Alienate Your Blog Readers*The following guest post is by Duncan*

Have you ever felt like your blog readers are just a hassle to your site? Using up all your bandwidth and leaving messy comments all over the place?

If so, you need some tips in how to alienate them and stop them coming back for good. Just follow these 4 simple tips and you’ll soon be the only one reading your posts in peace and quiet.

Insult Their Intelligence

Thinking that you are more intelligent than your readers and assuming they won’t understand if you start talking technical is one way to annoy them.

You can of course alienate readers by being over-geeky, but this is nowhere near as effective as stopping to explaining every other word, or saying things such as “I would explain about this further, but it’s for a more proficient audience”. BTW ‘proficient’ is an adjective meaning ‘competent’ or ‘adept’. If you don’t know what these words mean either…go away.

Make Stuff Up

Following on from the last point, you can both anger and patronize your readers by making things up in your posts as well. Firstly, your readers will see right through it and become angry that you have the gall to lie to them, and they will then feel patronized by the fact you thought you would get away it.

I once lost over 30,000 subscribers to my blog overnight when I lied about my gender. My readers Google-imaged my name and found out quite quickly I was not in fact a girl.

Ignore Your Load Time

Do your pages take lots of time to load? This may be the reason why most people leave!

Slow load time is one of the top reasons why people give up on brands. Don’t be one of them!

Ensure your web hosting is reliable and your images are optimized to achieve higher load time and build better user experience.

Not Proof Reading

Nobody is perfect and expecting bloggers to write without making any mistakes is unreasonably. However, when you read posts that have quite obviously been thrown together in ten minutes and have more mistakes that a dyslexic child’s workbook, it suggests that they don’t really care about what they are writing.

If they cannot take the time to go over what they have written a couple of times and think carefully about their sentence structure, why should a reader invest any time in digesting what they have to say?

Always check Grammar and spelling before publishing your article. Never miss this step.

Disallow Comments

If you’re confident in what you are saying and you think you’ve pretty much covered all the bases, why should you throw your posts open to the audience?

Believe it or not, blog readers like to have their say and often consider it arrogant when a blogger does not allow comments. The Internet is built on freedom of speech and choosing to terminate a conversation because you think there is nothing left to add will likely rile your readers beyond belief. Just in case you’re wondering ‘terminate’ is a verb meaning ‘to end’ or ‘finish’.

If, on the off chance you don’t want to alienate your readers, you might like to do the opposite of the advice given here and instead write honest, well thought out and intelligent posts, having the decency to allow your readers to leave their comments if they wish. This will help build trust and respect between you and your readers, and leave everyone much happier.

Image by TheAlieness

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