How to Moderate Blog Comments

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Blog commenting can be a great way to get to know your fellow bloggers on other blogs, while also building a community within your own blog.

However, spam comments have reached a critical mass, often taking up the majority of the time of bloggers who just want to be able to filter out the great, original comments from the fake ones.

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Besides installing a plugin to fight spam, there are a few other things you can be on the lookout for that will help you determine whether or not a comment is spam or is genuine. [Read more…]

How to Increase Blog Comments

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how to get more blog comments

Having an active and engaged blog community is at the top of every blogger’s wish list. While the goal is clearly outlined, the way to get there sometimes isn’t. Although not guaranteed, there are some ways that you can get more comments onto your blog.

Paid Traffic

Sometimes getting a high level of engagement does take a financial commitment. In this case, having paid campaigns to get more traffic to your website will certainly increase your chances of more engagement, especially when they come from social media. Do some research on paid social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter and also through the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Facebook and Google also occasionally send out coupons to new account users, so be sure to research that before signing up for a new account. [Read more…]

Are Comments a Measure of a Blog’s Success?

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CommentsIn 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…]

3 Easy Things To Boost Your Site Traffic Today

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traffic

Write great content

You’d be surprised how many forget this one. They choose a platform, they load it up with a million plugins, they advertise to their existing social media circles, but when it comes to writing they miss the mark completely. What is great content? This is material which engages your audience. It is researched, highly structured content posted once a week or more that meets people’s needs head on with solutions. It produces a response (in their sharing) to their questions because it’s entertaining but also informative. Pick a niche, and then research ways i.e. read other blogs and construct a way to say what they are saying, but in your own voice. DO NOT REINVENT THE WHEEL.

Promote properly

I previously mentioned promotion as a way to grow your traffic. But here’s the thing about promotion: too much will kill your success before it gains traction. Many of you, including myself, have probably done the following when starting out: start blog, tweet 100 times a day, get onFacebookand beg people to”like”, then auction your soul to the Devil when that doesn’t work out. This is not only painful, it’sunnecessary. The best promotion tactics, by far, are the ones which never get talked about. For instance, writing great content often produces a series. Conversion of these articles into PDF format and sharing witheBookdirectories and free document sites like Scribd or Helium is a great way to bump the odds in your favor. Angering your readers by over-promotion is an avoidable situation, so don’t do it!

Engage your audience

If someone, say a family member or friend, asked you a poignant question which gave you pause, would you ignore them? OF COURSE NOT! You’d jump right on the bullet train to Intelligentsia (sorry, bad puns abound in my world) and figure out a worthwhile reply to their query. So why is it when you post on your site, the only thing you see is the occasional greeting from Grandma?The ‘gurus’ bread and butter is no longer figuring out how to get traffic, it’s merely conversing (read:engagement) about all the traffic they get, thereby getting more. It’s a topic which spews dividends every time it is brought up. Simply put: present a question in your great content, then engage with your audience’s feedback. This method can be accelerated if you use forums to become an expert on your niche and use your blog URL as a signature in your profile.