A Comment about Blog Comments

I started my public online life as a blogger.

Once I got the hang of it and developed the discipline to post every day, things really took off.

I was asked to speak, to advice, to host, even offered a few paying positions along the way.

Some folks think that a way to measure success is by the number of comments you get on your blog.

If that was the only measurement tool, I would be considered a failure.

Sunday I wrote about the Decline of the Wrist Watch and scheduled the article to appear at 9am Tuesday morning. The next day there was 1 comment posted.

Some would say, “You did all that writing for 1 lousy comment?!?!”

I say, “Thanks for posting the comment for others to read and comment on too”

Most of the reaction and comments I get from what I place on my website are not in the form of a comment on this website!

Sometimes they are spoken face to face.  But often times they are on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

How do they end up on those other platforms?

Promotion.

I have 2 things set up to happen automatically when a new article is published on this website:

A Tweet is sent out to the 3,000 or so Twitter followers of ScLoHo with the title and first few words and a hyperlink to the full article.

The full article is also posted on my Tumblr blog at http://scloho.tumblr.com/ .

Then I sometime within 24 hours I often Tweet a link to the article again with different wording.

I may also use Buffer to schedule another tweet linking to that same article.  Buffer is a tool that you can use to schedule Tweets with links at times that you have predetermined.

The Decline of the Wristwatch article received at least 3 more comments and 3 more ReTweets because of the promotion via twitter.

I also selectively use Facebook and LinkedIn to promote articles.  This one I put on Facebook and there were multiple comments and shares.

Another way these articles are being shared is via news letters that people subscribe to and receive in their email daily. Occasionally an article will appear on someones Paper.li account too.

With all of these ways to spread a post on your blog, it is nearly impossible to accurately track who is and how many people are reading what you wrote.  Comments are always welcome no matter where you place them is my philosophy.

And tomorrow, I’ll have a real quick follow up story on something I touched on today.