HATE: How to get people to HATE your blog

by Tyler Dockery, creative lead at Dockery Design

I do a small amount of work with bloggers— helping them to redesign their sites, and punch up their content. One of the minor complaints that I hear rather often is that “people seem to HATE my blog. No matter what tack I take, visitors leave and don’t seem to return.” After analyzing many articles by different bloggers and reading over a ton of comments— I have put together this list of sure-fire ways to get people to HATE your blog

(INSIDE NOTE: NO BLOGGER I HAVE WORKED WITH USES ALL OF THESE— OR EVEN MOST OF THESE)

1. Hold Your Grudges Permanently
Remember that guy who used to call you rude names in the biology chatroom way back in college? Did you know that you can find him on the internet fairly easily? Wouldn’t it be totally sweet to burn them down on LinkedIn or track them down on Flickr or Facebook or Twitter or linked any number of Internet forums and tear them down the way they tore you down?

Well, stalkers are everywhere. Give it a rest. Better still, find out what that person is doing now, and comment on their materials. If they’re still rude, you can always just feel superior. If they’re making good endroads with their lives, why not help to pump them up and use the social networking as a new way to reinvent that relationship. Even better, get into personal contact with them, and write a piece together about how you both used to act, and what you are both doing now, and how you are both leaving those old ways behind. Its positive feedback for both of you. Above all, just let it go.

2. Correct People’s Comments and Nitpick Other Bloggers
Nothing angers a crowd like a self-appointed grammarian. These are the people who expand the comment sections needlessly and keep REAL readers from quality content. Sidelining discussions to correct the spelling and grammar of other people is tantamount to forgetting that the Web has no borders and it’s possible that English is not the first language spoken by website visitors. Ideas are far more important than the exact verbs, nouns, and adjectives used to express them, and any discussion is made more valuable with greater input.

Nitpick an article or blog post? Absolutely fair game, but usually frowned upon. Correct the grammar of your fellow forum friends? Prepare to get all sorts of nasty comments and potty humor. Best solution here: If you have a serious couterpoint, display it out objectively and if at all possible, give a link to one or more examples that the visitors can visit and make their own decisions. Are you upset because the discussion is making a turn that has been covered in another forum discussion or blog post? Send a link to that forum or blog post, and be done with it. Are you displeased that the forum has degraded into a digital shouting match, or a debate about a minor point? Best you can do here, is write a kindly reminder of the point which started before the name-calling, and make sure to quote it in your reply, and people may get back on track, but good luck all the same.

3. Be A Bastard
This should be the most obvious. Deliberately take up an unreasonable opposing point of view just to get a rise out of someone. This is most effective when you visit a site devoted to ONE Subject, and then state that just about everything related to that subject stinks. For example, visit a Macintosh forum and slam its operating system in favor of Windows Vista. Better yet, slam that operating system, and then post the same comment over and over again. Whether your comments are based in fact or not, they’re unlikely to be welcomed.

If you have a bone to pick, join the group, and start a new discussion. Its as easy as that. There is no need to butt in where you aren’t wanted. Check back in a few days. If the discussion has been removed, stop preaching an opposite point of view, and go elsewhere. If the discussion takes off, then feel free to say what you want, but expect to get slammed in return for that privilege.

4. Passionate Cluelessness
Okay, we get it that you have very strong design/political/religious views. Derailing a discussion of the benefits of a new computer graphics chip to present your views on personal grooming in endless detail may not be the best way to make friends and influence people.

This is the kind of derailment that will get you banned. That’s all I have to say. If you can’t talk about the discussion at hand, go elsewhere. No one likes to be preached to without asking.

5. Dispassionate Cluelessness
Search engines like Google provide the means for finding answers to many, many questions. At Dockery Design, I’m routinely amazed at how helpful people can be when others need assistance. However, even though the help is strongly available, it is unwise to abuse the patience of the provider by constantly clamoring for increasing amounts of help when the answer you seek is a simple Google search away.

Use Google or another search engine to find the answers to the questions at hand. Believe it or not, the answers are usually right there for the taking. If you got great help with an issue, make sure to tell people in your blog or twitter or social account— its just the right thing to do. Better yet, many of them will have a contribution button  where you can pledge a little bit of money. Was it really helpful? Is a cup of coffee too much to ask? Drop a couple of bucks. Time is money, so think of it as time you didn’t have to spend searching. Besides all that, it is a business expense and a tax writeoff anyway.

6. Insult Your Visitors and Other Bloggers
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. I cannot recall the last time I saw a positive exchange of ideas that resulted from one person calling another a moron, idiot, or worse names which I will not publish here. The difficulty is that most true morons, idiots, and worse will fail to recognize the truth of these words and react by replying in kind.

What exactly is to be gained by making rude comments? It won’t advance the conversation, and only makes you look like an uneducated fool. Best bet here is just to cut the thread. Make an apology if needed, or requote from before the argument started. If the person won’t relent, ignore them and take the high road. Eventually, other people will join your side. If not, and you started it, just get over it. Really.

7. Denounce People as Hitler or as a Nazi
Godwin’s Law. Become familiar with it. Compare anything but Hitler to Hitler and you lose. Compare anyone to a Nazi, and you set yourself up as the immediate fall guy. This is shortsighted at best, and will color you forever at worst.

Are you calling people Hitler or Nazis? Honestly? Repair your reputation by magnanimously retracting your comments. If possible, set up an “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong” page on your website. Send out notes about it to threads in forums, other blog sites, etc. Not only are you pointing out the error in your ways, but you can drive traffic to your site as well. Go ahead, apologize. Its not as hard as you think. If no one forgives you, at least you made the effort.

8. Promote Your Stuff. Endlessly.
Do you need a way to lose Twitter followers in a hurry? Do you need to have your signature scraped by forum administrators? Just keep offering up those links for your contests/site/book/iPhone app/job/pharmaceuticals/deals without a smidgen of additional worthwhile content.

If you are twittering 10+ times a day or 2+ times in a row with an advertisement link, just quit it. Really, just stop. If people are interested in your foot-fungus-ebook, they’ll go there. Everyone else will just sigh and skip it. By the 3rd or 4th time, you will probably just get flagged as spam. If your signature is a series of links, and you are posting simply to get people to see it— prepare for it to be deleted. See my preaching comments above.

If you really need those numbers and that traffic, why not try a strategic approach? Make some strategic partnerships. Promote on their websites, and have them promote on yours. Cross-sell your products or services (people who viewed this also viewed…). Why not run a contest through twitter for a prize? Often, this can really be helpful. If things aren’t working out, Please drop us a line at info@dockerydesign [dot] com and we’ll see what we can do to promote your business.

Tyler Dockery is a design consultant, business owner, and educator living in North Carolina. His company, Dockery Design services the Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill area through their graphic design firm and web design studio. Please feel free to visit them at http://www.dockerydesign.com