Follow-Up as Art: Learn and Practice

Do you follow your competing blogs?
Do you comment on them?

Transfer a long comment into your own article!

1. If I read the comments following an article I love to read short comments.
2. Rule: Long comments should better reside in their own article.
3. Don't hesitate to leave your own Trackback, Related or Follow-Up comment.

Speaking of Follow-Ups: They are one of the greatest sources to dive deeper into a specific subject. You can write about specific aspects of a subject in your own style and length. It's like taking up the ball...

Transfer your reading input into great blog output!

A Comment is no Follow-Up

Don't get me wrong: A Follow-Up is in no way an article which follows the most basic structure seen everywhere and way too much.

1. Title
• Two or three sentences
• A blockquote
• A link out

The "two or three sentences" would have made a wonderful comment below the original article. Those comment 'articles' normally annoy me. It's pure wasted click time. The above belongs into the comments and not in an original content article!

"Two or three sentences" comments are memes and belong to a meme site or into the comments of an article.

PS: Those memes are also good examples for Publish mini blogs as asides.

What is a good Follow-Up then?

If you follow the tracker on performancing.com (you should) and the new comments you will sometimes see references to Follow-Up articles in the comments.

Follow-Up Examples

Search for Follow-Up on performancing.com. One of the absolutely best Follow-Up examples in the last time:

1. A comment starting a funny thread: Your article is an incredible text desert but worth reading.
2. Ryans Follow-Up: 5 Simple Ways To Avoid The Dreaded "Text Desert"

Initialization - Five rules of thumbs

• The inspiration for a Follow-Up can come from an article or one of the comments.
• Comment threads on your own blog or other blogs sometimes slide off the track. As a blog owner you can react and start a new thread by pointing your readers to a new article.
• The most inspiring source for Follow-Ups are questions posted by your readers. Every question is worth a Yes/No decision about writing a Follow-Up.
• The same is true for incoming search traffic! Analyze your search traffic for questions.
• If you start commenting on an article and the comment is getting longer than three sentences or you even see yourself creating a list of tips, well then you should definitely think about creating a Follow-Up instead of a comment.

Writing and publishing a Follow-Up

• If you write your Follow-Up it is polite to quote or link back to the source of inspiration at the beginning.
• As you are digging deeper into specific aspects of a subject it is good to add some definitions, examples (Follow-Up example by itself) and some forward links to valuable sources.

After writing a Follow-Up and publishing it there is still some work to do.

1. Write a "Follow-Up: " comment at the source of your inspiration and inform the readers about your Follow-Up. Quote an abstract.
2. Publish "Related: " comments if you stumbled across related articles during your research. Be picky! No spamming allowed!
3. Publish automatic or manual trackbacks for your used quotes.

Looking for Follow-Up subjects is worth the research time. Write down those Follow-Up ideas in a To-Do list or create an editorial calendar item.