I like to consider myself a pretty good blogger and one of the reasons I am one is because I take the time to read other peoples and learn from them. The one thing though that I find really irritating is the amount of inane comments some people leave on these blogs. Therefore, I would like to take the time to post this, in the hope that there will be some who learn from it and that it will in the end improve their and our blogging experience. I would say that every blogger has heard many times over how important content is to ones post, how it is the number one factor that will bring return visitors and the all important high PR factor. The thing is how do people find your blog and all that good content? There is no point taking the time to write fantastic posts and then sitting on your rear end waiting for visitors to come and visit. Sure if you use the right keywords and stuff search engines may send you someone every now and again but it's going to take you a hell of a long time to get a decent readership.
Let's face it, nothing in life is easy and blogging is no different. You have to work at getting you 'Blogging Name' out there. One of the best ways is by socializing with other bloggers and you can do this by joining many of the communal blogging sites, by using places like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter etc, but I would say the most important way is by commenting on other peoples blogs.
A lot of bloggers also realize this, but where they fail is in their content. They feel that all they need do is to leave boring inane comments like 'good post', 'nice blog', 'good job' and other crap thinking that this will bring them the 'hits' that they require. How wrong they are, and for three main reasons. The first is that most blogs use the 'nofollow' attribute and so search engines ignore these comments. The second is that other bloggers hate these moronic responses and are now immune to them switching them off subconsciously and completely ignoring them. The last one is that the blog's owner will more likely than not delete them and so the whole effort of the useless comment was wasted.
Now, if on the other hand the comment was relevant to the post and contained good content, you are showing others that you are knowledgeable on the subject and this will intrigue many a reader of your comment, which will have a huge potential for gaining those readers that you are pining for.
I want to direct you to a particular post on the popular Rambling Thoughts Blog by Neerav Bhat, http://www.bhatt.id.au/blog/win-a-prize-by-writing-helpful-blog-comments/. The owner of the blog, places such an importance on comments that he actually gives out prizes to people who write helpful comments on his blog. He does this for a reason, and that is because of the knowledge that good comments actually increase the value of his blog, and this is important to him, because although he is earning thousands of dollars via his blog, he is a little short of the Problogger whose earning potential has reached the six figure mark! Yep that is over $100,000 dollars a year. Now if that isn't enough incentive to only put out good content comments, I don't know what is.
