Anyway, I came across this satirical blog post that I thought was comical. You can find the original post on the I Help You Blog blog. Did I just write Blog blog?
Anyway.... here is the letter...
Dear Blogger,
I have some things I’d like to share with you and get off my mind. I hope you’ll take the following pointers to heart so that we can both have a healthy relationship going forward:
- There are a lot of things I have to do today. I subscribed to your blog because it is interesting, it is helpful, it is inspiring, or all of the above. Please don’t waste my time with uninteresting, unhelpful and uninspiring posts. If you really don’t have anything to post about, it’s probably better to not post anything.
- Your posts are most interesting, inspiring and helpful when you don’t wander off the beaten path and ramble on about things that didn’t make me subscribe to your blog in the first place.
- You only get so many chances to overpromise and underdeliver. If you promise something is going to change my life or be some “sure-fire” thing, please don’t disappoint me because, like I mentioned before, I have a lot of things to do today and I don’t have a lot of time to spend doing things I like, like reading great blogs.
- I can spot a novice blogger from a mile away. They are always the ones with lots of badging on their site, an under- or un-developed About page, and Google ads pasted everywhere.
- You may fool everyone else with your affiliate links but you don’t fool me. If you don’t label your links as affiliate links and I find out about it, you can be sure I will read your posts with caution and this may be the last time I visit your blog.
- If I visited your site because some other blogger has called you out on something bad you did (like steal a design), it’s best to be forthcoming and remorseful. Because, like everywhere else in the world, nobody likes a bad person.
- Don’t make me jump hoops in order to leave a helpful comment. It just makes me not want to comment.
- Please don’t talk in the abstract. Please do give examples whenever possible. They help me to understand better and makes me believe you know what you are talking about.
- Please don’t talk down to me. Use words like “you should” very carefully. How do you know I don’t know better?
- It’s uncool to make a scene with your writing. When you accuse someone of something, there is a nice way to go about it and a not-so-nice way. I call the not-so-nice way verbal diarrhea and it reflects badly on you as much as the person you are accusing.
- You shouldn’t pretend to know something when you really don’t. It is totally obvious.
- If I can’t find your RSS feed or email subscription form at first glance on your blog, I’m going to assume you don’t really care about those things and I won’t look any further for them.
Your Reader
