Whatever you do online, you’re bound to encounter interesting individuals who seem to have made it their life’s work to show you how wrong, stupid, clueless, or worthless you are.  You’ll encounter these inviduals regardless of how you generate traffic–chat, articles, social networks, blog comments, youtube comments, and/or forum posts.  It is rather easy to avoid a deeper discussion about the value of these people to your online business by merely dismissing them as Internet trolls or just negative people who have nothing else better to do.  Doing that would be a mistake.

In fact, haters can be very helpful to webmasters if dealt with the right way.  Here’s a short list on how to deal with Internet haters:

Learn from critics’ honest criticism –  Just as it is harder to learn from success than learning from failure, it is easier to learn from someone who insults/denigrates you than from the tender/neutrally couched words of a friend.  Because they dislike you, haters  don’t have any incentive to couch their words in diplomatic terms or hold their tongues back.  This is a golden opportunity for you to glean honest feedback from beneath a pile of drama, exaggerations, and insults.  Piece together some genuinely useful information from the honest feedback and use it to improve your site or your marketing tactics.

Let their negativity and discouragement force you to react in a positive way – There are two types of people–proactive people and reactive people.  That’s human nature.  You can’t change it.  Either you’re proactive or you’re reactive–with varying shades in between.  There’s no good or bad in this division.  Just know that if you’re a REACTIVE person, you can use that to your advantage.  You can interpret the criticisms as forcing your ego into a corner.  From this corner, you are forced, due to the reactive makeup of your personality, to react in a productive way.  By being insulted, a FIGHT mentality ensues and you use this energy to prove your critics wrong.  Their hate just makes you stronger and you rise above their negativity.  In essence, they pushed you to become a stronger, better, faster, and more efficient YOU.  In order to do this, you must learn to channel  the negative energy from your detractors into a usable form–many people just let it get to them and discourage them.  It’s okay to get upset–just channel it into “I’ll show them” instead of “Why me?” or “They are F’d up, why can’t they accept me or what I’m doing?”

Convert your critics into fans.  Some people criticize because they notice something that you’re lacking.  Others criticize because they feel they are lacking something and thereby project that anxiety on to you.  The latter group can’t easily be converted because their animosity arises from their own personal issues.  The former group can be converted into fans if you listen to them and figure out what you’re lacking.   Often, this type of critic will become a fan or even a loyal supporter if you address their concerns.  The key is to get past the ego and filter through all the noise and drama and pick up on the instructions.

Don’t let others’ negativity derail your efforts or dampen your enthusiasm.  Keep moving forward and let their negative energy push you forward instead of hold you down.

Photo Credits:  ulMarga