Annoying Facts Of Blog Commenting

As you all know, blog commenting is one of the most effective ways to improve your blog’s traffic. It also provides great benefits to the blog owners. Most genuine blog owners like to see a lot of comments, or I should say quality comments on their blog. Because comments are not only good for getting free content, they also add a lot of value to your blog. They actually allow you to know more about the visitors and they allow you to interact with your readers.

As a blog owner, I want to share my thoughts on how a good comment should be. But first, you need to know what makes you to leave a comment on a blog?

Is it to promote your blog?

Is it to Gain Back Links to your blog?

Is it to get advantage of a competition that involves commenting?

Or, did you genuinely like the post and want to show your gratitude.

They are all acceptable reasons for me. However, as you know why you are commenting, you should also know that sometimes it is better not to comment

There are times, where you might feel as there isn’t anything to say. So instead of replying with short comments, don’t comment at all. Instead, you can do other things to get attention of the blogger. You retweet, digg, stumble, etc. In return the owner of the blog can also do the same for your own blog.

If you are commenting to grab attention of the blog owner and the visitors to that blog, try to avoid comments that only include the following:

For a blogger, following type of comments can be annoying:

“Great post”

“Thanks for sharing”

“Nice article”

“I don’t agree”

Many other two word comments.

The reason I get annoyed is because, I want to know why my article is great? Why are you thanking me for sharing the article? What makes it nice? Why don’t you agree?

When I leave comments on other blogs, I use the following format:

If I liked the post, I explain why? Did I have similar experience? What benefits did I receive from the points stated in the blog post?

If I didn’t like the post, or if I don’t agree with it, I also explain why? What is the right way?

Always remember, all the genuine bloggers out there don’t expect you to agree with their opinions. However, what they expect from you is to explain yourself.

Here is a good example of constructive criticism from one of my reader (Simon from Teenius.com), where he shared his disagreement with my previous logo. Here is the comment from Simon:

“As I’ve said in the comments of another post, I really like the design. However, I’m not too sure on your header/logo design. It sort of looks like ‘How I Blog’, or ‘I how blog’… it’s not really clear that you mean ‘internethow blog’.”

He tells me that he didn’t like the logo. He explains why, by giving examples. After he pointed out the problem, I actually see it from his point of view. And  result of that useful feedback, I changed my logo.

Things to avoid in blog commenting

There some tools and services that promise to increase your back links and sending you quality traffic through blog commenting. And they promise all these processes are automated, so you don’t have to do any hard work. Obviously, it sounds so good to be true.

For instance blog commenting services that includes commenting on number of blogs. Basically they do the commenting for you and leave your link on blogs. Of course it involves a lot of spamming and bad quality comments. In most cases they are deleted straight away by the blog owners.

Blog commenting Software is a tool, which allows you setting up your comments and blogs to leave comment on. I don’t exactly know how this software operates. But, I believe, it is an automated tool that goes through blogs and leave comments. As you would guess, it would only benefit the owner of this software as you need to purchase it.

Things I learned from top commentator competition

Apart from knowing more about my readers, I also discovered ways to abuse commenting. Most of the spam comments are very obvious. So, they can easily be eliminated by various plugins such as Akismet. However, some are designed in a way that would make you think they are genuine. Here are few examples I’ve been getting in daily basis:

“That is great information you provided here. All the points that you stated are so true and I will make sure to work on them.”

“Wow, finally I found what I was looking for. It took me around 50 blogs to find the information that I needed. You are now on my RSS feed.”

As you can see, when you first look at them they seem as comments from a reader, who is pleased to read my posts. Well, at least that is what I thought when I first saw them. However, after analyzing the sites that are linked to these comments and as these comments keep appearing in my pending comments queue, I realized that they were spam.

Now, I add their IP addresses to my bad comments list.

Spamming Through Trackbacks

I also find out how people abuse trackbacks to spam comments. They basically link to my site from blogs that either have no real content or they have content that doesn’t relate to mine at all.

I am hoping that these tips will help you to leave better comments that would attract more attention.

Discussion

Also, I would love to hear your thoughts about good commenting strategies. What annoys you the most when people leave comments on your blog? Did you receive any comments that looked genuine, but after you realized it was not? What type of comments you would like to see on your blog?

Technorati Tags: blog commenting, commenting on blogs, facts about blog commenting software

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