So you’re bored with blogging. You have other things to do – like eat, sleep, go out, work. You know – boring “real life” stuff. Besides, thinking about it, blogging is for computer nerds and failed writers.
Not to worry – help is at hand. Here are 10 ways to kill your blog. Let’s begin.
1. Stop Writing
What? That’s too simple – of course your blog will die if you stop writing? Well, yes, if you stop writing altogether. But be smarter about it – change your writing habits. If you write daily, change to once a week (and vice versa). If you want to lose your readers, confuse them.
2. Be Obnoxious
People like to be respected – your readers are no different. So be obnoxious. This can take many shapes – talking down to them in comment replies (if you reply at all); using made-up words that make you sound wanky; and making them feel you’re a hundred times smarter than they are. Be mean – and keep those pesky readers away.
3. Close Your Comments
People like to be heard, and we especially like to be heard when we read something that either inspires or polarizes us. So take away that option from your blog, and make your site a talking head instead. Unless you’re Seth Godin or Leo Babauta, you’ll soon see your blog’s popularity shrink, wither and probably die.
4. Use Captchas
When I was younger, I used to love stuff like the Rubiks Cube and 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzles. Now, though, since time is a precious commodity, I like things to be simple and easy to do. So install a crazy ass captcha on your blog that no-one can decipher and make people pull their hair out from frustration – great way to scare readers away!
5. Limit the Options
When blog readers read a great post, very often they want to share it. Of course, if you’re trying to kill your blog then you don’t want that sucker shared a lot. So limit the amount of sharing options – instead of making it easy to share on whatever networks the reader wants to, limit it to Facebook and Twitter. After all, they’re the only real social networks that are important to bloggers. Right..?
6. Screw Formatting
Because blogs can be read on different browsers and computer screen resolutions/displays, there’s no real point in formatting your post – it’ll never look good on every reading option. Instead, bunch all your words into one long-ass paragraph; don’t use images; and make your font 9-pixel Copperplate. Job done.
7. Die, Navigation, Die
Think of the world’s biggest maze. Then think of the world’s biggest maze at night. Then think of you trying to navigate the world’s biggest maze, at night, in a blindfold. Now – make your blog’s navigation that much fun, and make it easy for your readers to get lost and not know how to get back home. Lost readers = frustration = see ya!
8. Search What Now?
If you really want to kill your blog quickly, you could even combine a couple of the ways here. For example, if you have crappy navigation, make sure you don’t have a Search Box to at least let your readers find what they’re after. Add in no Archive section and boom, you have one heck of a lost blog happening!
9. Subscribing is for Wimps
When you set a blog up, generally it’ll come with a standard RSS feed. Thing is, the standard RSS feed doesn’t always work on certain browsers, so using something like Feedburner or Feedblitz is better. But you don’t want better – so leave the standard feed and make sure you don’t have any subscribe options in your sidebar. If your readers can’t subscribe, they won’t know when you have a new post. Blog death on the horizon.
10. Repeat Yourself
We all run out of ideas, but often you can find things to blog about to share with your readers. But if you’re trying to lose readers and kill your blog, then you don’t want fresh ideas. Instead, copy a post from your Archives, change the minimum amount of words up, and you have a new-but-not post to pan off on your readers. Tip – don’t use a Related Posts option here, as you can get found out and look stupid.
As you can see, there are a bunch of ways to kill your blog, so you don’t need to worry about pleasing these damn readers of yours anymore.
Of course, if you actually want to have a blog worth visiting, and one that sees you respected and visited and recommended, then ignore all of the above and do the exact opposite.
Your choice.
image: shiner.clay
This post originally appeared on dannybrown.me.
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