Blog Comments

The common wisdom online seems to be that if you’re getting critical comments on your blog – even the kind that say “you suck” – then you’re definitely starting to be noticed. Of course, that’s a type of notice most people can do without. (Note that this does not necessarily mean you are not being noticed if you are not getting negative comments.)

Some bloggers moderate comments and remove anything rude or insulting. Others leave all but the most offensive. But if you do leave them up, should you respond to negative comments? Ignore them? If you respond, how should you do so? Chris Garrett offers some great advice on when to answer critics. If you visit, read the comments as well, which provide even more insight and advice. Also check out Deb Ng’s advice on handling negative comments, published here on Perf last year.

So, do you get negative comments on your blog? How have you handled these?

Many professional bloggers have a broad schedule that they attempt to maintain. It creates interest within your readership, and it also gives your readers a great idea of when to expect new content. This also increases your chances of generating subscribers to your content. However, there are just those times when things do not work out as planned—it is times like those when preparation really can pay off. The ability to post content at a future point in time without having to do it yourself is a great way to ensure you are prepared, but you also need to have content readily available when you might not have it otherwise.

All bloggers should take the time to create a few extra posts that are not focused on news, but are more focused on opinions or similar to that. Depending on your niche and blogging style, this might be difficult, but once you have taken the time to use these posts when you really have to, you’ll realize that the extra effort is worth it. For Performancing, I already have had three articles prepared incase I ended up needing to use them. Coincidently, I am going to be using them this week. (If you were following me on Twitter, you would know why.)

A few other reasons for creating backup content:

• Taking that wonderful vacation
• Just needing a break from blogging
• Feeling under the weather
• The words just won’t add up (writer’s block)
• Allowing extra effort for more complex articles

The primary reason for doing something like this is to maintain your consistency. Again, readers appreciate consistency, and we all have had our moments where we have slacked off in the past, but there are other times when serious problems can arise, and this is why you need to be prepared. So, are you prepared?

That’s right—I have 11,072 unread items on my feed reader. All of it pretty much equates to me being way behind on my subscriptions. I am either subscribed to too many feeds, engaged in too many other things to bother, uninterested in the feeds which I am subscribed to, or a combination of all three. It would appear that it is time to fix this problem right now.

Obviously, I am subscribed to way too many feeds, but I have to be keep on top of things. How can we solve this problem? First, I could use a feed filtering service like AideRSS, illumio, or FilterMyRSS. Next, I could use the abilities within many feed reading applications to discover content that has only the content I want within the feed (alternatively, I could exclude this content as well)—NetNewsWire and FeedDemon offers functionality like this. Finally, I use services like TechMeMe, Reddit, and Digg to get only the best news out there.

Another issue that I have is the time that is required to read so many stories in a single day. Even if I was only subscribed to 50 feeds, and those sites posted an average of three items per day, if it took around around 20 seconds to evaluate the content of each story, it would require at least 45 minutes to read those feeds. Assuming you actually had a few stories that you wanted to read, now you should see how it all adds up to a very time consuming process. The only way I can rectify this problem is to reduce the feeds and set up a tight schedule. It is not easy.

Finally, there are just too many feeds that have either not produced valuable content or are not of use to me anymore. This is probably the leading issue that prevents me from being able to read all my feeds. I could simply segregate them in their own portions of my feed reader so that I can easily skip them if need be, but I could also simply remove them. Perhaps it would be an even better idea to setup an account on Pageflakes or Netvibes—set it as my homepage to get news to me fast that might not be as work related, and then I can dedicate time to get fully fed from my feed reader.

It really is information overload to the max. I have some work to do to get on top of this issue, but I am open to any suggestions. How do you keep on top of things without being overloaded with information? If someone can solve that question, create an application that can handle it, and, finally, monetize it, that person has it made!

[Video Source: Chris Pirillo]

• Do you hammer out your daily dose of blog posts?
• Are you and your readers satisfied with your blog format?
• Are your readers leaving your page after reading one page?

If the answer to the last question is a proud ‘Yes Sir’ then we have found a bunch of classical blog problems related to ‘archive pages’.

