5 Steps to Increasing Your Blog Comments

Filed Under Comments, Successful Blog, Writing | 1 Comment

How to blog series

by
Virginia Cunningham

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You’ve created a blog, made a few posts, maybe even installed some ads for the extra income. You’re locked and loaded to take the Internet by storm. But where are all the comments? Where is the dedicated audience breathlessly hanging on your every word?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to succumb to the tumbleweeds just yet. If you’re eager for more fans, here are five steps to increasing your blog comments.

1. Comment On Other Blogs

Before anything else, you need to establish your presence in your field. This is most easily achieved by commenting on other blogs and making a name for yourself as someone worth listening to. By making smart, funny and helpful comments on other blogs, readers will be interested enough to follow you back to your own.

2: Respond To Comments

No one likes to be ignored, and if your commenters feel like they’re shouting into an empty void, they become much less likely to comment in the future. To gain (and keep) an active community of followers, you’ll need to make a habit of responding to their comments. Answer their questions. Suggest new tech. Outsource their problems if you have to. Regardless of the content, just make sure their comments don’t go unnoticed. They’ve taken time out of their lives to comment on your blog; the least you can do is offer them the same courtesy.

3. Create A Community

It’s basic psychology: people like to belong. Take advantage of this by turning your commenting pool into a community – a place with its own language and lingo, a place where people can build friendships and swap stories without feeling out of place. If something happens to one of your followers, spotlight it. If you think two people would really get along, mention it. Make introductions among your followers. Create memes. Reference inside jokes in your updates. When new visitors feel the urge to “fit in,” you’ll know you’re doing it right.

4. Ask For Opinions

The best thing that can happen to any blog is a lively debate, so inspire some passion by soliciting the opinions of your followers. Make polls, ask leading questions (“what do you guys think?”) and encourage the most vocal of your readers. Don’t be afraid to touch on scandalous topics, because those often create the most heated (and long-running) exchanges.

5. Be Interesting

What makes you comment on a blog? What pushes you from a mere reader to an active participant in an exchange of ideas? It wouldn’t have happened if the blog wasn’t interesting or engaging enough to merit your response.

To this extent, if you want comments, you just have to be a good blogger. You need to be active, interesting, and well-informed in your field. Your post should be entertaining and relevant. Your comments should be smart and useful.

Simply put, if you want more comments on your blog, make your blog worth commenting on.

Author’s Bio: Virginia Cunningham is a freelance technology writer based in Los Angeles, California. She currently blogs about id security, social media and gadgets.


Thank you, Virginia! Engagement is always a noble quest.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Are You Ready to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done?

Filed Under Business Life, Comments, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Motivation-Inspiration, Successful Blog, Writing | 9 Comments

We’re Awfully Good at Debriefing Failures and Just Toasting Our Success

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It takes a team to achieve a major business initiative. The research, the trials, the final product, the sampling effort, the trade shows, the tests and metrics, the PR, marketing, and social media effort designed amplify the buzz all took people, time, money, resources invested where it counts.

And when that sort of investments fails, we’re all over it to figure out where it went wrong. We hold meetings to debrief our choices, our missteps, and errors like so many grains of broken glass ground down to sand. In the name of learning from our mistakes we own our loses like so many merit badges. Sometimes we beat the losing horse until it’s long past dead with a mantra never to forget or to repeat the mistakes we made again.

But when we win, we toast to our success and move ahead.
What if we put the same rigor to debriefing our success?

How to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done

We’re great about learning from our losses. We’re not so great a learning from our success. A quick look at Bloom’s taxonomy will show that what we often do when we debrief a losing situation is we work all of the way up from knowledge through evaluation of what didn’t work.

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Suppose we followed that toast to our success with an equally granular discussion of what worked with our success? It might look like this.

Raise that toast to your success. Then ask the six simple questions to claim what you’ve won.
The moments of reflection that bring you to the answers are the time you need to incorporate, internalize, and own what you’ve done — to move the “winning behavior” from a possibility into a natural response.

The evaluation of the win is the way to claim your rewards, to own them, and to leverage that learning from then on.
When you own your success, it shows every time you walk into a room. That’s how claiming rewards from success leverages itself into more success.

The good news is we can all go back — alone or with our teams — and claim our rewards for every success we’ve ever won.

Not everything we learn has to come from what we do wrong. Are you ready to learn from every right thing you’ve done?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

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Thanks to Week 269 SOBs

Filed Under Comments, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Motivation-Inspiration, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Writing | Leave a Comment

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

Purple SOB Button Original SOB Button Red SOB Button Purple and Blue SOB Button
and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

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They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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