September
20
2007
The short answer is I WAS!
Let me start at the beginning!
I started focusing on my blog, this blog, a couple of weeks ago.
- I want it to be a success.
- I want it to educate people.
- I want to use it as a networking tool.
- and I want to make some money from it.
In the beginning it was all exciting. My first serious blog. I was posting everyday- usually more than once, and things were going all rosy. I was not only building a significant amount of traffic for a new blog, but my rss feed count was growing at a fantastic rate.
Things were going great!
But a week or so in I started to think about how I had not received one single comment the whole time the blog had been up! “It’s only new” I told myself, “These things take time!”So I put it to the back of my mind and continued to blog, continued to network and a couple more days past and still no comments!
Something was wrong, I knew it:
- maybe my blog was just bad
- maybe the posts were boring and nothing new
- maybe I wasn’t meant to be a blogger
I got really discouraged, it was really starting to get to me - I needed to work out what was wrong!
I looked at all the popular blogs that got lots of comments, thinking I would surely find the answer to my problems. What I found was that the majority of the popular blogs had a section on their sidebar called “Top Commenters.”
I thought, Brilliant, a way to give your commenters some credit, and a bit of link love. This had to be the answer!
So I added it to my side bar, thinking the comments would roll in.
NOTHING!
This had me beat, so I went to one of my posts and scrolled to the bottom to see if I could post a comment as a test, and you know what?
I had the stupid thing set to “register if you want to comment”
The reason no one was commenting, was because the didn’t want the hassle of registering and logging in. So I quickly changed it, and made it so anyone could comment.
I had a new comment in 5 minutes!
Can I just say I felt a little bit stupid. But I am glad it is all worked out.
Feel free to comment my posts, at the end of each week I will show some extra link love to the top 3 commenters!
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On a side note, I have some exciting news.
I have been offered my first guest blog at IanFernando.com I will let you know when it is up!
Wow, that sucks! Sounds kinda like a mistake I made last week and resulted in me writing a blog post about why it is important to test drive your site - my rss subscribe button would only show on the front page, and not the individual posts. Once I fixed that, my subscribers count rose a fair amount.
Yea. I was building a really good feed count, and then it really dropped, and that could also possible be put down the the fact that readers couldnt comment.
Hopefully I get the same result as you!
A great post which has some interesting information. I personally have always disliked sites where you have to signup to comment or post. Although I don’t mind it as much now as I’m getting quicker on the signup forms, but many people that would have to signup would normally just move away from a site if they had to signup.
I can see from the amount of comments that you have had just for today that it’s starting to take effect.
Good luck with this and hope you blog works out. You have some good posts so far
Keep it up.
On my blog I find that the only comments I get are a list of spammy links. Do you get this and how do you overcome it?
I combat this by making it so I have to moderate my comments before they are shown. Which means I can delete comments that are spam before they hit my blog.
Hi Tom
Ouch! At least you’ve picked it up now & comments seem to be rolling in…
(BTW I came here via disassociated - nice to meet another Aussie)
Just make sure they are not going to spam the crap out of your blog
Nice blog btw