Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Q & A: how long is your comment thread?
Alan writes:
How does one drive traffic to a blog? I started mine to keep the folks back in the ‘old country’ up to date with my tomfoolery in San Diego. Now I’m hooked on Blogging. I really enjoy the comments more than the hits. I see some blogs with loads of comments. How does it happen?
My response, over at his place:
Hi, Alan. You were asking (over at my place) about increasing blog traffic. Here’s a must read article: Don’t Dump That Weblog! by one of my favorite bloggers, Paperback Writer. She wrote this article with author/writer-bloggers in mind, but she gives good solid advice which applies to everyone.
I think you have to ask yourself: why are you blogging, and why do you want to increase traffic? For us author-wannabes, the answer is simple: (A) networking with other writers, published and unpublished alike; (B) developing a potential fan base of folks who will not only buy our books but hype them on their blogs*. For folks like me who live in the boonies and can’t make it to conventions, blogging is indispensable.
If you’re blogging for the same reason that folks used to write to pen-pals (i.e., to make friends with people around the world), then keep doing what you’re doing. Offer a bit of yourself on each post and folks will respond to that. Post regularly. I enjoy your posts about the restaurant biz — I think of this as a Kitchen Confidential kinda blog.
On the other hand, if you’re solely interested in boosting traffic and you don’t care what kind of traffic you get, the answer is easy. Post nude photos. And that’s another thing — use sexual keywords. The mere act of writing ‘nude photos’ in close proximity to ’sexual’ will (once the search engines find this post) generate more traffic. It’s a funny thing, but different words work for different people. One of my pals told me that the words tantric sex drove a lot of people to her site. I tried it, and got bupkes. Different strokes, I guess.
*And (C) practice! If I didn’t blog, creative writing would become a weekend-only affair. Not good for discipline. Now, if only I could be even MORE disciplined, disciplined enough, say, to work on my manuscript during the week . . .
Naaaaah.
More below the cut.
Now that I’ve reread Alan’s question, I see that what he really wants are the comments, not the hits. Great way to pay attention, Doug.
The two things aren’t entirely unconnected, of course. No hits, no comments. Still, a place like YesButNoButYes gets scads of hits, but they get few comments. Nudity alone will drive hits but may not drive comments: porn blogs seem to get few hits if it’s porn-only, but if one senses a human being at the other end (for example, a woman writing openly about her sex life), you’ll see more comments. Not that I would know anything about those kinds of sites. I just, you know, hear things.
That’s the key, though: if folks sense a human being on the other side of their computer, they’ll write back to you. My personal posts generate far more comments than my political posts. You have to share yourself. You have to be a blogwhore.
Sure, it’s scary, what with the potential for identity theft. You have to use a bit of common sense. Don’t post your mom’s maiden name. Don’t post any major identifying info. And don’t, don’t, don’t post anything that would be hurtful to your loved ones. (Yeah, I flirt with that one all the time, but I do have my limits. No, really!)
I think you (Alan, that is) are on the right track at your place. I especially like your posts about the restaurant biz because they remind me of Kitchen Confidential. Bear in mind, please, that there have been some well publicized cases of folks getting sacked because they blogged about work . . . but The Man can’t fire everyone, can he?
Let’s open it up to comments. Think about your blogs, people: what kind of posts fuel the most comments? I’m curious, too. It feels good, having a long comment thread. Length definitely matters.
D.
I’m honored that you made my comment the subject of a post. Thanks for your advice it really helps and thanks for taking the time to visit the site of my ramblings once in a while.
This is something that is still very new to me. I don’t consider myself a writer, however I’ve noticed that I’m developing a writing style, with short conversation snippets, jokes etc., and the more I blog the more I enjoy doing it.
Thanks again.
Length is very nice.
Oooh. People read me! They really Read Me!
My topics are fairly inconsistent–one day I’ll post about family, the next I’ll just whine about personal stresses. The more personal the post, the fewer comments. And I guess that’s to be expected.
The posts with the most comments are the ones wher I’ve tried to lay out an argument as to why *I* like or dislike something. Likes/Dislikes get the comments up and going. (Unless you come off as Andy Rooney. FIne line I guess.)
As somebody who gets a decent number of hits, but relatively few comments, my take on this is that to get comments you don’t just need readers, you need readers-who-comment.
The easiest way to get readers is to comment on other blogs. Much of my traffic comes from comments like this one. So to get readers-who-comment, you want to comment in blogs that have lots of comments. But of course you then need to make sure that your comments are top quality. Kate Rothwell is good at this – pithy, to the point, but very witty.
Having drawn people to your blog, you then need to ensure that the content is such that it stimulates comments. That’s a bit of a black art, but as Doug says, baring your soul can help (I tend not to – typical English reserve, don’cha know). Humour is good to, but you need to get it just right – witty without being too clever. Political posts will always alienate some of your potential readers, but you may not mind that. Furthermore there are lots of political honeypot blogs out there – what is it about your blog that would make people carry on the debate there rather than on a more established site?
Frequent short posts will probably work better than fewer, longer ones, but you still need to make each one a reasonably polished gem, or at least a semi-precious stone. Sequins won’t cut it.
It helps, I think, to engage actively in the comments threads on your own blog; actively but not excessively – you don’t need to respond to every comment, it can be a bit off-putting. I reckon that the Smart Bitches pitch their interventions just right.
All this from somebody who gets about a third of the traffic that Doug gets, and probably less than a tenth the number of comments.
I only want to draw people who might be genuinely interested in writing and being published. I check my sitemeter to see what search words bring people to my site, but if they’re looking for JD Fortune (and I get a lot of those), they will be disappointed in my site. My reason for blogging is truly to network with other writers, as you mention in your post, Doug.
As to what kind of posts fuel the most comments, I have to say an interesting open-ended question or a good online quiz gets them commenting the most.
Good stuff, folks. Thanks.
Stephen, try some soul-baring on occasion. Start with something innocent, like a big toe 😉
To be fair, YBNBY does get quite a few comments – I estimate maybe 5-6 a day across our archive, and some stories have over 50 comments on them. but we post with such regularity, those comments easily get lost in the shuffle. If you want, you can subscribe to our comments-only feed, to get a sense.
The best way to get a comment is to write something where people can disagree or tell you why you’re wrong. Our Top Ten lists (by design) always get a lot of comments, as people always think we’ve left something off.
For me, neither hits/visitors nor comments are my measure of success, because I think both are fairly easy to get. I treasure the repeat visitors who make us a regular destination, a much rarer breed.
I’m with Stephen. If you blog to be part of a community, you’ve got to show yourself to that community by commenting on blogs you like.
I like this one a lot.
I noticed that I got the most hits when I was commenting on a lot of different blogs. It also happened when I blogged about a controversy that was happening in the blogosphere, and when I wrote about things that were really difficult to write about [and probably too personal].
Things were going pretty well for a while, and then I got weirded out about the fact that I was starting to get traffic.
I kinda got paranoid about sounding stupid, or being misinterpreted [and sounding stupid] and the old inferiority complex/shyness thing has pretty much kicked my ass, both in blogging and in commenting.
Inviting controversy is scary to me. It’s stupid that online confrontations would be worrisome, but I care what others think of me, even if I’ll never meet them in real life… and I want them to like me, so there’s pressure there, somehow.
Hmm. I hadn’t really thought about why blogging has lost its luster for me, but I think it’s the same crap I deal with in the rest of my life… fear of failure, and fear of success.
Yeah, that has almost nothing to do with this post, but it has been therapeutic. Thanks for getting the wheels turning again, Doug.