Hi Folks, firstly my apologies for not getting back to respond to your comments sooner.. the last 4-5 days or so have been a whirlwind around here.. firstly I have been attending the workshop run by Daryl and Andrew Grant.. which has been an amazing experience!  I was able to catch up with Yaro Starak, the author of www.entrepreneurs-journey.com.  Yaro really impressed me with is unassuming yet friendly manner and his down to earth outlook.  I feel really lucky to have been able to spend some time with him.

I also managed to steam my hand with a vegetable steamer, and ended up in the ER!  Those who know me know that I’m pretty accident prone and this is really no surprise.  Writing and typing have been off the agenda for a few days so I have been only able to stare longingly at the monitor while I got my husband to approve my comments.

I feel so honoured to have had the amount of great feedback in that I have gotten, and the points raised, especially by Tricia, which have had me mulling things over, over the last few days.   I’ve also had some great input from Ponn, and feel blessed to have made contact with these two wonderful women.

So now is the time to reply to comments and get some new content up.. stay tuned!!

This strategy is basically a brain dump of thoughts I’m having about how to use “do follow” and comments to best serve your blog over time.  I’m thinking that different strategies will suit blogs depending where along the blog lifecycle the blog is.  

OK.. so your blog might be a brand new blog, a blog with some traffic, or a very established authority blog with lots of traffic. (baby, teenager, mature.)

If you have a baby blog, you will want to encourage comments as much as possible, to break the ice on your blog and get the ball rolling with your community.  Folks are more likely to stick around if they can see that comments are being made and that you are replying to them.. people like interactive blogs.  Yaro Starak suggests in his Blog Mastermind blueprint thinggy the possibility of you leaving comments on your own blog to get the ball rolling.. (just don’t get caught!)  There are, of course, other ways of getting blog comments at “Baby Blog” level. 

The one that immediately springs to mind for me is installing the “do follow” plugin and advertising your blog on the “do follow” directory, the bumpzee community etc.  At this stage in your blog’s evolution, any comments that are not obvious spam comments are good comments, beggars can’t be choosers, as they say, and advertising your blog this way should attract some commenters, even if just SEO marketers.

At this stage you will want all comments to be followed so install the regular semiologic plugin (if you are on wordpress).  Other plugins you might like to install the wordpress plugin that allows commenters to subscribe to your comments, so that they are emailed whenever a new comment is left on that post.  Subscribe to Comments is a product of Tempus Fugit.

There are other plugins for comments that are very popular, but these probably aren’t good to install now, for example, the plugin that puts the most recent comments in your sidebar and the plugin that puts the top commenters in your sidebar are going to look pretty pathetic, and basically advertise that your blog is loserville and not a popular place to hang out.. yet.  And you don’t want to draw attention to that.    So leave off on these until your blog is a little more popular.

Once your blog has reached teenager status, you can start to be a little pickier about your commenters and the comments that are made on your blog.    Don’t forget - this is YOUR blog, you are queen (or king) of all your survey, and you can just delete crappy comments willy-nilly as you may and whenever you feel like it, without feeling bad.  You have license to be a tyrant, so don’t belly-ache over each comment, just delete it if you don’t like the feel of it and move on.  You are a teenager, after all.

At this point you might consider installing the plugins that I recommended against when the blog was in baby status.  This includes the show top comentators plugin and the show recent comments plugins.  Once you have established a community that is centered on the blog itself, you may decide that you no longer need the spammy comments and no longer advertise the “do follow” status of your blog in the directory or bumpzee to cut down on the comment spam you receive,  and simply view the “do follow” status of your blog as a bonus for the regular “real” readers of your blog.

Once your blog grows up and reaches mature or authority status, you will be receiving many comments a day, and trolling through the moderation queue looking at all that spam could put you in a spin!  At this stage, don’t advertise the fact that your blog is “do follow” and if you really hate the spam, install a plugin like the link love plugin, which allows you to control how many comments a commenter needs to make before their links become “do follow” links.  If you explain this is a “comment policy” and remove anything that advertises your “do follow” status, you should be able to turn off the human comment spammers as they realize that there is nothing in it for them.

So, to sum up - by evolving your comment strategy over time to suit the lifecycle stage of your blog, you can use your comment policy to help your blog succeed and grow.

A nice person helpfully emailed me and suggested that instead of a directory, I should really just join the “do follow” blogroll.

