Why Your Blog Sucks
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
I found this amusing. A blogger giving pointers on "Why Your Blog Sucks", on a blog that, well ... sucks.
Anyway, I figured I'd have a little fisky fun with it.
Why Your Blog SucksI post whenever the hell I feel like it. This usually works out to at least a post every other day, but I don't get my panties in a twist if I don't make that. After all, blogging isn't my profession. Sometimes I even get a couple of posts a day up there. People do come back on the off days, it seems, to check up on the comments, which are important here at the RWRepublic. John Hawkins tends to post at least three times a day, and includes a pretty well-thought out news post each day along with it. By the way, who is Glenn Greenwald?
Possible reasons not as many people read your blog as you would like:
1) You don't post often enough. People click on a website regularly when they expect it to have new content. If you're a thoughtful writer who tends to write longer essays then you're at a disadvantage. On the other hand, Glenn Greenwald provides a pretty good model of how to make this work: generally one post per day, followed by a couple of updates, and some participation in his comments section. Oh, and truly excellent, original, and important content.
2) Your page design sucks. I know there are some blogs I'd read more often if the design was more appealing to me. I'm not talking about sexy and beautiful, I'm talking about basic readability issues. For example, light text on dark background makes my eyes bleed.Oh, geez. I'm sure Spats, Delfts, MrMinority, and the like are just running scared trying to make your bleedy little eyes happy. Get a life.
3) You need to get some mad blogwhoring skills. Look, good marketing/PR is a skill. There are lots of ways to try to get attention. And, believe it or not, people like me don't have the entire interwebs jacked into our cerebral cortices. If I'm not linking to your awesome blog it's quite possible I'm not aware of its awesomeness.Any question as to the awesomeness of THIS blog??? Duh...
4) Your blog actually sucks. Maybe you're just not offering something that is original and timely enough. Maybe you don't have a good sense of what is or isn't important. Maybe your readers don't know what the hell you're talking about most of the time. Maybe you're not as funny as you think you are. Who knows?This from a guy whose content includes "More and Better Democrats", "Why Your City Sucks", and "Fox Apologists in the Mainstream Media". Dude, maybe people just don't want to read someone's work when they're full of shit.
5) You post all your best stuff as diaries at Daily Kos. Great way to get some attention and a quick readership, but it isn't a great way to encourage people to come to your site. Why should they? They can read you there.Posting at Daily Krap is a great way to get people who actually know how to think to avoid you like the plague. Same for DU.
6) A sizable chunk of your content involves complaining about people not reading or linking to you. There's an audience for this, but the territory is rather overcovered in the blogosphere.Guess you figured this little bit of intelligence out for yourself, huh?
7) An elite cabal of bloggers, all on the Hillary Clinton for President campaign payroll, have conspired to suppress your original voice by any means necessary, including the implementation of very elitist and anti-democratic peer review systems such as the open posting and "recommended diary" system at Daily Kos. This is certainly an interesting theory, and one which several blogs seem to be devoted to exploring, but absent further evidence you might want to look for alternative explanations.Ah yeah. Hitlery's coming to try to shut down my blog. Thankfully, I've installed the Socialist Moonbat Detection Array (SMDA), for which even that commie bitch has no defense. I wonder if you're really serious.
By the way, you are an embarrassment to the Philadelphia area. Oh, and your blog ... sucks.
RWR