I’ve learned a few things in my blogging experience so far and some of them demonstrate how to be a bad blogger. There are countless articles floating around about becoming a better blogger, so here are 21 tips in sarcastic form to put kind of a fresh spin on these recycled blog teachings.

General Bad Blogging

Miscellaneous tips to make you a worse blogger.

• Let the publish button get dusty. Considering the whole idea behind blogging is making posts, the best way to blog badly is to not do that. You can only get readers if they have something to read, so I’d have to say that is the best way to avoid getting them.
• Be sure to hate what you’re blogging about. Passion will show up in your writing, but only if you have it.
• Be impatient. Expect to become a top blogger overnight, and get frustrated when you don’t. Underestimate the time it takes to build a reputation in your niche.
• Confidence is overrated. On the other hand, not believing in your blog may be a more important characteristic of bad bloggers.
• Have an unappealing website design. First impressions count for a lot on the internet, so what visitors see when they land on your site will affect their entire perception of your blog.
• Obsess over statistics. Checking your number of subscribers, visitors, etc every chance you get can help you blog worse, because they can distract you from actually blogging.
• Read more than you write. Since articles will write themselves, you might as well kick back and spend your day reading other blogs.
• Give up. The best method to do anything badly is to not do it.

How to Write Posts Everyone Will Hate

Considering the royalty of content, this is a very important aspect of bad blogging.

• Remember that grammar is your enemy. Punctuation marks are just for decoration, caps lock doesn’t convey anger, apostrophes are an unnecessary stretch for your pinky, and correct spelling is just another guideline for the English language, right?
• Don’t write about what your blog was intended for. Let off-topic posts completely dominate your archives and maybe even change your blog’s niche once in a while to keep things interesting.
• Prevent people from scanning your content. Don’t use any paragraphs, bullets, numbers, or any kind of text formatting that can serve as “landmarks” for people to keep their place while reading on your blog.
• Forget structure completely. There’s no more intimidating piece of literature than one that’s composed in one giant paragraph without any subtitles or anything that can break it up into more manageable reading material.
• Make post titles as vague as you can. Give no clue whatsoever as to the contents of each post. You might even want to go one step further and create misleading titles that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual post.
• Make post content as verbose as you can. The opposite of above. Do not ever get to the point or purpose of the article. Ramble on about irrelevant subjects until you feel the reader’s unnecessary suspense has continued far enough.

How to Maintain a Lonely Environment on Your Blog

Tips taken from my previous post, “How to Attract Zero Visitors.”

• Steer clear of other bloggers in your niche. Make no contact whatsoever with anyone who could link to you, write for you, work with you, etc. In the long run they’ll just end up sending you traffic and what not.
• Keep your forums signatures link-free. Communities of like-minded people are infested with potential clickers of your links. Prevent any pageviews by making sure you don’t put links to your website in your signature space, especially if you’re an active contributor to the discussions. As a general rule, don’t place links to your site anywhere on the internet. They’ll just be followed.
• Forget everything you’ve ever learned about SEO. Who wants Google crawling all over their website? If you don’t know anything about Search Engine Optimization, consider yourself ahead of the game. If you’ve already spent countless hours reading up on it, clear your mental-cache immediately while you still can. Forget everything. Now, open up your website files and misuse h1 tags, erase keywords, and rewrite your URL structure.
• Stay away from social bookmarking and such. Prevent the potential floods of traffic by keeping your distance from Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and all those guys. This means don’t submit your links, and pray that your readers (if you have any) don’t submit them either.
• Don’t speak of your website. When your friends and family ask why you’ve been slaving away over a hot keyboard all day, just make up an excuse. Or if you’re a terrible liar, just remember you have the right to remain silent. Word of mouth can be a powerful marketing technique, so it’s best to keep the conversations non-internet related.
• Have a horrible website design. The only thing that’ll come out of a good design is praise. You’ll be published in galleries, you’ll be talked about, you’re links will be passed around like a bowl of potato chips. Play it safe and shoot for a bad website design. (see: How to Make the Worst Website Ever)
• Write terrible articles. The worse the content, the less you’ll be linked to. It helps to ignore grammar rules, ramble on about irrelevant subjects, and most importantly: write about things that nobody cares about.

There you have it. (As always, if you want to be a good blogger, do the opposite.)