Everyone knows how important comments are to a blog. They virtually breathe life into a post! When people see that a post doesn’t have many comments the first impression could well be that the post itself is inferior. This could cause them to move on without reading the post or at the very least it can give them a preconceived perception that the post is somewhat imperfect in some way.
Knowing that to be the case I have over the years conducted a personal crusade to show people how important comments really are and what they should do get more comments on their blogs. I’ve even written posts, like Teaching People The Proper Way To Comment to help commentators improve their commenting skills so they have more chance of getting their comments approved. More importantly I’ve tried to show them how leaving great comments will actually increase traffic to their blogs.
In my post How Much Do You Really Want To Cheese Off Your Readers I listed reasons why I wouldn’t comment on people’s blogs finishing off with a poll asking people to vote on what things stopped them from commenting on a blog. I think it’s time we analyzed those results.
What Stops People From Commenting!
- Closed Comments: OK, obviously you can’t comment if you have the comments closed but the thing to be aware of is that if people can’t comment they may decide not to stop by anymore. 59% of people said selected this choice.
- Need To Subscribe: 36% voted that they would not comment if they had to subscribe to do so.
- Third Party Comment System: 34% voted that they would not comment on blogs that used third party comment systems. I know those people who use it say people will comment regardless but the facts speak for themselves. What really makes no sense is some of these people say it actually attracts comments and that is just crazy.
- Poor Blog Content: 27% said that they would not comment on a blog with poor content! That alone should be incentive enough to publish the best content you know how. Make it interesting and appealing enough and you’re bound to get more comments.
- Comment Moderation: 25% of people said the blogs who constantly moderated their comments pissed them off to such an extent they stopped commenting and if they’re not going to comment they probably won’t read it anymore.
- Pop Ups: 25% of people found pop ups so annoying they left without commenting, and probably without reading it as well.
- Rude Blog Owners: These are blog owners who were unnecessarily rude to some commentators. 23% said they would no longer comment on blogs that had rude owners. Message here is to be polite at all times. Show that you are the better person.
- Being Ignored: Only 16% said that being ignored would stop them from commenting. I’m one of those 16% so if you don’t want me to
commentread your blog then don’t bother replying to my comments. - It’s A Blogger Blog: only 16% said they wouldn’t comment on a blogger blog. I occasionally do but only if I know the blogger.
Well, that’s it for that poll, and with the end of one we have the birth of another.
Why Social Media Should Begin At Home
Isn’t it weird how so many people are so into telling others how important social media is for growing their business or building their blog but when it comes to interacting on their own blog they are somewhat lacking? 
Well hopefully this and other posts will educate them somewhat by showing them how it really starts off with their own blog. Heck, it makes no sense at all to do all that interacting on social media sites to get people to visit your blog and once you get them there you fail to continue that very interaction that got them there in the first place!
And yet social media is an important part of getting people to know who you really are as well as building a sense of trust between you and those who have chosen to follow you, something that you need to continue once they come for a visit.
I feel this is a brilliant topic for another poll. In this poll you get to vote twice by telling everyone what your two favourite Social Media Sites are.
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Once you’ve voted please leave a comment telling us why you chose the ones you did. You may also choose to use the social media buttons on this post to spread the word amongst your contacts because as with most polls you always get a better result when a larger representation of people take part.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest UpdatesI highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!
. Man, I am so glad I purchased this Mac and I am now using it more that the PC, and that says a lot.
:cheese1_ee: Anyway, disabling all but the 
, so I deleted that and installed the script into the footer instead.
SEO Tactics For Improving Search Engine Results
In my last post I wrote about how things were tracking with my lottery ticket site. I related how although it had only been three months it had already attained a PR3 ranking. I also mentioned how although it ranked #1 for certain keywords in Bing and Yahoo it was doing pretty dismally where Google is concerned. I failed to mention though that it had an Alexa ranking of 500,994 which I think is pretty damned good considering it’s age.
One of the things that I love about blogging and cultivating good comments is that doing so usually results in useful information. Sometimes those comments may result in another post and other times they could result in valuable information that the blogger can use. This time they actually resulted in both. Like the comment left by my mate Mitch of I’m Just sharing.
I’m Just Sharing……last post You Can’t Just Be Comfortable
Then there was the comment left by Marion.
Marion
Train Games……last post Train Games
Both Mitch and Marion, who from this day forth shall be known as the M&M’s
both made some very good points that are keyword related. Naturally I knew that Buy Online Lotto Tickets wasn’t the best keywords to target, Market Samurai told me that, but I thought it would be the easiest option as they were in the domain name. Still, like Marion suggested the amount of searches for those keywords are minimal.
Taking their advice I decided to change my tactics by focusing on more popular search terms, like lottery tickets, and by ensuring that they appeared more often in the blog. Whereas other bloggers, including yours truly, uses the footer for placing widgets and such I thought it would be more SEO appropriate to use it to optimise the blog for those search terms. You can see what I mean by checking out my SEO optimised Footer.
Finally, there was the comment left by Nik.
Nik
Career Journey
At first I pointed out to Nik that they were H2 tags, because that was what I thought I inserted in the post, but as it turns out Nik was right and I was able to correct the error. So, I made some changes and I will now concentrate on increasing my backlinks making sure I spread them out over a greater range of domains.
While this post may point out some important SEO facts it points out something that is almost as important. I’m talking about the importance of leaving quality comments on a post. You just never know when your comment will lead to your blog or site being included in a post.
I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!