Perfect Blogging: Don’t take the piss

Hello dear reader,

Upon the positive feedback on my post writing good comments on a blog, I thought I would extend my advice to another area that irritates me in the world of blogging and blog writing.

The irritant is when a site or an author takes the piss out of their loyal readers.

Firstly I will give a definition of my colloquialism:

take the piss (out of someone or something)

phrase of piss

1. [British] vulgar slang

Mock someone or something

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Right now that’s cleared up onto the issue…

Don’t take the piss out of your audience

The most valuable thing a person has is their time and guess what?  They have chosen to spend a part of that time reading your blog or website.

They have chosen to watch your videos.

They follow you on social media.

Therefore the first step to not take the piss out of your audience is not to do a mind dump or post crap because you want to feel good about yourself by boosting your page views.

Don’t hold them to ransom.

One of the most dispisable acts of taking the piss of a loyal audience was from a webcomic I used to read.  Every few weeks the creator used to post messages saying:

“I’m getting bored of this, I need readers so send me 100 dollars to my paypal by date otherwise I will stop writing Shitty webcomic [Name I provided not actual comic name]“

Surprisingly this went on for a while until his loyal audience started to see sense and stopped donating every time he had a temper tantrum like a spoilt entitled child.  As a result he stopped drawing the comic, the audience remaining disappeared and that was that.

Don’t expect everyone to buy everything

One of my favourite blogs which was actually the inspiration behind me starting The Manifesto of Perfection actually managed to destroy my interest as a loyal reader because he kept taking the piss through his mailing list.

I signed up to his mailing list because I was as loyal an audience as a blog writer could want – I would read his latest posts, view his YouTube videos and even bought his ebooks off Amazon.

But I constantly got bombarded with various money making shills like online coaching.  This was fine I would just ignore them as it didn’t interest me.

But then I would get these “Hey man, didn’t you see that incredible offer I told you about yesterday”.

This would then be repeated over the course of several days and it occured everytime and eventually I unsubscribed because I got fed up being talked to like an idiot for missing out on some ‘fantastic’ offer.

The case of the crappy purchase content

Many bloggers use their blog as a ‘side hustle’ to make extra money – whether it’s selling online coaching, advertising, YouTube monetization or ebook selling – I have no issue with this.

But when greed gets in the way of artistic integrity or understanding the needs of the audience, this is when a creator really takes the piss!

I can forgive irritating adverts, or crappy YouTube videos.  What gets me is a bad ebook that has been thrown together!  A book I bought was Gorilla Mindset.  The biggest disappointment was the obvious spelling mistakes and it containing a lot of generic advice.

On the plus side at least the author actually bothered to write content for his book.  I have purchased ebooks for £7 that are 100 pages long, double line spaced and each chapter follows the format of this:

• Introduction to subject area of chapter
• Author’s personal experience of issue
• Generic advice that you can read on the first page of a Google search
• Links to other people’s websites and resources that may be dead links if you click it.

I estimate that this probably took the author no more than a few weeks to write.  If they had spent more time to plan out their writing, put more effort into research, make the content slightly longer and of course more time for a spelling and grammar check they would have kept a future customer and loyal blog reader.  Instead they lost me all for one book sale!

Respond to your damn comments!

One of the greatest pleasures for me is receiving comments on any of my posts.  I always make some time to respond to these comments, no matter how busy my life gets.

But you also get those with the celebrity complex’ where they don’t even respond to comments left!  This is just insulting when someone has left a comment sharing a thought, idea or general compliment about a post.

Now I want you to imagine this scene:

It’s a Thursday evening – my wife is out having a meal with friends.  This is a great time for me because I can focus on writing.  But first I have creator duties to perform – responding to people’s comments, visiting the sites of people who have followed me, then if time visiting the sites of those who have liked my posts.

Often I will read two, three or more posts of these and generally leave a comment engaging on whatever their post(s) are about and thanking them from following my blog.  It’s surprising the number of times I don’t get a response.

All it takes is a “thank you for taking the time to comment”

I treat interaction very seriously – anyone can ‘Like’ a post or ‘Follow’ a WordPress blog, but a comment takes serious thought.  Appreciate the person who left it.

To Conclude I think it’s worth me reemphasizing what I said at the start:

Every Time a person reads your post, they are taking up free time they won’t get back!

Every Time a person makes a comment, they are taking up time they could be doing something else!

People are choosing to spend a tiny part of their life consuming what you produce!  So don’t take the piss – the least you can do is give them the time of day!

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Thanks for reading.

I would just like to say I love my readers, therefore if you have any comments please leave them below, or e-mail me at averageperfect@outlook.com or if you want to share my article on Twitter make sure to tag @averageperfect in so that I can show my gratitude and appreciation.

Regards

James