Knowledge
Network
Network
ASK A QUESTION
WRITE AN ARTICLE
After commenting on so many blogs and reading and replying to comments on my own blogs and articles, it is safe to say that all blog commenters can be categorized into four groups.
*The other bloggers
There are more blogs than you can count out there and new ones are launched pretty much every minute. Even I started 3 new blogs recently. With so many blogs, come many bloggers. Commenting on other blogs might be a part of a strategy to get a link back to your blog, engage with similar-minded people, help build your own community, just say what you think or a combination of these.
But if you have a blog, there is a chance you commented at least on one. If you don’t personally, own a blog but have written on online content sites such as Factoidz, Triond or others and commented on a fellow writer’s article, you have commented on a blog (according to Technorati, both Factoidz and Triond’s websites are registered as blogs).
Other bloggers might choose to provide value or not. They can join in the discussion you might have started in your writing, agree or disagree with you. As long as the agreement is suggested in saying more than a generic “good post” or the disagreement is done respectfully, these type of comments can be listed in this category.
*Haters/trollsThese people don’t really care about who you are and what you want to do. They are really out there to piss as many people off as they can. They have no problems with direct insults and they think their opinions rock.
Bad news is that these commenters can really make you upset and/or angry. Good news is, many expert bloggers suggest that you haven’t succeeded online if you haven’t generated a couple of negative opinions. This common view is currently the tagline of David Fincher’s movie The Social Network that tells the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The tagline is: “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”.
The point is, you can’t please everyone. You are bound to annoy some people as your audience grows.
*Spammers
These are usually automated messages that your spam filters of your individual blogs can detect. You can get rid of them by deleting them in mass groups as you receive them. The spams are usually a group of irrelevant links to your topic and/or a generic message that comes to at least million other blogs.
It feels good to receive reactions but these commenters do not mean well. They just have left their link on your blog. Even if they haven’t left any links in their message body, there is a link in their URL. Do you really want your readers to click on these links that will take them to blogs that don’t really carry value? Even if they do, this blogger hasn’t contributed to your blog. To the contrary, they have taken readers away. Would you want that?
As for “Good Post” comments, I welcome them from my community (readers and writers that I know who are supporting me). You don’t always have the time to write an outstanding blog comment. But if your signature comment is saying “Good Post”, and you are leaving it everywhere, no one will take you seriously.
“But I didn’t know what else to say” isn’t a rational excuse, especially for writers. You write for a living so the writer of the article you are commenting on expects you to have something meaningful to say.
*Your readers who may or may not be bloggingAnd then there is that community you helped build. I have my own friends who don’t run blogs but comment to support me, my writer/blogger friends who have their own sites and strangers who may or may not be writing their own blogs. These comments may be positive, negative or critical with their comments. But as long as they are constructive, they make your blog stronger.
Great review of your commenters. I have admired factoidz for at least writers have a little sense not to repeat automated comments and at least I haven't got a message begging to be commented on without bothering to comment on my own work. Thumbs up Pinar.
It takes time to write comments.
Great discussion on this piece Pinar, I definitely agree with Will, thumbs up too and stumbled.
Lovely write! I haven't had to many insults only one or two. It is easy for people to attack you on line but they are not worthy of my precious time and you just have to remember if they are playing a game then you have won... you had their page view! :-)
Thanks for highlighting the different kinds of blog comments one can get. I also like to think that some blog comments are made as a reward or thank you to the writer of a blog post. The content of comments is also found by search engines, and, if a blog post was really helpful and tells a person exactly what they wanted to know, it's nice to thank the writer. It's awful when one can check stats and see that very many people are visiting a blog post, via natural search, because they were obviously looking for something you tell them about in their post, but then you get either no comments or only one or two. I do also try and comment on blogs of people who comment on mine. If a person is helping add content to my page, I feel they deserve some content from me added to their blogs too. As for spam, well, it just sucks.
@David: I learned about Factoidz was a blog when I was doing a research on the Technorati page. It is good news, though:) Promotion can be a real drag, and sometimes I just wish we didn't have to do it all but unfortunately doing it online and offline do help pay the bills. And if you are looking for trolls, there are so many of them on the IMDB disussion boards, lol:)
Excellent and helpful information. The spam filters available for blogs really do help to control the spam on our blogs these days. But some still comes through. In my IM classes they really stress not to get caught up with the trolls. Give them no recognition at all. Just delete.
Pinar, I never look for trolls (lol). I tend to avoid the kinds of forum threads where I know they lurk and multiply. I have just never seen any on my blogs or any of the Factoidz articles I have written or commented on. Let's see now, does that mean I've been fortunate, or just too innocuous. I'm working on something that might be troll bait. If it gets a lot of traffic and intelligent comment, it might be worth it. (What's IMBD? Besides something to stay away from if I want to avoid trolls.)
@David: I know you don't. I just said that to say I inevitably run into them. Ha ha- IMDB internet movie data base so it is the number one go-to-site for movie fans. It has a google page rank 9 over 10. Pretty powerful site. I need it as a resource page and I sometimes participate in the forums to get traffic to my blog's movie category.
@Susan: I second that advice, Susan:)
A lot of people don't bother leaving comments, especially if they just happen upon your article or blog, so it's really nice to get genuine feedback. Great discussion about the different types of commenters.
Good post . . . ... ... :) Interesting that Factoidz counts as a blog. I keep telling myself I should spend more time commenting on other blogs. I haven't encountered any trolls (yet), but I was pretty disgusted to find that a comment that appeared within an hour after I posted an article on another site was pure spam. I'd have deleted it if I could have seen how. Maybe it's not possible there. As for your fourth group, the odd fact is that after more than a year at this, only two people whom I know personally have ever commented on anything I have written on the web (once each, several months apart), and only one other has said to me that they've even read anything! And I do post links on FaceBook. I obviously have a thing or three to learn about offline promotion!