I’ve very pleased to welcome Jeri Dansky as my guest blogger for this week. Jeri is well-known in the organizing industry as a go-to person for anything to do with organizing products, and her blog is currently enjoyed by over 3600 readers. She is also one of our Professional Organizers Blog Carnival Star Bloggers.

In my blog and my tweets, I like to share good blog posts I find from others in my field, or related fields. But all too often I find myself NOT sharing a good post, for one of these reasons:

1. There’s a “hire me” call to action at the end of the post — or any other call to action that just doesn’t feel right.

As I said, I’ll gladly share posts from people who might be considered my competitors, but sharing a post that specifically encourages someone to hire them (rather than me) is pushing it too far. (On the other hand, if the reader likes the other person’s content and therefore wants to investigate hiring that person, then fine.)

I also just don’t like how pushy some blog posts sound. If I’m sharing a post, I want my readers to be getting good information, not a sales pitch — or a paragraph begging the reader to follow the writer on Facebook.

I know there’s lots of advice out there saying blog posts SHOULD include calls to action — and if they work for the blogger, then fine! I just won’t be sharing those posts.

2. The post is undated.

I don’t care if it’s a supposedly timeless post; I still want to know when it was written. I’ll quote from and link to old posts that truly have timeless information — but not to undated posts.

3. The images used aren’t credited and/or appear to involve copyright violation.

If the image isn’t a photo you took or a picture you drew, I expect to see a credit and a link to the source. And if it’s a picture of something other than a product being sold, where the link is probably all the vendor cares about, I also expect to see something that tells me the image is being used appropriately: a Creative Commons link, a note that the image is used with permission, etc. For example, the iStockphoto license agreement says you may not “use the Content for editorial purposes without including the following credit adjacent to the Content or in audio/visual production credits: “©iStockphoto.com/Artist’s Member Name]”

Fortunately, there are enough wonderful posts out there that DON’T have any of these drawbacks — because I like to share good stuff!

The above post originally appeared on Jeri’s Google+ page and has been reproduced here with her permission.

What about you? What factors will prevent you from sharing a colleague’s blog post?

Photo ©Depositphotos / Cienpies Design & Communication