You spent all that time creating a great blog/website, and you’ve had some success promoting it. Unfortunately, the visitors just keep on coming back. How annoying? That means you have to write regular content for them or they’ll leave snarky comments on your blog! So here are seven effective ways to drive away visitors.
1. Don’t bother updating your blog. That’s right. Why bother? After all, that posting made last March 2006 should be good enough for another 12 months or more. Why interrupt its loneliness with a companion post!
2. Make sure that you use the default theme in WordPress (Kubrick), or worse, the Classic theme. After all, you don’t want your blog to stand out from the crowd, now do you? That’ll just create more interest. Make sure that you haven’t even added or changed the header, too. And you can leave the tagline and title as is. That’s just perfect.
3. Turn off your pages, archives, categories, search, and tags. Make it really, really difficult to find other posts in your blog so that visitors can’t find anything else than on the first page. They’ll have to use Google to search your archive, and really how many remember how to search a website via Google. (hint: site:yourdomain.com)
4. Don’t use friendly URLs at all. Make sure they are very unfriendly. In fact, SMF forums has some of the least friendly ones you can find! Use something as obscure as that! It works well. Here’s an example: http://www.***.org/index.php?topic=2820.msg4177#msg4177
5. Make sure that comments are all turned off on your posts, and that registration for commenting is turned off. After all, why would anyone want to comment? That’s just more work for you to do.
6. Turn off your Full RSS Feed in the Reading Options section and cut the number of posts that can be in the feed. You can set this to one or even two posts with just the summary showing. In fact, even better, hide the RSS buttons that come in most themes, remove the RSS Feeds links in the bottom of the Kubrick them, and erase all the pings in the Writing Options section. This will effectively make sure no one knows that you have a new post, and that no one will be able to subscribe!
7. And fail to deliver on your …
If you follow all of these your blog will surely wilt and die! That’s what you want, after all. Isn’t it?
(Serious note: It’s not that I was making most of this stuff up! Unfortunately, I’ve come across a lot of blogs that fail on one or more of these points. In fact, one of my own blogs fails on the first step alone! Hope it amuses!)
Post inspired by John Cow’s entry: Exactly How I Got a Stampede of Web Traffic.