You’ve heard a million times that yes, there’s lots of money to be made on the internet by means of authoring a blog. Is this true? Yes. In very simplistic terms, the goal of the blog (if for profit) is to build a following, collaborate, share information and ideas, connect with others via means of social media or otherwise, get the hits rolling in and then monetize.

The monetization part is Dave’s thing. I will wholly admit that he’s the one with the mountains of knowledge about sales, marketing, generating leads, etc. This is why he’s the boss and writes the checks.

The Dave knows all.

However one side to blogging that isn’t mentioned all that often is how to deal with the negative emotions of your audience. In this article I’ll give you a few tips on how to best address it should it occur.

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On the internet, drama happens, both positive and negative. Negative drama starts when one (you) expresses an opinion, a reader disagrees and decides to tell you what he or she thinks about what you said (in the negative direction of course).

See the positives first

• You know your blog is being read.
• You know what you’ve written has generated a reaction.
• You know that particular reader will come back to your blog (and as you know, repeat visitors are the best kind).

When you see negative comments in this fashion, the shock of someone “telling you off” doesn’t shock you at all at that point.

Understand that negativity is mostly a knee-jerk reaction

Many people will blast out a negative comment fueled by emotion and nothing else. When someone is doing this, no consideration is given to the fact that you, the author, are a real person. At the time the negative comment is being written, you are a thing that does not exist.

Why is it that people “demote” you to non-human status when posting a negative comment? The answer is simple. It’s because they don’t know you personally.

You will notice that the people you know personally will usually never write negative commentary on your blog articles. That’s because they can associate your written word with a face of a person they know in real life – you. Friends and associates you know by person understand you far better than a random Joe or Jane Internet.

There is no way to convince someone you don’t know personally that you are a real person unless you actually meet them – so don’t bother trying the internet way. Accept that those you’re not personal with will see you as a thing. When you understand how they see you, you’re far better off.

Be willing to be wrong

Nobody knows everything; I certainly don’t. There have been things I’ve written that may contain a typo or two, and/or a slight error, and/or is sometimes outright wrong (but not on purpose obviously).

There are some negative-nellies who pitch a fit over typos, like “the” as “teh”. Yes, maybe it happened to appear on the blog by mistake, and of course, someone will see that and think you’re the dumbest person in the world for letting that thru – and tell you so.

A slight error is when you make a factual inaccuracy. For example, let’s say a computer is listed with 2GB of RAM but you stated 1GB by mistake. Again, someone will see it and call you a moron for being off by one number.

There are times when I’m outright wrong in an article I post but I do admit it does happen. It’s rare, but hey, I’m not perfect.

For any of the instances above, if someone happens to notice an error and comments on it politely, yes I will fix it. But if someone decides to launch a personal attack instead, the error stays because I know it generates more traffic to the site. That negative commenter will tell his or her friends about it, link it in places and draw people to the site just to point out the error, thereby giving me free web traffic perks.

I recommend to any and all other blog authors to follow suit because it works.

Now what’s really interesting is that the negative commenters expect you to apologize for being wrong or what they think is wrong. Don’t. Let the traffic roll in. The more publicity they can generate, the better.

Note: Don’t make errors on purpose because people can see right thru that. Let your errors be natural, so to speak.

What you can learn from negative comments

There’s no such thing as bad publicity. You’ve probably heard that before, but it applies to blogs just as much as it does to other media outlets.

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