I have been blogging now for about a year and a half and one difference I have noticed between my blog and the blogs I read is the participation level. Granted some of the blogs are read are written by the social elite of the bologosphere, but even some of the lesser blogs get more participation than I do. It’s not like I don’t get any readers, I check my stats regular and get almost 1000 unique visitors on average each month, many of them repeat visitors. My question is this, what am I doing wrong? Does my content suck? Does my quality of writing suck? If you are a reader who visits often or semi-regularly, please respond. Let me know your opinion on what you want to see. Even if you just stumbled upon my blog, take a few minutes and read through some of my archives and let me know what I am doing wrong. Any help/advice is greatly appreciated!
It’s not you, it’s me. :)
Really it is. Between the many blogs I read semi-regularly and the little projects/plugins I work on, I rarely ever, if at all, leave comments; as it’s quite hard to follow up with disscussions in the fast passed world of teh blog. In fact, this is only the 3rd comment I have left at a blog in the last 2 months ;).
But I did browse through your site a bit and you have great content. Keep up the good work and they will come… or something like that :).
LOL, well thank you for blessing me with the privelage of one of your comments :-P That doesn’t explain everyone else though! heh
Same here. I’ve been trying to get better about leaving comments on peoples blogs. I think RSS is to blame. I used to have to actually visit every site to read them. Now I can just load up bloglines.
Because of that I’ve started to read about 200 personal blogs on a regular basis and I try really hard to read everyones blog who reads mine! But sometimes it just doesn’t always work out :)
So I have RSS to blame huh? I gotta say I love RSS too … but I usually find the time to comment on posts I like or have an opinion about. Keeps people writing =)
Good point Kristin. Being as how RSS has popularized, more web surfers avoid visiting their favorite sites per say, and opt to check their news aggregator for new info. Talk about a second job. Going through everyone’s reading is not so much a hassle for me but time consuming so I try to keep up with everyone’s writing.
Maybe you just worry about it more than other people. Nobody wants to read about your blog statistics. Who cares how popular your blog is, I’m sure only about 6 people read mine and I couldn’t give a rats ass either way. *Shrugs*
Breigh: It’s not that I ‘care’ per se … and it’s not that I do this for validation from my web peer’s. I write this stuff because I think it is interesting and hoepfully someone else will too. I just like the feeling of being part a community is all.
Pablo - I have found that the most consistent way to get visitors to your site is to do this, comment on other peoples sites and start the community on their blog and it just seems to draw them back to your site. I also think that coComment is going to ease a lot of the comment tracking issues that I used to have. I could never easily track where I had left a message until now.
Well, I found your blog from coComment as you were one of the “recent posters”. I think that also posting other articles (or your own) to Digg.com can generate some traffic - even if they don’t comment.
I just signed up for coComment today - so I’m really looking forward to keeping track of my comments! It’ll make following other people’s blogs a whole lot easier!
Glad to have you here Pablo! Always good to meet another Pablo =) As far as posting stuff on digg, I only ever posted one of my own articles on digg, and that was when I scooped the freepay(gratis) nano site the day after the nano was announced. Got about 12 referrals off of that, none of them completed thier offer though LOL
I defintely think a service like coComment is going to help with something like this. I know I have the same problem every once in a while, but I have always tried to keep it in check =)