• Visitors read the latest article and leave
• Visitors find a good article via search engine and leave

As the new performancing.com staff writer James Mowery pointed out in How To Make Your Previously Written Content Valuable Once Again there are good reasons to give your readers a lightning fast way to previously published great articles (Read: buried stone dead in the archives). Let’s use a more generic and less performance consuming approach…

Social bookmarks are perfect for publishing…

Be aware of WordPress performance problems

If you are a WordPress user like the ones the above mentioned article is aimed at you may want to check if there are other solutions then the mentioned WordPress plug-ins because WP extensions can lead to another bunch of problems at least if you consider performance to be important. Take a look at the number of database calls and you may see that your page is pretty slow because some WP plug-ins may add literally 1,000s of database queries to your site just for a fancy feature.

Why not use some powerful social services and take advantage of them?

Workflow sketch:

Find out about your best pages yourself

I am using the tool 103bees and a good analytics tool (old school Google Analytics in my case) to find out which landing pages are successful. But 103bees can do much more for you in this ‘best pages’ case then standard analytics packages do.

• You can lookup your top landing pages and see which keywords and which phrases have led to the specific page.
• You can lookup single keywords and see to which pages on your site they have led visitors.
• You can lookup keyword phrases and see to which pages on your site they have led visitors.

Using the menu points “Top landing pages”, “Top search terms”, and “Top keywords” you get a list of phrases or single keywords. This is priceless information even if rumors say that there might be some price to pay for the 103bees service in the future.

Now we have found out:

• What are the most visited landing pages which is good for identifying the most successful if not the best articles.
• How to collect the data for keywords leading to specific single pages which can be a good source to create a ‘this article was found with the following keywords/phrases’ block for single articles.
• Which pages belong to which keyword cloud which can give us a good list of related articles.

Now we can develop a little matrix of cross connected links.

Bookmarks, notes and tags used for publishing power

The list above sounds very complicated, doesn’t it?

• Let’s use the ‘best landing pages’ scenario as a 1st case study.

The del.icio.us plug-in for Firefox is a useful bookmarking tool because you can bookmark a link, add a note and tags. Bookmark your top landing pages links in 103bees with a special tag like my:best:pages to del.icio.us. Done. The basic matrix for the ‘best landing pages’ scenario is finished.

Of course the best landing pages don’t have to be the pages you consider to be the best pages but you can decide yourself about the mix.

Repeat the bookmarking procedure from time to time to refresh the list if necessary.

Additional scenarios

• Use a bookmark tag for fitting external pages to create a block of reading recommendations below a single article.

This can be done in the Firefox browser via the mentioned del.icio.us add-on. To speed up this process you can use a feed reader which is capable of tagging articles and sending them to del.icio.us. My favorite feed reader BlogBridge can do so. Just tap ‘t’ when reading an article and add tags and extended note in the dialog. After OKing the dialog the tagged article is sent to del.icio.us as a bookmark and the bookmark is ready to be published without further action.

Let’s say you have an article about ‘what great grid design can do for your blog’. The article is finished but you stumble across fitting pages because new articles about grid design pop up all the time. Bookmark the found article i.e ‘blog:grid’ and you can update your reading recommendations below the article automatically without touching the admin interface.

With the del.icio.us add-on for Firefox you can even exchange the external article title against a better alternative for your site.

Note: By looking up the original search engine referrer we are also able to find the related pages via the original search engine result page. If you link out to the top authority results you have a chance to receive some fitting backlinks.

• Tip: Use an external blog editor to send short notes as asides to your blog.

You can send articles via XML-RPC (read: external blog editor) to a specific blog category i.e. ‘linkdump’. Now you only have to define a template block for that category to only contain these ‘linkdump’ articles.

Use the hosting power of modern social web services

Remember that WordPress plug-ins are a) only for WordPress and b) very resource consuming esp. when combined. A WP installation with plug-ins installed for a top commenter list, most read articles, most downloads, last referrers, etc. plus all the rest of the dynamic WP plug-ins might become very slow because of all the necessary database queries!

Let’s say you run a couple of websites which are not powered a) by WordPress, b) you want to use the before mentioned bookmarks on multiple sites and/or c) you love the idea of a ‘computing grid’. Maybe your hosting plan also plays a vital role (think about videos, music and photos).

As we have loads of free solutions on the web which offer great computing power and many of them offer personal RSS feeds why not use those resources to free our sites from performance bottlenecks, ISP download restrictions and gain publishing power by adding little snippets of external information to our websites?

Use the power of RSS subscriptions!

Publish your i.e. ‘best of’ bookmarks via RSS

On pretty every serious CMS or blog system you can subscribe to RSS feeds to show up in your content. These RSS feeds can come from your own sources (think blog network) or from external sources. If you don’t have the RSS subscription possibility then you can still install the powerful SimplePie or MagPie RSS aggregator solutions and add some PHP to your template code.

