*I'm moving over to Lunarpages hosting so until further notice all comments have been disabled. If you need to get into contact with me, please email me at rileyhater2003@gmail.com and I'll respond as soon as possible. Until everything is done I'll be posting updates on my tumblr: babblative.tumblr.com.

If you're doing it for comments you're doing it wrong Nov 15, 16:11

and

If you’re doing it for comments you’re doing it wrong

Last year at this time everyone was all hustle bustle, must get comments. Affiliations, link exchanges, buying adspace on crappy websites, they did whatever they could to gain more visitors (and thus more comments). Nowadays that trend seems to have settled a little, I suppose on the one hand people have established themselves more (in our little community) and they’ve long since realised their blog is a boring bunch of crap and decided to not care. And really, most blogs are nothing more than a boring bunch of crap these days. I recently cut my RSS feed list down from 42 feeds to 23 because blogging has become so formulated. Sure we all go through dry-spells where we can’t blog for love nor money, but more and more people seem to have taken up “lazy blogging” (not only using Twitter and other micro-blogging services). They’re just blogging about the most mundane of things. Ah well, that’s another rant for another day (and one I’m trying to trick con make convince Sarai to do) and I want to talk about comments and the lack thereof.

If you want more comments then there’s always Despair, but that definitely has its drawbacks as I have mentioned previously. You could run around commenting on blogs, but where’s the fun in that? You should only comment on a blog if you have something relevant to add to the entry. If you want to mindlessly spam something join a forum, blogs are not the place of such monkeying around. Chances are also good that you’ll come across an owner that doesn’t return comments unless there’s something interesting (like me!) and your efforts will have been for naught.

So what can you do to boost your comments? Stop caring. Of course, this is slightly hypocritical of me because I was whining about it the other day to Sarai. We spent a while compiling sources and editing an IP post and we didn’t get that many comments. It’s okay to feel disappointed if you don’t get the response you wanted to get, but don’t let it rule how you blog because people will notice and they’ll leave. The second you start whining and bitching on your blog people are going to run like Oprah in a fat free sundae bar because no one wants to listen to the blubberings of someone who seeks validation on the Internet.

Take my entry There’s no shame in secondhand. I didn’t think I’d get much of a response and I figured that response would be “Wow, you buy used things!?” I was pleasantly surprised to get 13 comments (and 3 comments asking me to participate in a meme) on the subject that weren’t shocked at my buying used things (sometimes over new). 13 comments, however, certainly isn’t a large number. I take what I can get, though, because I could get 40 comments an entry like Swimchick, but look at the quality of her comments vs. the quality of mine, there’s no comparison because mine are better.

And that’s what it all comes down to, kids: Quality vs. quantity. ‘Tis better to have one diamond than it is to have a bucket full of coal. If just one person comments on your entry with a comment that shows they actually put some thought into it then you must be doing something right. If you’re getting comments like “FIRST COMMENT” or “SECOND COMMENT” then you’re definitely doing something wrong.

my-thoughts, tips

|