Although I appreciate the thought, I’ve decided that a directory is the best way to go, both for me and for other bloggers.  This is why:

Getting ON: The blogroll is kept on Tricia’s site, and folks copy and paste the roll from her page and put it on their page.  This is all well and good, but it means that if you have copied and pasted the blogroll over, you need to keep doing that as more blogs are added.  No manual updating needed if you are in a directory.    Also, as folks will invariably forget to update their roll, the most recent blogs will not get the exposure their earlier counterparts got.

Getting OFF:  if you want to be taken off the blogroll, as Tricia is comtemplating, then there are dozens of places that this would need to be changed.  Realistically, there is no way you can effectively remove yourself from the blogroll once you are on it.

I really do think a directory, over which the blogger has control of their entry, has got to be a better way to go that lists that get copied over and over ad infinitum in an out of control way. 

There have been reports that “do follow” is dead.. Tricia of Feverish Thoughts claims that she is sick of “human created comment spam”, Darren Rouse on his famous Problogger.net blog points out that there is a new despicable service available where you can pay people to place comments on blogs for you, Randa Clay says that some people are turning their “no follow” back on again (including Wendy at eMomsathome, who has indeed turned hers back on again) and Lorelle at wordpress also speaks out about human generated comment spam (and mentions that she is happy she has “no follow” tags on her blog.)

Personally I agree with Randa when she concudes that turning the no follow back on again will not dramatically reduce span anyway, and:

I just don’t think it’s enough of a problem to worry over for most bloggers. Moderate comments, zap the questionable ones and if a few get through… oh well.

What I think this furore has brought to light, for me at least, is the question of why we want comments and how comments benefit us.  Is a human spammed comment really that bad?

I’m going out on a limb here and I’m going to say that for the beginning blogger, it’s probably not all that bad as long as the comments aren’t total junk and the spam isn’t obvious.  (If it is obvious, then you just delete it of course!)

When you are just starting out in blogging, it’s exciting when someone comments on your blog, even if that someone is a paid commenter.  It’s a signal to the new blog owner that their blog is now “on the map”..  and a discreet spam comment will at least give your blog some inkling of credibility.  Nobody likes to break the ice on a new post or a new blog where nobody else has commented before. 

Indeed some of the blogging guru’s out there suggest that you break the ice yourself by setting up a dummy user and commenting on your own blog!

If comment spammers can do this for you.. all the better and less work for you to do.  All you need to do is to moderate the really obvious spam.   Of course in the long run, this won’t get you a thriving community (which is what many seek to achive with their blog) but as an interim marketing tactic, allowing (and some would say encouraging) comment spam in the early days may give your blog a boost towards becoming a community.

You can use these early comments to respond.. by responding to all the comments you receive you are showing that you are happy to interact with your readers.  Blogs where comments are not responded too have a difficult time getting off the ground in terms of building community.

As Randa also points out, the overhead of a few spammy comments isn’t worth the trade off for the extra comments we may receive from having “no follow” turned off, until perhaps we have a super-blog where we are having to moderate dozens of comments a day.   In that case, you would do as she has suggested and Link Love plugin should do the trick.  (It turns the “no follow” off for regular commenters.)

Here is another set…  enjoy!

I’ve put together a few free badges for you to use..  enjoy!

Today we have 7 great new blog listings:

Nimble Theory - Startups and technology.

Pony Tail Club - the blog of 14 year old Madison and her horse Moon.  I know my stepdaughter is going to love this, she’s horse crazy!

Medical Spa MD information on retail medical business for plastic surgeons, ermatologists and physicians practicing cosmetic and aesthetic medicine.   The stuff we love.. but won’t admit to. 

Simple Curiosity? - a collection of simple explanations about who Beowulf is and why Grendel is dead, why time slows down when you approach light speed, and why you think you are… or not.  Fascinating tid-bits every day.

mu-sik.com  get music news, music, videos, lyrics, music comments and opinions.

Spoilt Angel, Cosmetics, Fragrances, Skincare, Beauty Spoilt Angel has Cosmetics, Fragrances and Skincare reviews, comment and advice as well as beauty tips and secrets. Yummy!!

Rob Cubbon Rob Cubbon is a Freelance graphic desinger artworker in London.   Very interesting dude and his site is well worth a look for those of us with blogs, websites etc.