Ruining relationships - One reader at a time
August 23rd, 2007 | by Brook Durant |
Ruining relationships - One reader at a time
The other day I wrote a piece titled Building relationships - One reader at a time in which I detailed some practical methods to gain a readers trust. The objective was to get people to begin looking at different ways to build relationships with those who read their blogs, and start working at the methods they came up with. This time around I’m going to examine a few ways to ruin the relationship you have with your current readers. I’m also going to teach you some “tips n’ tricks” that will assure potential new readers run as fast as they can away from your blog.
This is when you want to do things such as insult their intelligence, mock them, lie to them, and cuss at them. You want to overwhelm them with advertisements, and the more risque’ those ads are the better. Oh and be certain to embed a music player of some sort and set it to autoplay. Take a moment and consider how many ways you could potentially offend your readers…
Good now that you’ve done that take another good hard look at your website and ask yourself if you are offending readers. Don’t just compare my suggested offenses, but consider other ones I haven’t. We work in a very visual, and some what auditory medium. If you give it some though I’m sure you can come up with at least a few ways to offend readers.
- Online forums
- Comment sections of other blogs
- Online blogging communites (think blogcatalog, mybloglog, etc)
- Social networking sites
I’m sure if you give it a few moments of thought you can come up with a myriad of places in which to disparage the blogging community. Remember our goal is to strike a large target, not an individual. We want it to reverberate with many. As with anything else worth your while you should go into this with a gameplan. It will help save you time and effort. Once again I’ll remind you the objective isn’t to make everyone hate you. The objective is to get them to distrust you and question your motives. For example going to another blogs comment section and saying something “mean” about another blog altogether. Something like this works for two reasons. First because it will make people reading your comment a little hesitant to deal with you. After all if you’re willing to attack one blog in a public setting you’ll likely attack others. The second reason that it works is because chances are it will be totally off topic. This is disrespectful to the blog operator(s) and while not a direct vindictive attack it will certainly make them feel a little cornered.
Failure to follow through is much like disparaging the community. Neither method is a direct attack but they both leave lingering doubts. If you want to eliminate readers in droves try a combination of the two methods. The reason these methods work better on a large scale than offending your readers is simple. If you write or display something offensive to one person there’s sure to be 3 to take their place who aren’t offended. That’s why offending readers is precision attack while disparaging and not following through are more of a widespread offensive posture.
I hope I gave you some ideas to help you in your efforts to lose readers. More importantly I hope that you will take a look at your own roll in the bloggin community and see what you might be doing that is costing you readers. Remember that if you lose one you’ve probably lost 100 viewers by proxy along with that person. No doubt there are many more ways to lose readers, but these three areas should give you a good starting point. Before we close I’d just like to ask what you have done within the past week to lose some of your audience? As for myself I posted a comment on another blog that had absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. I had clicked on the wrong tab and wasn’t paying any attention so there I was responding to something very specific on one blog in another blog. And of course for good measure I made sure to include my link that way people would know exactly who had done it. What about?
Don't forget to subscribe to A Blog about Nothing's RSS feed!
By Bryan@OneMansGoal.Com on Aug 23, 2007
As I was reading your other post about building relationships, I was actually thinking that this would be a good follow up post. I guess we think a like.
By A Blog about Nothing on Aug 23, 2007
I guess we’re either both great minds, or we’re lunatics.
But yes I suddenly realized that contrasting the two sides of the coin might be useful to someone.
By James - Visualized.Feel.Abundance on Aug 24, 2007
That last part about following through is what break most blogs!
Cheers
James
By A Blog about Nothing on Aug 24, 2007
James - And I believe that the last part is the one part we as bloggers miss the most often. Truthfully though it’s not just blogs. It’s almost anything online. There isn’t a sense of urgency when you aren’t dealing with someone face to face or even over the phone. I know when a client sends me an email I tend to be much more lax about answering it, sometimes triaging it to the next day, than I am with a phone call.
By Leo on Oct 29, 2007
Its a case of remembering “why” we started online in the first place…if we give “content” we will “get” in the long run.
Its a case of remebering what the visitor wants first..
By A Blog about Nothing on Oct 31, 2007
Leo - Good point, but to be perfectly honest we concern ourselves with ourselves more often than with our readers. At least that is my experience.