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In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how to deal with online trolls and haters.
Unfortunately, there will always be someone out there trying to bring you down when you’re up, so we’re showing you how you can deal with it, and still come out ahead.
Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you!
Click here to ask your question!
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Jocelyn’s post on how to deal with haters
- Today’s question comes from PersonalizedToday.com
- Have a Question? Ask it here!
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. Our question today comes from Matt and Meredith from PersonalizedToday.com. Thank you guys for writing in and for leaving your domain name, and make sure you leave us your domain if you do submit a question so that we can read it on air and put it in our show notes.
Matt and Meredith write:
“Hey guys, the biggest hurdle that has been keeping us from starting an online business has been dealing with haters and trolls. I see all these trolls all over YouTube and on other people’s website comments. My question is, how do you all deal with haters and how can I not let them bother me and stop us from reaching our online goals? If you already have a post on this subject, please let us know which episode or post. Thank you so much. Keep up the awesome work and God bless.”
JOCELYN: We actually do have a blog post about this. I wrote it a while back and it’s called Dealing with Haters.
SHANE: Got to hate, hate, hate. Sorry, I’m a big Taylor Swift fan, so I had to go ahead and do that.
JOCELYN: Wow. So if you go to FlippedLifestyle.com/Haters, you can find my blog post about dealing with haters and this is something that we have dealt with as well. I actually have a theory about this. If you have haters, that means you have officially arrived because the fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter what you do in life, no matter how good it is or how well intentioned, there’s going to be somebody out there who wants to just cause trouble for you.
That’s just the way of life. That’s the way it is when you’re young child, that’s the way it is when you’re an adult. I just think that probably never changes. It is really, really frustrating to have somebody to say something negative about work that you’ve done or something you’ve written or something you’re trying to sell. This has happened to me actually many times and it is, I mean, it’s just hard. It makes your whole day just kind of bad because somebody says something bad and it just makes you think that everything that you do is terrible. That’s just not true.
You just have to remember that no matter what you do, there’s going to be somebody out there for whatever reason – whether it’s jealousy or whether it’s just being mean – somebody is going to hate on what you do.
SHANE: Most of the time, we really let that negative comment overwhelm us when really, we’re doing so much good for so many people that that one person is just a drop in the bucket anyway but it’s like that negative comment feels louder. We have over 200 five star reviews on iTunes and if you haven’t left us a review on iTunes, we’d really appreciate if you’d do that. just head over there and tell us what you think about this show but we have almost 100% positive reviews on iTunes and one person one time, didn’t even leave a comment, but they came in and left us a one star review. It’s our only review that’s below four stars. It’s the only bad one and they didn’t even leave a comment.
When we got that review, we were kind of like, “Oh man, somebody is hating on us.” We thought about that one star review for like days and days and it was like, but then we finally realized, “You know, that person is just a troll.” They are just out there. They saw all those positive reviews. They were probably just hating on us because they tried to start something, couldn’t do it, and they were mad because we did. They were just doing that out of spite basically.
I have another site where we have a product and we have all kinds of lesson plans for teachers. We have tons and tons of four and five star reviews. Literally, hundreds of four and five star reviews but then every once in a while, we’ll have a hater come in and give us a one star review. So now our average goes to like 3.9999.
At first we used to let that get to us. We used to let those negative things happen but now, we just let it roll off the back of our skin because it doesn’t really matter. That person is irrelevant. 99% of our audience is never either going to see that review or they are going to disagree with it so vehemently that they will come in and actually defend us from that person.
You have to realize that trolls are out there because they really want what you’re doing or they want to accomplish something and maybe they failed or they can’t, and they are really just lashing out because they are bitter or because they don’t have anything else better to do. Most of the time, they are not even really criticizing your work, they are not really mad at anything. They are just doing it for spite.
JOCELYN: Okay, so I’m going to give you a couple of actionable tips to deal with these types of comments or just rude things in your business. First of all, if you get a mean or vindictive comment, depending on the nature of it, if it’s something legitimate, if it’s a legitimate concern, try to respond to it.
SHANE: Like customer service or something like that.
JOCELYN: It actually makes you look better if you will thank the person for their email or their comment and try to tell them that you understand where they are coming from and respond to their comments.
SHANE: I have an example of this just the other day, we had a lesson plan that we sell and someone posted a really hateful comment and said, “Everything that you said was in this is not included. You didn’t even give me answer keys for the tests.” I actually responded to that and I said, “This is not a true statement. The answer keys are at the bottom of the test. You just have to scroll down a couple of page.”
The person came back and was like, “Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t see them,” but their negative hateful comment was there and I had a legitimate time to say, this is the time I can jump in and say “Wait, that’s wrong” and now people that read that will see that my product does include that so it was a chance for me to improve my customer service.
JOCELYN: That’s a legitimate concern that somebody might have. If on the other hand somebody is coming to your YouTube video or your blog or whatever the case may be and just being like, “This is the stupidest blog ever.” Well, you know what, it’s my blog and I approve the comments and that one is not getting in. If somebody is being mean just for meanness sake, then if you have the ability, just delete that comment and move on.
SHANE: And it’s also good to create filters. When we first started out, Jocelyn takes these negative comments a lot more personal than I do, I don’t really care. I coach football for years so I’ve heard myself called everything from every parent in America for losing games and whatever, you’re doing something wrong, not playing the right kid so it kind of washes off me a little better.
I would always check our emails and comments first and I would remove the haters because I can deal with it a little better and then I would leave the customer service or whatever was left for Jocelyn, even on her Elementary Librarian site and then when Jocelyn hired a personal assistant, she now has her go through and check all the emails, all the comments, and if it’s hate, she removes it. That way, we’ll never see it so we kind of create these barriers and we protect ourselves from the haters.
JOCELYN: The bottom line is that if as long as most of your audience is happy with what you’re doing, then you’re doing fine. Try not to let these negative people ruin you. You’re doing just fine.
SHANE: Focus on the people that love you, love your brand, and build you up, and just like in real life, If you’re hanging around negative people, get those people out of your life and you’re going to be able to take it to the next level. Thank you guys so much for your question. That’s all the time we have for today and if you need to send us a question, make sure you do that over at FlippedLifestyle.com/QASJ. We’ll see you next time, bye.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Rach says
My situation is a bit different and is effecting our online presence. We have a group of people who are doing extremely derogatory video reviews of our product. They are going on to the good reviews and harassing those video posts. They are placing the video link in blogs and any site they can so it shows up everywhere. They are being very aggressive on our social media and in their videos. Their video is now coming up first when you search our product. What can we do?
Shane Sams says
Wow, so sorry you are going through that Rach 🙁
All you can do is control what you can control. Try to ignore responding to them…don’t feed the troll.
Notify the PLATFORM about the comments and stuff, but just ignore them. They will get bored and go away hopefully.
Praying for you! All things pass! Be strong, keep moving forward! -Shane