In our ‘best of this blog’ scenario we now only have to add a content block at the appropriate places and publish the my:best:pages RSS feed from del.icio.us. The latest list of the i.e. ten best pages will show up automatically.

You can decide to show the title only or add your bookmark notes.

Javascript solutions

If possible don’t use the offered Javascript solutions by Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. because their content will not be indexed by the search engines. For your readers the Javascript solutions will still be better than nothing.

Extended possibilities

There are many possibilities to add content via RSS. Think about adding weather information, news, videos, photos, blog search results from Google, Technorati or many other sources.

But please: Take care about copyright restrictions if using external sources!

For external full content feeds I can only recommend to republish them via i.e. FeedBurner and shorten the feed content.

Resume for the ‘best articles’ scenario

del.icio.us is your friend …

This del.icio.us way I am also solving some archive presentation pages issues. For every month I ‘develop’ a certain del.icio.us linkroll … with or without excerpts and put them onto a page or into my sideboard

Here are the steps in short:

1. Use a d.i.u tag for your best articles
2. Publish the RSS feed for that tag as an aside
3. Your finest content will show up automatically

Related articles

• Publish mini blogs as asides
• Intuitive Navigation with Tag Clouds – Lengthy article but valuable ‘archive structure’ discussion in the comments.

Feel free to add more links to related articles in the comments.

Are there blogs you read where you completely ignore the comments? I noticed today around half of my blog reads have lousy comment areas. On the other hand there are one or two blogs where the comments are part of the appeal.

You can recognize the poor ones right away. They looks something like this:

• “Buy Pills!”
• “Me-too”
• “Nice post”
• “Link Link Link Link”
• “Irrelevant off topic nonsense”
• “SEO Real Estate Chicago Lawyer”

If your comment area looks like this what can you do?

Obviously the spam and the sneaky link dropper has to go. If you neglect that job then there is little point in working on any other aspect. Also jump on any kind of comment abuse or blatant link drops. Keeping one spammer happy is not worth it if you are annoying the rest.

Next you need to actually engage your readers in discussion. Ask leading questions. If your questions can only be answered with a single word answer consider a poll instead. You want people to expand on your conversation, not simply agree to it.

If you want a master class in comment management, take a look no further than Liz.

Don’t expect comments to magically transform overnight, it is a gradual culture change.

Are any blogs comment areas (or lack of) getting you mad? What do you do to create a better comment culture? Have you had any success in growing your quality comment count? Have you given up on comments entirely?

Please share … in the comments 🙂

Last year was one of reinvention. When I started Freelance Writing Jobs three years ago, I was the only writing blogger on the block offering a daily list of leads for freelance writers. Three years later, blogs listing freelance writing and blogging leads and jobs are a dime a dozen. I know I’m not the only blogger experiencing this, either. While I do believe there’s room for everyone in the blogosphere, it’s also kind of frustrating to see everyone doing the same exact thing. What’s a blogger to do?

Refocus

Can you think of another focus for your blog while still staying on topic? The reason people visit my blog is to find work. Wouldn’t it stand to reason they’re also interested in reading articles about the best way to find said work? When I stopped featuring ONLY jobs, the numbers went way up. Now FWJ is more than just a “jobs” blog. It’s a writing community.

What can you do to set you apart from others in your niche?

What do I have to offer that the other guys don’t?

• Background – With over a dozen years in publishing, I know what editors look for and the mistakes many new writers make. As a former group editor for an Internet content portal, I know a lot about writing for the web, and getting web writing jobs. I also know many of the mistakes new writers make. How does your background set you apart from the other bloggers in your niche? Can you use it to your advantage?
• Experience – In addition to the aforementioned publishing and editing experience, I’ve been writing for the web on a freelance basis since 2000 and blogging since 2005. Is your experience such that you can use it to become an authority in your field?
• Community – By focusing on my community and writing for them, I managed to make it about the FWJ community and not so much about Deb Ng. Moreover, by encouraging group participation I made FWJ a place where people share ideas and engage in lively discussion. How can you include your others to make your blog more of a community?

The Result

Before my reinvention, my numbers weren’t bad. I had a loyal readership, but traffic stagnated. After changing focus traffic went way up and continues to rise.

New ideas are rare in this day and age. Every day thousands of new blogs are created, some just like yours. What are some of the things you can do to stay fresh and keep your readers coming back for more.