Are you abusing the concept of appreciation?
There are many ways you can directly or indirectly abuse the idea of appreciation and respect for your blog visitors through blogging. Whether or not you realize such a thing happening, your blog visitors and customers will surely notice it. Very few things can do more damage to your blog than a bad reputation and vibe that turns away people from your blog.
RA Project refreshes the concept of 5 ways you can abuse the concept of appreciation through blogging. Avoiding these 5 things will make sure your blog heads gains more visitors and loyalty.
5 ways to abuse appreciation through blogging
- Write posts simply to fulfill post count.
You see it happening everyday. Many blogs focus on the number of posts they can write, instead of what they write. You yourself may be writing simply to keep up with a schedule that you have imposed on yourself. After all, you have promised your readers 7 posts a week. Therefore, you have to write something, anything, to fulfill that promise.
Your blog readers are not stupid, which is why they will immediately notice the trend of you writing useless articles. Write about what you think matters or about something you are actually thinking about. The posts will follow. It is better to have two great articles a week than 7 useless ones.
- Appreciate readers because not doing so may get you a bad name.
Slowly, and finally, more and more people are starting to focus on reader and client appreciation. You can visit your favorite blog today and see if they are doing anything to appreciate their readers. Chances are they have probably thanked their blog readers within the last few months or even weeks.
However, the same way customer service in the online world went from honestly appreciating customers and feeling appreciative to “appreciating because it is an obligation otherwise we will get sued or might lose business” principle, more and more bloggers are starting to fake reader appreciation, as they consider readers to be paying customers.
Appreciating readers because of feeling obligated is bad, because when such a feeling of obligation does not exist or when a reader does not provide you with enough benefits, you may turn around and actually disrespect them. As an exercise, please go ahead and read the following five sites and see whether or not you can find any examples or counter-examples of the trend of appreciating readers simply because it results in more money or because not doing so may result in people frowning.
- Put unsuspecting readers through extra loops.
Putting readers through extra loops is a great way to abuse the concept of appreciating someone. Sure, having Captcha’s to reduce spam is good, but having a captcha that results in even a single person feeling annoyed or not able to do something means that person is feeling abused. Why? Because you are portraying an illusion that you care about readers when in reality an innocent reader somewhere is suffering because of a system that you actually put in place on your blog.
Some examples of extra loops that readers are sometimes forced to go through are: Making readers register in order to comment while not making sure that the benefits for the readers outweigh the annoyances, putting unnecessary obstacles between readers and your content, turning off comments on unsuspecting readers and not giving them a choice, etc.
- Help others only when you benefit more.
Several bloggers talk about charity, donations and helping others, and they talk about it only so that they themselves can benefit. It is the same as donating only when you get a number of comments, or saying that you are giving back to the community where in reality you are making the community work for your money or donation of any kind, resulting in the donation turning into paid labor.
- Give blogging advice without understanding it.
In many ways and for some people, this can be the best trend of abusing appreciation. The blogging world is still new for many people, and already we have “experts” running around giving advice even when they have no experience or interest in what they do, other than to make money. Many people tell others how to fix their blogs and charge them for it, simply because they once fixed their own blog in similar situations. People are not understanding trends, techniques, behavior. It is mostly like the offline world, where many businesses focus on solving problems and generalizing all other problems in the same category.
Many bloggers abuse the concept of blogging simply because they can sell their advice. For example, I giggle and get surprised every time I run into a few offline marketers who claim to be experts in blogging simply because they have a blog. It seems that opening a blog can make people a blogging expert. Many people create a blog, get over 5 readers, and claim to be experts.
Does your favorite blog abuse the concept of appreciation through blogging?
There you have it: 5 ways many bloggers are abusing the concept of appreciating through their blogging techniques. While your favorite blog may be doing something unintentionally to fall into one of the 5 ways above, you yourself may unconsciously be doing something that may be resulting in your readers not feeling appreciation.
Can you spot such things online? Do you disagree with any of the above points? Do you have any example that could further clarify or probably simplify a point to explain it more?
Please share your comments, tips or experiences in the comments below. Thank you.
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A much needed post! You have pointed out some common mistakes committed by blogs. Point no.1 is important,many blogs focus on the number of posts they write, as a result you can find a lot of blogs boring with no useful contents.