It’s getting closer to Halloween, one of my favorite times of the year. It’s that time where you can be anyone and do anything all in the name of All Hallow’s Eve. I thought it would be appropriate to visit some of the types of blogs that scare off your readers. Ironically, they are all named after well-known archetypes from this time of year. How weird is that!?
Let’s see how scary we can be this Halloween.
The Frankenstein
We’ve all borne witness to the terror that is the work of some mindless Dr. Frankenstein slaving away in his or her lab, using dead parts from this blog and that blog to make something truly horrifying.
Now, before you start throwing the term “content curation” at me, I’m not talking about the curated wonders that can be fantastic blogs (i.e. Mashable, Huffington Post, Social Media Today, etc).
The Frankenstein Blogs are those blogs that one person creates with sample parts of a lot of other sources, making a mess that is unreadable, frantic, and most times quite sad. Sometimes they look scary and sometimes you can only really see the horror when you get right up close and see all the parts that don’t quite fit together.
If you feel yourself creating or drifting into the area of The Frankenstein Blog, the cure is to revisit your blogging strategy. What are you wanting to get out of it? Who are you writing for? What’s the focus and goal of your blog?
After reviewing what makes your writing unique, you should be back on track and not quite so “stitched together”. You also don’t have to worry about the townsfolk chasing you with pitchforks and torches, which is always nice.
The WereBlog (AKA, The Jekyll and Hyde)
This one sneaks up on you. Everything is going completely normally, you’re an English noble in your writing and everyone is extremely happy, but every now and then you just go off the deep end and end up killing half your subscription base.
While it’s encouraging to play around with different writing styles and actually take some instances to shock your audience to grab their attention, WereBlogs go completely off the deep end into a place that’s so uncharacteristic and violent that it pushes people away.
WereBlogs are generally driven by strong emotions and sometimes you wake up the next morning, your clothes are ripped and you can’t understand the angry responses in your comments or emails. I’ve battled with this every now and then.
One silver bullet I’ve found to help deal with WereBlogs is to have a separate place to write down things that are driven by pure anger or emotion. Keep a journal or a voice recorder and just go to town. If you wake up the next day and still feel like it benefits your audience, by all means, post it. If not, leave it for your own reflections.
After a couple different times, you may even have enough content to fill up a completely separate blog driven by that content, only to be read by the light of the full moon.
Dracula Rising
You probably at this point are under the impression that I’m about to make a whole lot of “sucking” references. Well, I’ll have you know that I’m above all that nonsense. I take Halloween very seriously. So suck it.
Dracula blogs are actually some of the best-written blogs out in the Interwebs. They’re incredibly charming and appealing from the outside. It’s only once you’re bitten and realize they they live off other’s lifeblood and have forever trapped you in a world of the undead that you realize it’s not a blog you want to be trapped in.
Dracula blogs are an anomaly because some people actually really love the well-written, undead blogs and that’s totally fine. There are good vampires out there too (i.e. Blade and Edward), so this one is last on the list because it’s not always bad. They drain the life from others’ writings and present them as their own life (Blog Puke, if you will), but sometimes that’s just what people in a hurry are looking for. This one’s totally up to you.
I’m my opinion, it’s always better to live your own life and draw from sources of information as opposed to Vampyres, but I’m not going to tell you how to live, or unlive.
The Blogging Dead
Zombie blogs are dead blogs that still wander the Internet because of brainless content. If you see one, shoot it in the head with a shotgun and never visit again. Avoid becoming a zombie blog at all costs.
Monster Mash
There you have it, the scariest blogs alive and undead today. Sometimes they are easy versions of ourselves to fall into, but there’s always a saving grace and a help line (a-hem, email us at For Bloggers By Bloggers *cough*) if you find yourself trapped. Which monstrocities have you witnessed in your journeys? What are some of the best silver bullets you’ve acquired so far?
Thoughts?
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About Joey Strawn
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