Blogging is different from article writing; you have to sense your audience, in order to engage it.
When I first started to blog many years ago, I used to reference other writers’ blog posts. I then used the available technology, in the form of vanity RSS feeds and trackbacks, to stay up to date on mentions or opinions about our own blog. Nowadays, however, the volume of the published content is so massive that vanity RSS feeds and trackbacks are essentially useless. [Read more…]
Your average commenting system has evolved quite a bit over the years, but sadly many blogs are still stuck in the dark ages. While blog comments aren’t a measure of success, that doesn’t mean you should not encourage them. Platforms like WordPress come with commenting ready to rock, and you are probably very familiar with the setup. Someone enters their name, email, website address and then says whatever they want to say. Depending on your theme, the comment form can be designed differently, but the functionality still remains the same.
Using the built-in commenting system is totally fine, and tends to get the job done. However, I feel you can do better with a more advanced setup like Livefyre or Disqus, and here’s why:
Good Lookin’
This can be chopped up to a matter of personal opinion, but the reality is that many basic comment forms are not lookers. Functionality is of utmost importance, but design should also be considered. To be honest, I am not a fan of the commenting system currently in place here on Blog Herald, but hey, that’s not my call. Setups from Livefyre or Disqus are very clean and simple, and they automatically adjust to the fonts or colors of your blog. [Read more…]
In December 1997, Jorn Barger of Robot Wisdom coined the term “weblog.” It combined the word “web” and “log,” and at the time such “weblogs” were incredibly basic. There were no push button services at the time, and not just anyone could start plugging away. Eventually, “weblog” got shortened to “blog” sometime around the year 2000, and we have seen massive changes ever since. WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and others have made it super easy for anyone to start creating content, helping to make their voice heard.
As blogs started to evolve, so did the level of interaction around them. The rise of search engines made content easy to discover for the first time ever, and commenting systems made it so that posts were no longer one-sided. Now, thanks to the age of social media, search engines are no longer the main source of discovery. Despite getting my start at blogging around 2008 when Facebook and Twitter were really beginning to gain traction, I always valued comments. [Read more…]
Blog comments are welcomed by all, and give us an opportunity to create a discussion, further building a community in the process. Most of the time, they’re cool and collective, sometimes disagreeing with what you have to say, which is great. If we all agreed on everything, conversations would get pretty boring, pretty fast. However, things can go south, and the bigger your blog is or the more popular you are, the more you have to deal with “haters.”
Haters have no better way to spend their time than to spew nonsense, and not add any value to the conversation whatsoever. They move beyond criticism, and can get personal by calling you names. They are an unfortunate part of life, and really seem to enjoy spending a lot of time on YouTube. Haters have one simple goal: to get a rise out of you, and to get attention.
Understanding The Mindset
Haters are simply broken human beings, and usually going through some sort of problems in their own life. Just like a school bully, they unnecessarily take things out on other people. It is easy to get upset over blog comments that are uncalled for, and wanting to lash out. However, when you start to realize that the person spewing such hate is broken, and probably needs to be hugged more often, it kinda starts to get sad. [Read more…]
One of the main reasons bloggers enjoy writing posts is to generate comments from their content that they’ve published. However, for new blogs, it can be hard to begin generating the steady traffic that also is commenting regularly. Here are some ways you can encourage commenting and participation on your blog posts.
Write About Controversial Topics
When you decide on blog topics, always pick the most controversial. If you are in an industry where there is some leeway on best practices, focus on that grey area. Organizing your content in areas where people have the most questions will more than likely start getting you more views and users that are going to want to comment.
Guest Bio: David Smith works for Conversion Optimization Company Invesp and enjoys writing on SEO, landing pages, conversion rate optimization and affiliate marketing.
Are you tired of seeing no or very less comments on your blog posts? Do you feel sad when you find out that no one wants to spend his 2 minutes in leaving a comment on the post which took hours of your efforts? If the answer to above questions is Yes, then here is good news for you, on average more than 80% of blogs suffers from “No Comments” disease. And to help you in getting rid of it, we’ve compiled a list of 18 types of posts that always gets lot of comments.
But before jumping to the list, what you need to understand is that number of comments is not an accurate index to measure success of blog. There are many other factors that determine the success of a blog – traffic, affiliate sales, advertisers etc. And if you can see a consistent increase on those departments then there is no reason to worry about comments. Now without further adieu, here are the 18 types of posts that can get you the maximum number of comments. [Read more…]
Thanks for everyone that sent this in, from the Disqus 3 teaser site, embedded below for your viewing pleasure:
Disqus is obviously one of those comment hosts that can take care of your site’s comments. A lot of sites swear by it, and we are considering switching to it here on the Blog Herald as well.
Disqus is a hosted comments solution, a popular one at that. What it does is that it replaces the comment functionality on your blog (or site for that matter) with a hosted one, which means that people can sign in with one username, and you get a lot of cool features without having to mess with plugins or code on your own.
The Mini-Profiles is pretty cool, but the killer feature is the Twitter sign in, available thanks to the new OAuth support (for you techies). Not only can you sign in with Twitter, you can also synch your commenting with your tweets, which is cool. Check out the Disqus blog post for more, or try it out yourself on any of these blogs.
In my article, “What Changes Your Mind About Leaving a Blog Comment,” I talked about some of the issues around debating where and when to leave a blog comment on a blog that hosts information or opinions you don’t support, or is filled with blog clutter, a clue that something isn’t right. About how your comment may be seen to support the blog, and impact your reputation by association.
As I wrote that post, I looked back over all the WTF Blog Clutter articles in the series and realized that many of these issues are ones that impact my willingness to comment on a blog. Sure, they impact my ability to even read the blog, let alone return and tell others, but they also impact my willingness to endorse a blog with a comment.
I started thinking about all the blatant, subjective, and even unconscious reasons that prevent me from leaving a comment on a blog. Here are some of my self-discoveries, most of them associated with various aspects of blog clutter. I’m sure you have more you can add, but these are big clues that this is a blog that doesn’t deserve my participation. [Read more…]
This is actually pretty cool, and could be the one killer feature that would make me swap to IntenseDebate. As you probably know, IntenseDebate is a hosted comment manager for your site, just like Disqus.
And now they’ve added plugin support, with a bunch of them available already. Like instant YouTube embedding and Seesmic video commenting support. Check out the launch post, the ReadWriteWeb coverage, Techmeme coverage, and the intro video below:
