Five Surefire Ways To Lose Readers

Most people blog because they want to share something–their opinion, their knowledge, or a bit about their daily life.  Others do it for more cathartic reasons; after all I have found writing to be very therapeutic and it often helps relieve stress to “get stuff of my chest” through the keyboard.  Regardless of your motivation, it is flattering when others read what you write and find inspiration in your words.  I recently shared a few ways to attract an audience, so now I’ll share ways to lose one.

Five Ways to Lose Readers

1.  Be a know-it-all.  Nobody likes to listen to a know-it-all, and they don’t like to read stuff from one, either.  If you want to really connect with people then you have to share both your successes and your failures.  I readily admit to my screw-ups when blogging, and then share the lessons learned from that experience in the hopes that it will help someone else.

2.  Don’t write anything for weeks.  There will be times when you simply cannot meet your traditional blog schedule.  That’s fine; most readers recognize that you have a life and will forgive a short vacation from posting.  However, when a few days turns into a few weeks, or even months, your site goes stale.  Readers have a lot of options these days, and if you fail to put out any new material for a long time you might just become dead weight on their feed reader.

3.  Be insulting.  What’s that old saying, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all?”  Yeah, I heard that a lot growing up because I was rather opinionated (still am).  But this is a case where you want to take the moral high-road.  It’s fine to disagree with other bloggers, or readers who leave comments, but do so respectfully and then thank them for sharing their opinion.  I love a good argument, and oddly enough am closest to those I typically disagree with, but only because they are as respectful of my opinion as they are of mine.

4.  Do not engage readers. Most bloggers will admit that they could do a better job of interacting with readers–via email or comments.  So could I.  But I do try to make an effort to respond to those who take the time to email me with questions or comments, and I try to respond to comments on individual articles.  One note about this, blog authors can sometimes be “thread-killers” in that they’ll jump in the middle of a particular volley of comments and squash the whole discussion.  It isn’t necessary to ALWAYS repond to every single comment, or interject your own opinion in a heated debate.  Let your readers battle it out; that’s what builds a sense of community at your blog.

5.  Allow ads to dominate your theme.  A few blog advertisements are acceptable.  In fact, I take them as a sign of a healthy blog, and I personally have no problems with bloggers earning a part-time (or full-time) living from their work.  After all, they are providing content to me for free, usually at their own expense.  But you can take monetizing too far and allow ads to dominate your blog’s theme.  While sneaking in the occasional affiliate link is fine, you wouldn’t want every single sentence to include an ad.  And you wouldn’t want 3/4 of your page to be taken up by banner advertisements, leaving only a small fraction of space for your content.  After all, it is your content that readers return to see, not the latest deals from eBay.

Photo courtesy of lepiaf.geo

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