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To Give is To Get. The Importance of Blog Comments.

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By Dorien Morin-van Dam

You are business owner. You are active on social media. You even have a blog on your website and you are doing your best to keep your blog original, fresh and active, posting new articles on a regular basis. You send out updates on your social media sites and you might even have joined a blogging community to share articles of like-minded bloggers.

Does this sound like you?

To Give is to Get

But…you knew there’d be a ‘but’ right? What else can you to do ‘spice up’ your blog? What are you forgetting? I am here to tell you that many bloggers forget to do one important thing. Blog commenting. Asking for comments as well as leaving comments.

To my own clients who want to get more eyeballs on their articles, one of the first things I recommend is for them to start seeking out the blogs of other bloggers & experts in their industry and to start leaving intelligent, well thought-out blog comments.

Not sure you’d know what to say and what to comment on? Go read some comments!

Seriously! The best way to learn blog commenting is to go to (larger) publications and to see first hand what types of articles generate what types of comments. According to Jeff Goins, there are 7 types of commenters. Read his article here and decide which one you are, or want to be!

Who Should You Give Your Blog Comments To?

There is no ‘right or wrong way’ to leave blog comment, because in essence any blog that accepts your comment should be grateful you’ve taken the time to give them feedback.

However, if you’d like to target and leave blog comments for the purpose of getting blog comments back, I suggest starting here.

Leave comments for:

• Those in your industry

• Local (business) blogs

• Your colleagues

• Those in your blogging community

Why Should You Take Your Valuable Time To Leave Blog Comments?

There are many reasons behind blog commenting, that is another post on its own, but I did want to start you thinking about a few reasons why leaving blog comments could be beneficial to your business, your own blog and your writing skills.

• To show your expertise – Leave a comment that adds value to the article

• To make new connections – Leave a comment

• To find collaborators – Leave a comment and connect with like-minded people

• To start online conversations – leave a comment and get noticed

• To give feedback – Leave a comment for a specific reason

• To get backlinks – Once your comment is approved, you’ll most often get a link to your own site

• To get noticed for guest blogging – leave a comment and show off your writing skills

What Should You NOT Do When You Leave a Blog Comment?

Don’t make these five blog commenting mistakes! It might seem like common sense to you, but I often get these types of comments on my blog. When I see these types of comments, I am always happy I’ve set my blog commenting system up so that I have to approve any and all comments before they go live.

Now that you know the importance of commenting on blogs, how about I help you figure out how to get some comments for yourself? Consider how you should go about attracting the right audience to your blog and how to entice them to interact with you and leave a comment.

Why Do You Want Blog Comments On Your Blog?

There are multiple reasons to want to have an active commenting community on your blog. Here are some of the more obvious reasons to want to get blog comments.

• To build your online community

• To get potential customers to notice you

• To develop strong relationships with your readers

• For economic growth (get new customers!)

• Give-Away/Promotion

• To get feedback on your writing

• To become an authority in your field/industry

• To drive even more traffic to your blog

Caution!

There are a few things to watch for once you start to encourage blog commenting on your own site. Here they are in no particular order.

• Watch out for spammers

• Take time to moderate any and all comments

• Deal with, and process, negative comments

Ideas on How To Get Comments

An active community of commenters is a sign of a great blog. Comments inspire new comments and the cycle continues. To insure this commenting will go on and on, here are some ideas to get, and keep generating, good quality comments!

• Ask for comments

• Include a call-to-action at the end of each article

• Ask a specific question of your readers to be answered

• Give comments to get comments back

• Write provocatively (or ‘shake things up a bit’)

• Make commenting easy for the public, hard for spammers. Check your settings!

• Create a blog comment policy outlining what is expected of your community

• Respond to comments! You will get more comments that way. First, as people see you reply, they are more likely to leave a comment in the first place and once you reply to their comment, you can ask a follow up question.

Whether commenting has been on the back burner or not, ramping up your commenting can make a huge difference in the quality and quantity of your blog comments going in and out!

