annoying.
As with any other business decision, you gain in one place and you lose in another. But, ruining your chances on social media is not a good decision in 2015, especially when the networks are focusing so heavily on photos! If I were running a huge blog, I would have very expensive and clear photos that appear before anything else. You might ask why I am not doing this now. The answer is that we are a very small blog and our budget doesn’t permit for that — yet!