*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.
Contents
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.
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Contributor
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Well I was a bit confused about the reason why you wrote a piece like this. But it is understandable that blog comments can be seen as a nuisance, I haven’t (gotten) this problem yet.
So I’ll take the last tips to my hand.
Hmm, I never knew lying could be such a bothersome to people, losing 30.000 subscribers. I consider that a lot!
However I believe disallowing comments should be the best choice if you don’t want people commenting. In my opinion everyone should be able to comment.
Thanks for sharing these tips, I will use them counter wise 😉
Definitely different approach, I usually read blogs pertaining to how to get more traffic, keep loyal readers etc…etc…but this one, it’s really interesting, insulting ones intelligence can really be irritating plus other things mentioned here.
You really have to absorb this in a different angle. Nice read.
I am usually mortified to find out that what I am saying is not quite true or I somehow manage to let more than 1 typo through … and I try to correct it as soon as I see it or it is pointed out to me.
With regards to comments, though, recent personal drama caused me to close comments on my blog for a while. With a personal blog, things get slightly less easy.
LOL. Great post about everything not to do. Love it. My biggest pet peeve is the spelling thing. Really? They have a button in WordPress that will do spell check. Use it!
quite a different one but i didn’t get your purpose of posting
Totally different approach, but it will work.
Thank you.
As i m new in internet marketing so i hope this will help me. Thank you.
Great post. Everyone should be able to comment.
Thank you very much. This is one of the best post post i read on Blogging tips.
Great observations. Another one, IMO, is: making readers register to post comments on your blog.