As Easy as A-B-C
A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!!
Chances are if you’ve been anywhere near a sales position you’ve heard this classic line from Glengarry Glen Ross. However, after reading a recent post by Chris Garrett on Problogger, I realized there’s an A-B-C that applies to blogging as well. Always Be Commenting! The post was What to do When Your Blog Plateaus and this was one of the causes he listed:
Looking Inward – I have said it many times and I will keep saying it, commenting is good for bloggers! We see a lot of bloggers who get to a certain level then stop reaching out. They stop reading other blogs, no longer comment, and the outbound links dry up. The problem is by retreating back to the cosy folds of your own blog you drop off the blogosphere radar. When you get busy of course it is much harder to do these things but we must all keep it up especially when we are doing well. I will promise to link out more if you also promise, deal?
The post was especially interesting to me since the growth here has slowed quite a bit. I don’t by any means feel it has plateaued but there’s no denying that the subscriber count isn’t climbing at the rate it used to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very happy with where this blog is at and where it’s headed but after reading that paragraph, it became instantly obvious that I’ve been guilty of looking inward. In the early days of the site most of my traffic came from commenting on other blogs and participating in forums and the community as a whole. Somehow, I’ve gotten away from the very foundation of blogging and I think the slowed growth rate is a direct result. Isn’t it funny how we seem to forget the lessons and principles we know best? Anyway, I think it’s time for me to get back to the basics and if you’re blog growth has slowed or even grown stagnant, you might consider doing the same.
It starts auspiciously. There are more commenters sites’ to comment on than you have hours in the day to comment on them. So you start to only comment on “the good posters” sites as a return for putting worthwhile energies into your site. You let the “great post, good job” comments slip through the cracks. You rationalize it in any number of ways, believing that “creating better content will get me more readers, commenters and value overall than commenting”. Before you know it, that habit of commenting is nothing more than a withered vine you occasionally water.
To continue the plant analogy, a blog is like a cactus…very hard to kill. You can forget about it for a period, not give it the attention it deserves and it will stagnate. But it won’t die, because the search engines will continue to index your content and new users occasionally trickle in. But if you invest the time into it which you’re proposing, it can become lively and profitable and grow to be so much more than just a prickly plant.
I’m planting seeds of change in my mind for my blog today in hopes of better growth for tomorrow.
This is a lesson that I’ve learnt too. But how to choose? What I’m trying at the moment is to comment on the sites that I have subscribed to via rss, afterall I subscribed to them because I like them so it should be easier to comment on the posts. I don’t check whether they’re “big” bloggers or not but I am more likely to comment if they are dofollow blogs. Even so if I have something to say, I will regardless.
Ben, I’m sure you could shoot your blog back up again. These days bloggers seem to post same or similar content, so maybe try a new thing?
-Mike
p.s. I’ve never discussed in forums before, which site do you visit?
Blogging for 4 months, I have only started commenting regularly about 2 weeks ago. Although I have seen some traffic from these comments, the greatest benefit for me is the gems I can find within the comments stream.
Blogging is a lonely job and if your blog do not have the legs to generate comments regularly, commenting and joining discussion on other blogs will give you better insight on some of the topics.
@ Mike, I’ve really enjoyed Chris Garrett’s Authority Blogger Forums and The Blog Experiment (no not this site) blog forums as well. As for content, I think I probably got a bit bogged down in the Under the Microscope posts and probably should do a better job spreading those out.
Yeah, I too have been procrastinating the last couple of weeks. I’ve to go back to all the blogging forums and start posting again…
I didn’t start my blog until a couple years of marketing online so I was never really in the “Web 2.0” mindset. In this day and age Web 2.0 is taking over. That means it’s all about participation.
I never really thought something as small as commenting on blogs and linking out could create such a positive response, but after a few months of blogging I continue to see my blog grow from doing so.
Great advice.
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