“Fresh Ways to Handle Blog Criticism” plus 1 more

Posted: 20 Jun 2012 01:08 PM PDT

This guest post is by Harry French of BloggingTips.com.

Sometimes being famous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

When a blogger writes a negative comment about you, or goes on an outright tirade, it can be hard to bite your tongue and move on.

Sometimes, however, that’s the best course of action. Sometimes, you need to put on your boxing gloves and get ready to duke it out.

Why readers post negative comments

Excitement? Jealousy? A clever ploy for attention? A Jedi craves not these things, but many bloggers do.

Criticisms and personal attacks don’t have to be legitimate or even coherent. In fact, many “rants” that visitors will leave in your comments section are just that: rants. They are often emotionally driven and they don’t make much sense when you stop to think about what’s really being said.

Sometimes, of course, criticism is warranted and the points being raised are legitimate. In that case, you can let the critic become your best friend.

But people can post negative comments for all sorts of reasons. It doesn’t even have to be about you or your article. It could be that they’re just having a bad day and decided to take it out on you.

Come to terms with this first, and it’ll be a lot easier to know when to respond and when to walk away.

When to respond, when to walk away

You should definitely respond to legitimate criticisms of something you’re written. With that said, it’s not necessary to repeat yourself like a broken record. If you’ve already answered an objection, you can usually just point any new objecters in the direction of your answer.

When it comes to derogatory, inappropriate, or nonsensical comments, you can ignore most of them.

Think about it: what’s the value of responding to these kinds of comments? Most of the time, it’s a waste of time to bother with them.

On occasion, however, you might be able to monetize someone else’s stupidity. That becomes an interesting decision to make. If you’re saying a lot of controversial things, and you get a decent amount of hate mail for it, you could use these hate comments to generate even more controversy. Take the most blatant offenders and show the world just how ridiculous they are, without coming right out and saying it directly.

Whenever you do need to respond to hate comments, you should do so with civility. Put yourself on moral high ground. This way, you could gain a lot of respect from your regular fans and demonstrate how you strive for rationality and objectivity, even when people say nasty things about you.

Showing your cool in the face of an attack also makes you look stronger (in fact, eventually, you’ll actually become stronger psychologically). It shows that while sticks and stones may break your bones, words really never do hurt you.

How to respond

When you’ve made the decision to respond to criticism, make sure you stay on point. Don’t veer off onto a tangent—that just makes you look a bit scatter-brained and can open you up to further criticism from the commenter.

Also, try to only address any essential aspects of any criticisms raised. For example, Matt Cutts came to Google’s defense by knocking down criticisms that Google’s search engine would favor TLD web addresses over “.com” equivalents.

Cutt’s didn’t respond directly on the website where the criticism was made. Instead, he posted his response to Google+.

Matt sticks to the essential points here, and doesn’t veer off onto tangents. He has a good track record of staying focused, even when criticisms of Google are irrational and emotionally driven.

Finally, don’t get sucked in to a long debate. “One-up-manship” is easy to get into and notoriously difficult to get out of. If you are sticking to facts and the essential points raised, you’ll never get into a back-and-forth argument that goes nowhere.

In fact, you could simply continue asking questions of your tormentor and hope he responds. He may draw out fans of yours who will gladly come to your defense. All the while, free content is being created for your blog.

The author of this blog post on rawfoodsos.com did not even need to get involved in the comments. A visitor dropped a hate comment:

Then, a fan responded for her:

In this example, the blogger’s post generates a heated debate. That debate spontaneously generates massive amounts of free content that is keyword-rich and highly relevant to the blog itself. It may not have been the blogger’s intent, but it happened all the same.

How do you respond to criticisms of your blog? If you have any tips to share, we’d all love to hear them!

This guest post was contributed by Harry French, on behalf of BloggingTips.com.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Fresh Ways to Handle Blog Criticism

So You’re Making Money Blogging … Now What?

Posted: 20 Jun 2012 07:05 AM PDT

You’ve started a blog, written great content, engaged with readers … and now you’re making a little money at it. Congratulations!

I started blogging seriously with the aim to make a living from it, but I know plenty of bloggers—probably the majority of those making money blogging—have less clear-cut ambitions to profit.

Many money-making bloggers started simply by trying out some monetization method (an affiliate product, perhaps, or advertising) and were pleasantly surprised by the fact that it worked.

If this description fits you, although you might not be quitting your day job any time soon, you’ve at least proven that you can make money from your blog.

That’s an exciting realisation.

So exciting, in fact, that the world of pro blogging focuses heavily on the questions of how to get to that point, rather than what you might do once you reach it.

Today I want to ask that question.

You’re making money … now what?

Let’s say you’ve made your first $20. Or $200, or $2000. What will you do with that money?

Treat yourself to a movie? Celebrate with a dinner in a nice restaurant? Put it into your holiday savings account?

Or will you look at how you could invest it back into your blog, with the aim to earn more next month?

While it mightn’t sound as exciting as any of the options above, I’d encourage you to consider investing at least some of the money you make back into your blog.

How much? That’s up to you. But it might be a good idea to put a set percentage of the money you make through your blog each month aside to reinvest this way.

That percentage may change over the life of your blog, and depending on your blogging goals at a given time. But the important thing is to commit yourself to a percentage that you’ll reinvest into your blog every time you make some money from it.

How will you invest it?

When you make your first few dollars (and it might literally be a few dollars!) blogging, you’ll probably feel the excitement that, wow, blogging really does work! Your efforts have paid off and that idea you decided to try succeeded in making some money. Great!

That elation can be a great springboard for your plans to use the money you’re reinvesting into your blog.

If you made the money through careful selection of an ad network and appropriate advertisers, for example, you may decide to leverage what you’ve learned in that process—this time with some financial backing. You could:

have a designer change your blog interface to create ad space in different places
try different ad networks, or change your blog’s listing so that the ads shown on your site are more targeted to specific topics or keywords
buy advertising space yourself and pay a designer to create some eye-catching ads for you
set yourself up to sell your own advertising space, if you have a large and targeted enough audience.

Of course you’ll want to spend the money you’re investing in your blog wisely. Rather than throwing it all at a one-shot tactic, try to build on the successes you’ve already had.

You might divide up your investment between two or three different trials or test tactics, to get a sense as to what might be the best way to direct your money-making efforts in the coming weeks and months.

Or, you might decide to spend a portion of the investment on something new, dedicating the rest to building momentum with what’s already working to generate income.

This way, you reduce the risk that you’ll get zero return on the investment you’re making in your blog, and maximize your chances of developing skills in the methods that are proven to work with your blog, niche, and audience. You also have the freedom to experiment with new ideas, to see if they might work for you too.

Hopefully, you’ll maintain the same baseline income you had this month next month, and be able to grow that income with some of these new ideas you’re trying out. So next month, you might even have a little more money to invest in growing your blog—and that monthly income—even further.

How are you spending the money you make?

Investing money into your blog can be a big shift for those who have been running their blogs on blood, sweat, and tears alone—but it’s an important one.

It can help you to understand that your blog has the potential to build your income, and to think practically about the implications that could have for you. It can also drive your day-to-day blogging and open you up to new opportunities to learn and engage with blogging as a rewarding challenge.

Do you reinvest some of the money you make from blogging into your blog itself? If not, how do you spend the money you make? Share your approach in the comments.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

So You’re Making Money Blogging … Now What?