I’ve had fun writing this article (my first on this site!) and I have just one question for you:

Will you let me know what your most successful blog commenting strategy is? I can’t wait to read the answer!

Author’s Bio: Dorien Morin-van Dam is owner and social media marketer at More In Media, a social media consultancy in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Dorien provides social media consulting, management, training and education; she is passionate about teaching social media to small business owners. She services clients all over the USA and has worked in many different industries as well as with several NPO’s. In her spare time, Dorien manages four kids, three dogs and a husband. She runs marathons and loves to bake, travel and read.

Asking For Feedback From Clients: How and Why It’s Vital

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By Jennifer Escalona Dunn

Every business owner likes to think that his or her business is great and is operating at 100% efficiency. If your clients haven’t complained and your bank account is fine it’s easy to pretend that nothing is wrong. However, you could be setting yourself up for huge problems down the line if you maintain this illusion.

Undoubtedly, one or more of your clients has something to say about the services you’re providing. Whether or not they’ve told you personally is irrelevant; sometimes people don’t like to upset the apple cart and won’t tell you what you think…unless you ask!

Why Feedback is Important

This isn’t to say that your business is falling apart at the seams. It’s only natural that a problem might crop up from time to time.

However, one problem that occurs all the time may end up harming your business in the long run. Wouldn’t it be terrible if some little thing you could have easily taken care of irreparably damaged the work you’ve done over the years?

It may seem like you’re tempting fate by bringing these issues up in the first place. After all, if you’re asking about the problems people have, doesn’t this give them a chance to focus on what’s wrong?

This may be true, but you want these problems coming up when you can control them rather than out of the blue. If your problem is being late with assignments, one or two won’t kill you – a whole year of it, though, certainly won’t help your bottom line.

How to Get Feedback

Feedback is pretty important to the long-term health of your business, but how do you go about getting it? Is it as simple as just asking each client or should you use other methods?

Ideally you want as wide a sample as possible. As stated before, some clients may not be very receptive to freely giving out their opinions. Their ideas are still valid, though, so you need to provide an avenue for these people as well.

One idea is to make an anonymous survey on Facebook or a service like SurveyMonkey. This way all clients can provide their opinions without fear of backlash from you. Not that you would yell at them, but some may have trouble getting over their hesitation. Of course you can always email clients individually. In the email you can provide a link to the survey or they can just reply to your message.

One helpful tip is to have specific questions in mind. If you have concerns about your timeliness, for example, ask questions about this. Focusing your efforts can yield better results as it concentrates clients’ energy on that issue rather than fumbling around trying to figure out what might be wrong with your business.

Also remember: not every piece of advice you get is going to make perfect sense. In fact, you may receive flat out terrible advice from clients. Don’t immediately discount it, though. Try to figure out what they’re really saying and get to the root of the problem. It may end up helping you in the long run.

Have you ever received negative feedback from clients? Were you surprised? How did you rectify the situation?

Author’s Bio: Jennifer Escalona Dunn is the owner of Social Street Media where she writes about small business, tech and finance for sites like WePay and Outright. You can find her on Twitter @jennescalona.

Solve Communication Breakdowns with Your Blog

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By Brian Milne

Communication Breakdown,
It’s always the same,
Havin’ a nervous breakdown,
Drive me insane!

– Led Zeppelin, “Communication Breakdown”

Is it just me, or is all of this technology that’s “connecting us” actually discouraging real communication.

By definition, communication is an “exchange of information,” but even Webster suggests it should include a “personal rapport.”

But in today’s fast-paced, attention-deficit world, personal phone calls have given way to occasional emails and text messages. And, in many cases today, those one-on-one messages are being replaced by shotgun Facebook and Twitter blasts to a faceless social mediasphere.

So what about those defining moments in life, or business, that warrant more than 140 characters? Babies being born, companies doing actual good in the community and for the environment?

