5 Habits Of Highly Unsuccessful Bloggers: Grandma Juice Tips

habits of highly unsuccessful bloggers

5 Habits Of Highly Unsuccessful Bloggers
The Exact Opposite Of How To Win Friends And Influence People Online.

Just because you have something to say, doesn’t necessarily mean you should, right? My mother was forever telling me to find my ‘mouth filter’. I don’t think I necessarily have. Let’s face it. Being obnoxious online is an art form to some. It’s very easy to creatively annoy people online. It’s when those annoying skills become less than creative and overused that we cross into the 5 habits of highly unsuccessful bloggers territory. Also known as “The Exact Opposite Of How To Win Friends And Influence People”

POST, UPDATE, POST, UPDATE, TWEET, TWEET, TWEET–  Lather, rinse, repeat:

There’s a fine line between keeping your status updated and just being a complete spammer. Do you update The Facebook more than 2 or 3 times a day? Kind of spammy… There’s nothing worse than not being able to see what your Grandma baked today because your wall is full of crap you don’t want to see, right? Are you filling up someone else’s wall with crap? And, Twitter isn’t fun anymore when it’s loaded with every.single.random.thought someone has. Sure, it’s awesome to have a snarky and clever tweet. When you start talking about ‘size’ of anything, you’ve gone too far. Just stop.

WANT TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE? – Duh:

We all know money can be made online. Some are better at it than others. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that I personally make about enough to pay the electric bill every month and Grandpa handles the rest. I know some bloggers (very few) who comfortably pay all their bills from online revenue. Sweet, right?  Can you honestly say that you’ve found a new, legit way to make a decent amount of cash? Or, are you just writing the post so that you can include your affiliate links? You’re not fooling anyone. And, you’re absolutely  writing for all the wrong reasons. Everyday people, you know, your followers, they don’t want to know that. Make them laugh, tell them about a sweet new product you found or recipe you discovered. Better yet, leave them to enter a fantastic giveaway! But for the love of Jose Quervo, don’t talk on and on about earning .32 per click for checking out the latest online dating site. COME.ON.

OH WOE IS ME, MY LIFE SUCKS BECAUSE – Negativity gets old… fast:

Self-depreciation can be a super way to dive into humor. The quickest way to get a laugh is to laugh at yourself. But, it’s all about timing, tone and technique. If your timing your tone to use the technique (say that 3 times fast) to push out ‘Poor Pitiful Me’ posts over and over; you kind of sound pathetic. No, not kind of, you do! Of course it’s OK to talk about a bad day! It’s your blog. And your kids are driving you crazy, your dog is dying, that *significant other* is not so significant today, and, and, and… Get it out! But if that’s all you talk about it’s time to back away from the ‘puter and clean house. Pay attention to the small fry’s, give your spouse some lovin’, and take the dog to the vet. Balance your act.

COMMENTS ARE CLOSED?Why you no share with me:

I know, that was awful grammar (see below) The whole reason you started blogging was to share… something… right? Your opinions, your feelings, great product reviews. Why cut people off at the knees and not let them communicate with you? There’s nothing that gets me to click ‘Un-like/follow’ faster than a blogger who’s such a know it all that no one else can have an opinion. I love, love, love chit chatting with people who follow my blog! I go back and comment among the comments all the time. Get off the soap box, mingle with us common peeps!

My #1 spot for habits of highly unsuccessful bloggers goes to….

SPELLING, PUNCTUATION, AND GRAMMARAre you smarter than a 5th grader?

You don’t have to be an expert to have a opinion. But, you do have to state it with some credibility. There’s a difference. What’s the quickest way to lose the street cred? Riddle your blog with as many spelling errors, lack of proper punctuation and poor grammar as you possibly can! If you don’t know the difference between your and you’re by now, you can’t tell me what’s the best cloth diaper to put on the small fry’s tush. I have a need to take a red sharpie to my screen and send it back to you for editing. It’s not only distracting, it just makes you look silly. Sure 1 slips through the cracks every now and then, meh… it happens. Spell check is your friend, use it.

Did I miss anything? Make horrible spelling errors somewhere? Tell me what gets you all in a huff when you read a blog and feel the need to ‘Un-like/follow’.

Comments

  1. great post! I agree… overexposure and negativity make me want to disengage!

  2. Ha, I loved this and actually devoted a whole post once to the unprofessional look when a blog can’t follow simple grammar. I still to this day remember the grammar mistake that completely turned me off to a blog. It was the word hole in a post. The person was trying to say whole store, but she said hole store. What? A store that sells holes? Who does that? For the record the post had several other glaring errors, but that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

    Now to add to that comment thing I can’t stand the blogs that allow comments, but have all of these rules to commenting. If you do this this and this then you will be marked as a troll and never allowed to comment again. Well, the problem is trolling is one of those way overused terms IMO. And some people simply don’t like any sort of dissenting opinion no matter how it is stated. I get monitoring for spam and really some people can be downright cruel, but for me there’s very little comments I would actually consider troll comments or inappropriate. It just comes off as a power trip to me and it is a huge turn off.

    • Grandma Juice says

      If people are *trolling…. you’ve got their attention!!
      Even the angry ones can start super discussions. Don’t
      cross the line into race, gender and sexual orientation and I usually
      leave all comments. Hate speech, no 😉

    • I don’t mind when to comment its a simple math problem, or check this box, but I hate captcha! It makes me want to just x out of the page. Sometimes it is SO fustrating. And then Im in a group of bloggers and one blog has me marked as a spammer and I can’t comment at all, but i have no idea what I ever did to be marked as a spammer since its mostly a coupon/ freebie website so I would have only been commenting something like “hey thanks, it worked for me”

  3. Great tips. One of my big no no’s is poor grammar… that and sparkly unicorns that dance across the screen and music that plays when I go on someone’s site.

