My Plan for World Domination – Comments!
The small audience that I have managed to attract to this blog so far has come primarily from the Thirty Day Challenge and I am completely unknown outside of that circle. I would like to start taking this blog to the next level and reach out to anybody who is interested in making a living from Internet based business ventures.
Comments In, Comments Out
When blogs first started out they were very much web based diaries and I suppose this one is a bit like that as I am documenting my Internet marketing journey. However, the beauty of web 2.0 is that sites no longer have to be a one-way conversation between the site author (blogger) and their audience.
Blog comments allow readers to continue that conversation, to feel involved, to offer their opinion, to start a debate… the list goes on. When new readers come to visit a blog they like to see a vibrant community thriving in the comments of the posts – it shows that the blog is active and thought provoking.
In essence, comments are good. Over the last 8 months or so the list of blogs in my feed reader has ballooned and I now read a ton of blogs about Blogging, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Personal Growth and of course, the best blog in the world, I Can Has Cheezburger! During this time I have soaked up information like a sponge but I have remained a lurker – I have never commented on other blogs as I never felt as if I had anything of value to say.
That all changed with the launch of this blog, and now I have plenty to say! I’ve also been thrilled to see that most of my posts have already started to attract great comments from my readers. There are two areas in which I’d really like to make a big push:
- Comments IN – increasing the blog comments on this blog
- Comments OUT – increasing my contribution to other blogs
Comments In – Introducing the Top Commentators Widget
The Top Commentators widget shows up in the sidebar and shows the names of the people who have contributed the most comments in a set period of time. The widget I am using allows me to set that time period as I see fit. I think I’ll try weekly to begin with. I’ll be installing the widget over the weekend. For the reader who appears in this list there are two main advantages:
1) A Do-Follow Backlink
I use Wordpress on this blog and that means that any links posted in comments, including the links associated with the name of a reader who left a comment, is no-follow. This is a tag used by Google and it means “don’t follow this link when crawling this site” so it does NOT count towards your count of backlinks. Now not all search engines pay attention to this tag but Google does and Google has a large chunk of the search market so it’s a big deal.
However the links in the Top Commentators widget are not no-follow links so they do count.
2) Commentator Name Prominently Displayed
The widget is in the sidebar and this is shows on every page of the blog which means that other readers may be enticed to click on those links to check you out which could bring more direct traffic than just the links within the comments themselves.
The Potential Spam Threat
I started getting spammed in my comments literally within days of going live. I can only assume that people are using automated software to trawl the net for new blog posts on which to leave comments. Thankfully, Wordpress comes with an anti-spam plugin and once I switched that on I found that it caught it all. It’s actually slightly over-sensitive as it has caught some genuine comments which I had to let through manually.
Plus, I’m a believer in the Law of Attraction and as long as I’m focusing on providing readers with a good user experience and rewarding my loyal commentators and not focusing on that tiny minority who try and spam, I figure it won’t be a problem. Anyhow, if it does get abused then I’ll just take the widget off.
Comments Out – Putting Myself Out There on Other Blogs
I’ve seen this advice touted quite a lot as a way of getting free exposure for a blog – “comment on other blogs” but rarely is that advice expanded upon. I actually think it can be a valid traffic building strategy for any website that you want to draw attention to, it doesn’t have to be a blog.
I Need a Plan
I have so many blogs in my reader that I simply will not have time to become an active participant on them all. I figure I have two choices:
- Pick a handful of blogs and focus on those
- Rotate the blogs I comment on, to spread myself around
I was swinging between both strategies for a while until I evaluated what I really wanted to get out of the process. One thing that I want is some backlinks to the blog but that is rather secondary. My primary purpose is to get my name out there into the blogosphere and get noticed!
Over time I have come to really love some of the blogs I read regularly. I feel like I know the blogger personally and even talk about them by name to my other half who usually has no idea who I am talking about! People know Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak and many others. I want to be one of those names :-)
How do I intend to do that by posting a few comments? By making an impression, that’s how. I’m sure you will have seen that many blog posts on popular blogs (especially those that have some kind of Top Commentator plugin) are filled with one liners like “great post!”. Well that’s nice for the blog author but that comment provides absolutely nothing of value to the other readers of the blog.
I want to separate myself from the general comment noise and stand out from the crowd. I intend to provide insightful comments that make people stop and say “who the heck is this Caroline Middlebrook person?” and then go click my link to find out. I want the blog owner to think the same thing and check me out.
If those people like what I have to say then they may come here and become a regular reader, and that is my goal. I figure that I am far more likely to get noticed in this way by focusing on just a few blogs and becoming a regular commenter there so I have plumped for the first strategy. If they don’t like what I have to say in my comments then chances are they won’t like my blog either so I haven’t lost anything.
How Do I Choose the Blogs to Focus On?
1) Blogs I Love
First of all there are some blogs that I really like and I want to put in the time to keep up with them so I’ll want those on my list as I’ll be reading them anyway so it’s not much more effort to comment also.
2) Blogs That Do-Follow
I talked about the nofollow tag earlier. Any blog that is using a do-follow plugin will allow me to score a backlink as well so that’s an added bonus that I may as well take advantage of.
3) Blogs With a Top Commentators Plugin
I already talked about the benefits that this plugin presents for the reader. As I am a reader of these blogs, those benefits apply to me. If other people in this niche start seeing my name in the top lists for several blogs they will start to remember that name and may be intrigued enough to come take a look at what else I have to say.
My Commenting Strategy
It seems somewhat anal to have a ’strategy’ for posting comments, but if I don’t I could see myself easily losing hours of the day just drifting from blog to blog reading and commenting. For comments to be effective they need to be seen and that means posting on recent posts, not last week’s news, and making sure that comment is one of the first ones to be seen.
This means that I actually need to keep up with my blogs which is tricky for me because of the way I currently read blogs. At the moment I have far more than I can actually keep up with so when I have a little spare time I just pick a blog and start working my way through the backlog until I’ve read them all. This is nice in a way because it allows me to really get a feel for the writing style of that particular blogger but of course the disadvantage is that I often get the latest news a few days late.
I’m going to have to change this – I can continue to do that for my regular blogs but for those that I want to comment on, I need to first get caught up and then make sure I stay up to date. I’ll be picking an hour or so a day to do this, probably fairly late in the day as this is easy, “no brainer” work which is nice to do when you’re getting tired towards the end of the day.
And That Achieves World Domination How Exactly?
Ok perhaps I can be a bit of a sensationalist at times but hey, I like to think big! Blogging is about engaging with your readers and as Darren Rowse says, you do that one reader at a time. It doesn’t matter how small you start out, everybody started out the same way. I am taking my first steps here, and sharing immediate plans and my longer term goals along the way.
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Andy Roberts
September 21, 2007
Hi Caroline,
I think you are definitely on the right track with keeping up to date with RSS reading rather than working through a long backlog. Mister “Mark Read” is your friend :-)
I’m motivated to comment tonight because I’ve also been thinking about how comments work recently, and I’d consider inward comments to be a ‘conversion result’ if you like, and try to make things easy for commenters, eg no registration or captchas. I’ve installed the top commentators plugin recently but not advertised the fact. Some people like recognition but others feel self conscious about being pointed out as adding more volume than anybody else. It used to be a well known trolling ploy to post lists of posting stats back into newsgroups. But it depends on your target readership. There may be some transatlantic cultural differences at play too, or maybe not.
Probably more important is the “get notified of further comments by email” plugin. I’m also experimenting with a threaded comments system. Not sure about that yet.
I’d also recommend Spam Karma2 above akismet.