Those are the types of communications blogs were made for. Whether it’s a personal or corporate platform, your blog is your most important communication tool online.

Not only does the blog allow you to let your hair down, and write more freely about topics that will engage users, but it allows you to share that narrative with hundreds, thousands, even millions of readers.

And it allows you to complement your prose with strong images, videos and all of the other assets and plugins we can integrate into our blogs today.

But how do you make sure your blog doesn’t turn into another source of one-sided noise in this overly-saturated blogosphere? Here are six tips to help turn your blog into a two-way communication tool.

Use the Blog Often, and Well

They say quality over quantity. I say quantity AND quality.

For a majority of the blogosphere, blogs are successful because they do both. Their content is solid, so it gets shared. Their content is frequent, so it gets traffic.

A good blog is a two-headed monster, and you have to feed it often if you want your site to become a beast to be reckoned with online.

Don’t have time to blog as often as you’d like? Here are 10 tips for finding more time to blog.

Use the Blog to Keep Connections Updated

Ever have a situation where you’re traveling in a remote place, or are in the middle of an adventure and don’t have time to update all of your friends on your whereabouts? The blog is a great vehicle for updating the masses on your situation.

I used this same approach in 2007 when I paddled nearly 100 miles of California’s coast, and again this past fall with a photo blog from McCovey Cove during the World Series.

Posting updates to your blog will not only keep your friends and family informed, but it also saves you time so you don’t have to reach out to everyone in your social circle to give them a unique update.

Use the Blog to Share and Engage

For corporate blogs, running diaries like the examples above probably aren’t realistic, but taking the same, real-time updates approach will work for major events and conferences when content ideas are coming your way at a furious pace.

Take advantage of these events (which are content gold mines) by posting frequently around the topics and using social media (and the appropriate hashtags) to promote your work, because these types of milestones are often more timely and newsworthy than everyday posts.

Use the Blog to Collaborate

Have you ever thought of your blog as a collaboration tool?

Active online communities and blogs have amazing potential when it comes to collaborating online.

Turn your blog into a collaboration tool by: concluding posts with open-ended questions to drive reader comments, driving interaction through mobile engagement, and embedding polls, surveys and forms to pull user-generated content from the community.

The key is driving at that engagement and making sure your blog isn’t just a one-way communication.

Use the Blog to Motivate

The best part about having a phone conversation with a friend, colleague or mentor that you respect, is that the call is a two-way conversation.

Two-way conversations help resolve issues, breed new ideas and inspire and motivate both sides to strive for more.

Take the same approach on your blog.

The best posts in the blogosphere (think about all of the great content here on Successful-Blog.com) motivate and inspire, and your blog shouldn’t be any different.

Use the Blog to Listen

In conclusion, don’t just treat your blog as a one-way communication tool. Allow for comments on your posts.

Listen to and engage with those in the comments section and continue the conversation beyond the author tagline.

Take the discussion to your social networks to engage more connections in your social circle, and, gulp, even offline in the real world.

Imagine that, actually communicating with folks offline.

Robert Plant would be proud.

Author’s Bio: Brian Milne is the founder of the Hyped Blog Network and Meadows Interactive, an authorized seller of the WorkTraits behavioral assessment and work compatibility program. Share your communication tips and challenges with him on Twitter @BMilneSLO.

5 Steps to Increasing Your Blog Comments

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How to blog series

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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!!

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

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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.

blooms_taxonomy

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

  • Knowledge – What it is we accomplished? What were the key parts that led to the success?
  • Comprehension – What do we know now about the project, the team, the customers that we didn’t know before?
  • Application – How can we use what we’ve learned from this success to build the next initiative like this one?
  • Analysis – How is this project similar and different from other projects we undertake?
  • Synthesis – What overall learnings can take forward from this success?
  • Evaluation – How as this win change what we understand about what we do as a business?

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!!

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Thanks to Week 269 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

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

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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blind-influence
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my-storyboard-life
new-adventures-of-an-old-sid

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