This is a guest post by Harrison Li. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
Yeah…you don’t often see one of these random posts on Daily Blog Tips do you? But ignore the fact that I’m a guest poster and take your time to read what I have to say. This is the real question you’ve got to ask yourself. Have you been commenting on DBT recently? Or should I ask, in the last three months?
You might not care about who I am, but what matters is, Daniel has worked hard to create this blog and grow his audience, and commenting is one of the best ways to say thanks and to show that you enjoy the content.
I’m talking about community here, if you would take a look at the archives right now, pick a post from one year ago, or a post 3 months after he first started Daily Blog Tips. It can be shocking to see there are even more comments on posts back then than right now.
There’s only one simple reason to all this, the result of bloggers being lazy and wanting only benefits from the sites they visit. We read, absorb new knowledge, and leave. Ever thought about commenting? And I don’t mean commenting for your own benefit again (i.e., to get traffic), but commenting to add value to the community.
I wish there was a time travel machine that could transfer the community of this blog (and many others) back to a year ago, having to enjoy those nice and fun moments networking with fellow bloggers and making new relationships (and participating in arguing with trolls). Unfortunately impossible, unless you are willing to afford the price of spending one minute after reading each post.
Of course, there are some benefits for you in reading this post other than myself expressing my thoughts on the community of DBT. Here are some tricks to keep your readers out of pure information consumption mode and putting them into the inner circle.
- Write regular opinion-generating posts, such as “Why should we blog?”.
- Create interactive polls like Daniel has, What Browser Are You Using These Days?. (take a look at the huge increase of comments compare to the other posts)
- Get a little personal with your life.
- Host blogging contests, offer freebies or giveaways.
- Use Questions & Answers, so people could ask you questions and attract readers at the same time. (like DBT had)
Those were just some ideas, I honestly don’t pay much attention to this because I don’t have a successful blog with almost 60,000 feed readers.
If you’ve been a regular reader of DBT for a quiet long amount of time, the valuable information you have freely gotten from this blog could actually be charged quite a bit of money. So did you give something back to community? Have you even used one minute of your time to spend on commenting?
Start rebuilding the Daily Blog Tips’ community, every little comment adds up.
Daniel’s Note: I appreciate the motivation behind this post, but I also think that what Harrison is talking about is a natural trend around the blogosphere. That is, blog readers were much more engaged a couple of years ago, while these days blogs and traditional websites are becoming almost the same thing, so the community aspect died a little bit. But let us know what you think in the comments below.
About the Author: Harrison Li is a 14 year old blogger who writes in-depth blogging tips at BlogLectures.com. His blog aims to teach anyone to starting a blog for money, he currently also has a goal of getting 100 feed subscribers to his new blog, help him achieve this goal by subscribing to his feed (only if you could find the icon).
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