Inklyo
Hey, it’s a jungle out there. There’s a blog for everything. Food photography, travel blogs, political rant pages, corporate musings, fan page free-for-alls . . . you name it. With all that competition, who wants to stand out and create an engaging, creative blog that actually adds value to the Internet? Not you. Quality work and responsibility to readers are just too much darn effort. You and I, we much prefer to float comfortably in the recesses of Internet no man’s land. We’re not attention seekers—we’re far too lazy for that. Afraid your blog might actually do well? Follow these simple blogging tips to make sure your blog is a complete and utter dud—in fact, its boo-boos won’t even go viral. It’ll even fail at failing.
1. Don’t proofread.
Typos, punctuation errors, and painful spelling mistakes are the quickest, easiest way to give your blog a death sentence (ooh, the puns). After all, a clean, error-free post might actually make you look credible, and you don’t want that.
2. Remove all comprehensible train of thought.
You know what happens when your writing is easy to read and has a logical flow, don’t you? People might *gasp* keep reading it. All structure, consistency of tone, and clear thought processes must be removed from your writing. Immediately.
3. Post irregularly, if at all.
It’s bad enough that you have to be bombarded by all those bloggers constantly updating their sites with structured, consistent schedules. Who do they think they are, anyway? You certainly don’t want to add to the success mess, and you really need to take care of those annoying Internet prowlers who have decided that your blog is interesting, or they’ll stick around no matter what. How can you rid yourself of such pests? Well, stop posting, of course! Or, if you must, post at random with long stretches of silence in between. Once you’re off your readers’ radar and have established that you can’t be relied on, they’ll swipe on to terrorize the next site with their incessant subscriptions, comments, and shares.
4. Steal whenever possible.
Isn’t Internet rage a joy? Of course it is. And what’s the fastest way to stir up the anger pot? Why, stealing intellectual or creative property, of course! Hijack ideas, writing styles, photos, or other created media, and don’t credit any of the original sources. Be prepared for the initial wave of attention your blog will receive (what horror!) when people start to realize you’re stealing their material, but worry not—it’s all negative, and it won’t last. Once your integrity is destroyed, no one will subscribe to you. You might even be so lucky as to receive a cease-and-desist order.
5. Plaster blank space with gaudy advertisements.
Maybe you’re a literary genius. Despite all your best efforts, you just can’t turn off the wordsmith charm, and people keep flocking back to your blog. Lucky for you, there’s a fail-safe to divert readers from even the best content: gratuitous advertising. Banner ads, pop-ups, and sidebar post-its will send potential subscribers—even the ones who really want to stay—away from your blog with grimaces on their faces and carpal tunnel in their primary click fingers. Did you know the speed at which a user runs from your page is directly proportional to the degree to which ads are unrelated to your blog’s topic?
6. Fill up on keywords.
Google keeps getting smarter and faster when it comes to finding more ways to send people to your page. How rude! Lucky for you, there are always new ways to convince the Google bots that your page isn’t worth visiting. Some of the latest? Saturating your content, tags, and anchors with keywords, of course! Once your text is so agonizingly full of keywords that it’s nigh unreadable, and your primary keyword is in every tag, even when it doesn’t make sense for it to be, Google will obligingly penalize your blog so that it appears too far down in search results ever to be noticed.
7. Ignore your readers.
Ugh, are people leaving comments, tagging you in things, asking questions, and suggesting content for future posts? Give them the silent treatment. Readers stick around when they feel like they receive a personalized, relevant, engaging experience, which of course you don’t want. By no means should you ever reply to readers when they make an effort to communicate with you. That would just make them feel too validated and like they actually gained something from your blog. Yuck.
In summary . . .
Be a bore. Be inconsistent. Over-advertise. Refuse to communicate. Publish your typos. Steal. Confuse. Distract. Disappear. Such are the magic tools by which you can keep your blog safe from Internet success. Now who wants to hang out on MySpace?
Image source: Luke Chesser/Stocksnap.io
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