Art of Blogging

In order for a blog to work fully as a viral web site, you need to utilize the comment system. Getting people to post comments helps bring people back and make them feel as if they are a part of the site and help set the direction it is going. This leads to telling other people about your site and getting even more people involved with your site and gracing you with traffic. Comments also are free content for your site. More key words, more updates, more links, more of everything a blog is supposed to have.

WordPress has the comment system enabled by default but that does not mean you will actually get comments other then spam. Before we go further, enable the WordPress spam filters and look at and install comment spam tools. I will write about them soon.

No one likes to be first in the comments. Help them out by creating a couple of different users for yourself and commenting on your own work or asking friends to comment. Yeah, commenting on your own work as someone else is kinda like masturbation, but deal with it and do it. No, I have not done it here, but that is because i don’t really have plans to monetize this blog. If you look at the SEO Blog you will see that “Admin” commented. That is not me, that is my friend. Getting friends to comment is not a bad thing. They are your friends after all, talking to you should not bother them.

The other side of comments is making them on other blogs. Fire up each of the major search engines and do a search for blogs like yours and go leave a comment at those blogs with your link in the comment. DO NOT make worthless posts though! Things like, “Good Read!” or “I like how you write!” are worthless and can even be considered comment spam. If you really feel a need to make those comments, at least take the time to explain why it was a good read. Look at it as a trade, some content from you as a comment for a link from them to your blog. Be fair.

The Art of Blogging is learning how to use all the tools and then most importantly, actually using them! Start to use the tools and you will learn how to be a master with them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Blog Theory, Blog Tips, Howto Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.