How to Have an Unsuccessful Blog
Enough with vying for success. I know what you really want deep down - a blog that fails! Who cares about gaining and retaining an audience? That is SO 2008. Being utterly and completely disastrous with your blog endeavors is the new hotness. Follow all of these wonderfully ineffective tips, and no one will care about your site or ever visit it.
Don't post regularly. If you don't habitually write blog articles (daily, weekly, or have specific, recurring days), this will effectively keep people away from your site in droves as there will be no real reason to come back. Awesome! Besides, you posted a few times back in April of 2008 and once last February, so that should be good enough, right?
Constantly apologize for not posting regularly. Who cares if this is as annoying as a fork scraping across a chalkboard? Keep screaming you're sorry and that will make up for the good content your site lacks.
Don't have your blog be focused on one general topic. Have your blog be about both nothing and anything, such as random thoughts, poetry, and why ticks love to infest your best pair of work shoes.
Don't know why you are blogging. Simply create a blog because everyone else says it's cool. And if you've just started a blog for your place of business, it doesn't matter if you have good content or a well thought-out, coherent plan. Just blurt out whatever comes to mind.
Constantly copy other peoples' blog posts and articles. Just take verbatim what other folks write, and offer no original thoughts or perspectives of your own. Never offer anything valuable or unique.
Don't use proper spelling, grammar and punctuation. Feel free to blog posts like you're a 12-year-old who's text messaging. Showing regard to good diction, well-formed sentence structure and easy-to-read paragraphs went the way of 8-track tapes. Don't have comments enabled. Why on earth would you ever want to reach out to an audience and let them strike up a two-way dialog? That might force you to spend more than three minutes a week on your blog.
Require someone to register for an account to post a comment. I know that most of the blog software out there has anti-spam filters and captchas that will catch most of the rift-raft. People enjoy jumping through hoops and filling out forms and love the fact that there's YET ANOTHER username and password to keep track of, right?
Don't have items easy to find and well laid-out on your website. This would make it too easy to find an RSS feed, an "About Us" or "About Me" page, post archives, and so on. Instead, force site visitors to spend several minutes on your site (you know, because you're so great that they should naturally want to waste ridiculous amounts of time on your site). Have an ugly, gaudy, and extremely disorganized website. This gets them every time.
Don't write for the web. Use gigantic blocks of long-winded text with few or no breaks. Why should your blog be easy to read?
Use misleading and undescriptive blog post titles. You should fool, baffle, and ultimately turn away any readers that may be straggling around. Don't develop your own voice. Be cold, impartial, and overly-analytical. Don't put your own unique spin on something.
Attempt your best to be "spammy". Do your best to sound like an ad, using lots of marketese, and have virtually nothing honest, trustworthy or real to say. While you're at it, employ as many font styles, font sizes and colors as you can in your blog posts, as well as underlining several lines of text despite them not being hyperlinks.
Cover your blog with ads. Clean is out. Make your site look like the Vegas strip or downtown Branson at night. If your 60-year-old boss at your place of employment likes flashing and shiny objects scattered across his monitor, that should be a justifiable reason to cram your blog with as many ads as you humanly can.
Be a loose cannon and don't watch what you're typing. Never do research and never think of any kind of repercussions your posts might have in the future. Having class, restraint, and highly calculated ideas is overrated.
Member of several social media and network sites? Terrific! Do nothing but spam your blog post links on them. Never become personally involved in social communities and participate in them unless you can get something out of it.
Never spend time on other blogs, to borrow ideas, topics, tools, and tricks which you can use. Be stagnant, unimaginative, and uninteresting.
If you follow these simple, yet concise, tips, you will establish yourself as a blogger NOT worth following. Because, really, what's the point in maintaining a fresh, engaging blog that encourages others?
Oh, one more thing - be ready to use sarcasm at any moment when you blog. Make sure you sufficiently confuse your readers as to whether or not you are serious. Your followers will love this...
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Comments
2009-06-23 13:25:23
That one drives me up the wall when I see it.
2009-06-24 19:41:07
2009-07-13 16:28:20
Basically, be active within the community and give back.
One point...spamming social media sites. Is there a better way to do this without coming off as spamming your site? I guess frequency would play a major role in this...thoughts?
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