What Turns a Visitor into a Reader, Commenter, Quitter or Hater?
When a unique, brand new, never seen before user visits your site, within the first 30 seconds or so, they will become one of four things, but what turns them into these directions?
First, you have to realize that you can not have only one of the four categories: Reader, Commenter, Quitter, Hater. Any site, no matter the quality or bias will produce a little bit, or a lot of everything.
Visitor to Reader
What’s going to make someone hit that ‘subscribe by RSS‘ or fancy button? Finding the answer to this seemingly impossible question is nothing more than waiting under your nose. Just ask your self, “why do I subscribe to a site?” and even go through your feed reader. The answer? The content.
I know, it’s old. Quality content is the ultimate cliché answer to all your blogging woes. Unfortunately, it’s true. Some things in life have a simple answer, whether you want to accept it or not. Case in point, dieting. A diet (not in the literal sense of the term, the popular sense) is a temporary solution to a persistent problem.
Going on a diet is like getting on the front page of Digg. The problem is your blog’s traffic and readership. Sure, you’ll get a nice boost, but it’s gone faster than you can say “chocolate cake”.
Food analogy aside, what makes people subscribe to your site is mainly content. Design plays a part, but can be out weighed (no pun intended, seriously, the analogy is over) and so does the “lemming factor”. The lemming factor basically means if a ton of people read your blog, then people are bound to subscribe without a though. Lemmings!
Visitor to Commenter
When users comment it’s awesome. Bloggers love interaction with their readers, and it’s one of the things that makes blogging so popular. Commenting, while a seemingly good thing has it’s downsides. To turn that visitor into a commenter, one of a couple things happened:
- What you wrote was so awesome that they just had to tell you.
- You angered them, and a rebuttal is necessary.
- A regular visitor, comments often.
- They want some traffic.
- You helped them, and they thank you or show some results.
Of course there’s many more, but looking into the darker side of things for a second… This is the internet. If you step out of line on something, there a millions of people waiting to call you out. Doing something wrong or stupid will get you more attention then doing something helpful or awesome (mostly) but words will be exchanged over it.
Sometimes the best thing to do, in realizing you slipped up is to admit and not press on with a debate. However, if you’re right (which most bloggers believe anyways) then don’t be afraid to stand up for your self. It turns commenters into haters real quick, but it’s hard to have someone walk into your home on the web and slap you around.
Visitor to Quitter
Quitter, referring to someone who’ll just promptly close the window, tab, or navigate elsewhere to likely never return.
The quitter, as it were, are found looming around sites like Digg, waiting to click a popular link and then leave. All social bookmarking site users have to admit to doing this, but if they do quit, maybe personally for them there were not enough reasons to go the two former transformations (we’ll call it that 
).
Although, with social media traffic comes herds and heard of all four types. Mainly quitters, but you’ll notice a huge boost of comments and readers, with the occasional hater. In huge quantities, there will always be a mix.
Visitor to Hater
Depending on your site, you either have an opposing bias to the “hater”, specifically called them or something they love out, or did something they didn’t like.
Sometimes it really isn’t you, or your writing. Maybe said visitor has a bone to pick with a stranger, has been having a bad day or just needs a hug - who knows? These people come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, including the fanboy, condescending guy, annoying guy, etc…
If you write about technology, you’re going to have a surplus of these visitors, especially when covering topics such as Microsoft, Apple, Linux, and especially recently, the iPhone. Everyone has their bias, no matter how objective they believe they are (can you really name yourself objective? C’mon…) and when provoked by an article disagreeing with that, you’ll get some nasty comments, emails or even phone calls.
Back to when you do something stupid, say something you shouldn’t or what have you. The example to end all examples, is of course the recent escapade of Phillip’s stolen camera. Read the comments on Digg, it’s a good laugh and the story is definitely entertaining, if you haven’t already.
The plus side of haters, for the one being hated on, is that they turn into aforementioned quitters really fast. Most won’t come back to read your perfectly planned comeback, but don’t worry about it.
Oh, there’s more!
While this mostly discussed the brand new visitor’s inevitable transformation, there are many other combinations. To name a few, off the top of my head:
- Commenter into reader, if they haven’t become one already, and vise-versa.
- Commenter into hater, if you say something offensive in a discussion.
- Hater into quitter, as mentioned.
- Reader into quitter or hater, usually because of the aforementioned bias vs. bias issue.
- Hater into reader, if your persuasion skills are up to it and can totally prove them wrong, and then convert them.
On an end note, don’t let your stats and readers get you down if you have more quitters than readers, etc… Try to find out what your visitors turn into, and you can either feel satisfied or try and do something to alter it in your favour.
Leave a comment
cherries
June 26th, 2007 at 7:51 PM
^ Damn spam bots.
Nice job on the article Connor
cherries
June 26th, 2007 at 7:54 PM
Also lulz at the all the food analogies in the beginning!
Connor Wilson
June 26th, 2007 at 8:59 PM
That’s not a spam bot… Actually, that’s Andy’s blog, who also happens to be in my blog roll. Definitely not spam
Andrew Rouhafzai
June 27th, 2007 at 4:26 PM
Hahahaha, I’m not a spam bot
L3ggy
June 27th, 2007 at 4:47 PM
I am.
Nice post connor. You recent posts are good ;).
The Personal Development Blog
June 27th, 2007 at 7:21 PM
I subscribe to a lot of feeds. Many are from the big names of course, but also a lot from underdogs. If feed subscribers start to unsubscribe, then you have a problem.
Connor Wilson
June 27th, 2007 at 7:23 PM
Definitely, but most of the time with FeedBurner your RSS numbers will fluctuate a little and not always give an exact number of how many people acutually subscribe. I’ve talked at length in the past about how your readers number can depend on people checking their email.
Goob
June 28th, 2007 at 2:26 AM
But how would you rank the main four in terms of what kind of people you want on your site? For me, I’d personally say from best to worse is commenter, haters, reader, quitter. Love em or not, haters tend to keep things interesting (as long as they aren’t flaming or trolling) and they give fodder not only for you to response/write about, but for commenters to respond to and readers to read.
Robert MacEwan
September 9th, 2007 at 6:40 PM
Recently I’ve started engaging my commenters more but only after reading how important they were. Guess that makes me a bad person.
Login »