Let’s be honest… There is a part of blogging that is absolutely intimidating for many people. Each and every time you publish a blog post, you are truly putting yourself out there. Your thoughts, opinions, writing style, and more are out there for comment and criticism each time you make one of your blog posts available to the public.
First, here’s a reality check: Not everybody will like you or your blog. Some will genuinely find something in your writing style, your branding, or your opinions that they truly dislike.
In that case, take their criticism, consider it carefully, improve where you can, then let it go. You’ll also run into trolls. The best way to deal with them is simply not to feed them or respond.
Mostly, keep in mind that the blogging community as a whole is both supportive and forgiving, as is the majority of your audience. Make a sincere effort to post quality content, continue to educate yourself and grow as a blogger, and you will be just fine. The positive feedback that you receive will have much more of an impact on you than the negative.
Inability to Handle Engagement
Now you’ve done it. You published a post, gone to bed, and woke up to chaos. You’ve done what all bloggers want to do. You have written a viral post.
This means that you are now living in a world of intense social media engagement. Your post is being shared, retweeted, and linked. Your social media feeds are clogged with commentary, and the hits keep coming (in a good way). You visit your blog and the number of comments and social shares are through the roof.
Now, what? The entire point of creating a blog is to grow an audience and foster engagement. Unfortunately, if you cannot handle the volume or types of engagement that you receive, you will quickly return to obscurity.
The first thing to do is pick a tool for managing blog comments. Then, you will want to make a plan for dealing with intense engagement.
This should cover methods for dealing with conflict or complaints, determining which team members will be in charge of engagement on various social media platforms, and most importantly a plan to take that engagement and turn it into conversions.