    • Grandma Juice says

      I call those ‘Pink, rainbow, sparkly blogs”… UGH…
      Back away Hello Kitty.

  4. I love this post. These are all big reasons why I will stop reading someone.

  5. GREAT tips! Music playing on a blog makes me get off it quickly. And when I follow someone on Twitter and they send an auto DM or a Twit Validation, that turns me off too!

  6. You want to know something else that stinks, and that’s captcha. I always hate word verifications. Will make me think twice about leaving a comment.

  7. judy gregory says

    Amen! Also, please, if i comment on your blog, don’t send me an e-mail arguing with my point. I absolutely LOVE when I get an e-mail because someone liked what I said. I feel BLESSED when someone thanks me for what I said. But, telling me my power saving idea must not work because it wasn’t included in the info they got from their power company? Power companies are businesses and they may want to seem green but, they are still trying to turn a profit. This really goes for any industry “pamphlet”. You should do your own research before you put yourself out there as an expert. My tip by the way was to “chuck’ the central air for window units. A good high efficiency unit uses about the same power as a coffee maker. Our power bill in summer went from 240$ to 110$. How is this bad?

  8. judy gregory says

    BTW. We live in the deep south.

  9. Great tips! Can I add one more- captcha! I HATE it with a vengeance and music is a huge no-no in my books!

  10. AWESOME POST! I read a review/giveaway post the other day that was full of partial sentences, grammatical errors, and punctuation problems. It drove me insane. Literally. I was ranting at the poor girl through the screen and DH was looking at me like I had totally lost it. Maybe. Maybe it’s just the former school teacher in me breaking out the ruler. I make mistakes. We all do. But if you can’t spell properly, down load Chrome! It red lines everything that is wrong except for things like there their and they’re.

    MY biggest pet peeve though is people who do reviews, sponsored posts, or giveaways and their house is a mess in the pictures. I get it. I have for kids, two dogs, a husband, and I am brooding 12 baby chicks in my house at the moment. Things get messy. CLEAN it up before you take a picture. A little mess is one thing. Showing off your blogger corner (you know the pile of marketing stuff you have to take pictures of before you try) in the picture isn’t portraying the product in the best light in my opinion.

    • Grandma Juice says

      HAHAHAHAHA
      I have yelled at the screen for people to clean it up before they take a picture oh…. 2849606043 times, at least!
      Probably more.

  11. okiedokie weenienoky (just wanted to troll ) LOL

    I agree with twit validation..in my mind I always say (twit this)!!

    • Grandma Juice says

      Twit THIS!!!
      I thought it was one of those “People are talking about you” tweets people send when they get hacked the 1st time I got one.
      DUMB!!

  12. Me Likey!

  13. Thanks for sharing…pinned!

  14. I laughed so hard at this! It’s all true. I have unfriended people on facebook for the chronic updates. No one cares if you say you love the same person, no matter how significant of an other they are, 34 times in one day.

    Ironically, you messed up on the your/you’re issue at least once in this article. We all make mistakes. What I can’t stand is the deliberate use of leet-speak. I know you seen it: 14 l00k5 50m3th1ng l1k3 th15.

    Ugh. That made my brain hurt just typing it.

    • Grandma Juice says

      For real??? Where?? Your/you’re… I still don’t see it LOL.
      I feel ya on the text/tweet typing. When I was finishing my degree, I took an online class. There’s quite a bit of ‘forum’ work. The teacher was actually telling the younger students to knock it off this was actual school work and they weren’t texting their BFF’s… I was kind of shocked people really did that! How are you going to tell me why my head is a mess and you should be my shrink when you can’t type a simple word without injecting weird numbers and symbols for letters?
      NO STREET CRED! 😉

      • Under the Oh Woe is Me section:

        You said: “If your timing your tone”. It should be: If “you’re timing your tone”. Like I said, we all make mistakes and spell check isn’t designed to catch these kinds of things. It’s the biggest reason why I write my Saturday blog no later than Thursday night. I’m obsessive about reading it over and over to catch every little snafu. 😀

  15. Thanks for the great tips!

  16. joy harris says

    Grammar! Uhg so annoying when I see a lot of errors. Just the simple ones, mind you!

  17. Good article. Spelling errors don’t irk me as much as make me feel bad for the blogger, knowing it is going out to their fans to see all their mistakes.

  18. These are some great tips. Thanks!

  19. Great post! I enjoyed this very much.

  20. Jennifer Hall says

    What a great post and I couldn’t agree more. You hit the nail on the head with all of it!! I know I’ve thought of these things a few times myself when reading blogs or Facebook pages:)

  21. This is great advice. I am just starting out and I need all the help I can get.

  22. Love this. Funny and so true…

  23. Ha! These all bug me. I can over look several errors. I understand how after reading the same post 50 times, you just miss things or your brain auto-corrects it. However, some posts are so awful, I cannot belive an adult wrote them.
    I agree with all above and add writing in all caps for large chunks of text. A word here or there in caps for emphasis is fine, but long paragraphs in caps? I cannot read it!

  24. So glad I came across this today! Love it and thanks for the laughs!

  25. Avon Shay says

    Thank you for the great tips! As a soon-to-be blogger, I really appreciate them and agree. I think the biggest turn-off for me are the constant floating ads and what bloggers increasingly are using, the underlined word links that pop up ads. So now, you can’t even move around the post/page without 50,000 ads popping up you. It just too distracting and makes me lose interest in the blogger overall.