Why I Committed Blog Suicide
Rant time.
There are three reasons why I blog:
1. I want to help nice but confused and poor people who can’t afford to pay for it.
2. I want people who CAN afford it to buy my shit.
3. I want to feel famous.
You’ll notice that “starting a meaningless conversation with total fucking strangers” is not on that list. (If you haven’t already, I very strongly recommend you read The 6 Types of Blog Commentators. It is utterly delightful and one of my favorite posts on this blog. And yes, you can still comment on that one.)
This is the first week we haven’t allowed comments on new posts at IttyBiz. It’s too soon to tell what the impact will be, but I thought I’d throw out some thoughts. Some of you are wondering why I did it, as removing comments is apparently the equivalent of committing blog suicide. Others are wondering if you should do it yourselves.
When is a blog not a blog?
When I did a Google search to find out how to take the comments off the website, I didn’t find much in the way of instruction. What I did find was a bunch of people with blogs nobody’s ever heard of saying they would NEVER do it because blogging is about conversation. This may be true for some blogs, but not for all of them.
In my case, IttyBiz is a blog in that it’s chronological and it’s powered by WordPress, but that’s about as far as the connection goes. It’s basically just a lecture.
But it shouldn’t be a lecture! It should be a conversation!
There’s a lot of talk about creating conversations in marketing. (If you want to see a very smart man’s head explode, go email Bob Hoffman and tell him Naomi sent you. Tell him you heard he loves all of the discussion and community and so-gosh-darn-SOCIAL aspects of web 2.0.) Basically, everybody thinks the only way to teach or sell anything anymore is to create a fucking dialog. If I hear “create a dialog” one more time, it’s going to get ugly.
Some things aren’t meant to be dialogs.
I basically run a class here. Not a discussion group. I tell you the stuff that I know, and you can agree or not agree. You can follow my advice or not. You can subscribe or unsubscribe, forward links to your friends or not, come back or not come back. It doesn’t impact my life in the slightest.
What DOES impact my life, however, is people who come into my comments section to argue with me about stupid shit that has nothing to do with anything, just in case someone might see their link and click on it.
Lame comments were impacting my writing.
I almost didn’t run the increase your AdWords conversion post because I could personally name about ten people who would very likely come into the comments section to say, “AdWords is STUPID.”
Lame comments were impacting other people.
I get emails every single day from very nice people who say, “I didn’t want to leave this in comments, but…” or “Your comments section is kind of crazy and I’m a bit of a wimp, so…” And they always feel so guilty! The lame comments were driving away nice people, people like my own mother and my own friends.
Most important, lame comments were giving BAD ADVICE.
In line with goal number one, people come here for help. They come to have their questions answered. They come for information from someone they trust. When they get here and they see a whole bunch of people arguing amongst themselves, they leave more confused than they were when they arrived.
On the internet, anybody with a thousand bucks can create a website that makes them look like an expert. Even when they can’t find their ass with two hands and a flashlight. So the n00bs were coming and seeing retards with nice websites giving stupid advice and feeling worse than they did before. This is not cool and it is not what we represent.
Lastly, I’m trying to run a fucking business here.
Amy Derby Wrote a great post about Stupid Blogger Netiquette that I’ll excerpt here, although you really should go read it.
See, the Great Platitudists of Blogland have dictated certain netiquettes:
1) Never post pictures of your ass on a professional blog.
2) It’s rude not to respond to every single comment.
3) If a blogger comments on your blog, it’s only polite to return the favor.
You know all those productivity blogs? I can sum up what most of them say fairly easily. Stop doing stupid busywork horseshit that doesn’t make you any money and start MAKING MONEY. Getting involved in the drama of who commented where and who owes what comments and OHMYGOD! DidIrespond? ShouldIrespond? WhatifIhatethatperson? doesn’t make you money. It wastes your time that you should be spending DOING STUFF.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I have for people trying to start an IttyBiz is to start the fucking IttyBiz. Jump. Do it. Get off your ass. Do some work. Commenting on other people’s blogs is a very good strategy for getting people to your site. Meticulously commenting on the same blogs, day after day, because it makes you feel all fuzzy inside is not the same thing.
So there. That’s why I took the comments off my website. Now when I lose 5000 subscribers and die lonely in a gutter, the haters can say they told me so.