I’m Not Registering, And Other Missives
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 15, 2011
Y’all know I love social media. I love getting to meet people through all the different platforms. I use it for business as well, probably not as good as others but I get by. I’ve written a lot of posts about trying to find ways to encourage people to participate in the processes, retweeting, sharing your information with Facebook and LinkedIn, and commenting on blogs.
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Well, it seems things are starting to move in a different direction, and I’m not all that crazy about it. Seems that there’s going to be less effort in trying to convince people that maybe you have something worth sharing and more coercion to get them to participate. And I’m not playing the game; nope, just not doing it.
I’m not going to blame this on Andy Bailey, who I think is brilliant. I love CommentLuv, and I’ve been one of its biggest supporters. I know he made no money off that plugin, and probably makes nothing to very little off the GASP Antispybot plugin as well. I know he’s only delivering to the masses what they want. I’m just not going along with it.
Andy is about to release a new version of CommentLuv, a premium paid version that’s going to have a lot of features to it, as well as allow people to eliminate a bunch of plugins because it will contain what those plugins handle now. It’s purpose is to help those who buy it encourage others to share their information with other people to be allowed access to the best parts of CommentLuv on those particular blogs. I don’t have a problem with the first half of this; I do have a problem with the second part.
When the most drastic changes to CommentLuv came around, users had the ability to limit the number of previous posts someone had access to select from if they left comments on one’s blog. They could just up and select a number or do something like ask people to register so they had access to more posts to select from. I decided I was going to leave things alone; after all, I’ve always been open for access without people having to jump through hoops on this blog. I also remember back 4 years ago when it was recommended NOT to let people register on your blog because some of those people had the skills to actually break into your admin panel and cause you all kinds of grief. I guess that hole’s been plugged, though I’ve never heard a retraction of that statement.
Now those who buy the plugin will be able to hold you hostage (yeah, kind of strong) by making you share their content with one of the major social media sites. They can select one, or they can give you the option of selecting which site you want their post to go to. If you do that first, then you have access to your last 10 posts to choose from.
Trust me, I get it. All of us want our content out there as much as possible. All of us want our blogs and websites to grow. But I’m not one of those people that takes kindly to coercion. Y’all know I’m rebellious about participating on blogs that have Disqus, Livefyre, Intense Debate, or any of those other things. You know I’ve stopped participating with Typepad blogs. You know I’m not leaving comments if the comment system is Facebook only. In other words, if I have to go through an extra step just to leave a comment, I’m not doing it.
So, where does that leave me? It leaves me with only having my last post as the selection, and frankly, that’s good enough for me. What you, the blog owner, will lose is the possibility that maybe I’ve written something in my last 10 posts that’s pertinent to your topic on the day I visit your post. You and your readers will just have to deal with whatever I decided to say on my most recent post; that might be good enough for you.
Oh yeah, in this instance I will still comment on your blogs. I’m not dropping anyone I already like. Goodness, I comment on lots of blogs that don’t have CommentLuv. I don’t comment for the link; I comment because I like commenting. You know, one of those guys who’ll share an opinion or statement if I’m encouraged to do so. If the commenting system is still the one I like, I’m sticking around.
But I’m not registering, I’m not retweeting through any of these means that’ll open up my last 10 posts, and I’m not playing the game. I might still retweet, but I’ll do it my way. Yeah, I know most people aren’t going to agree with me on this one. I know the explanations are coming as to why this is good rather than bad.
But, as Wanda Sykes says, “I’m a be me.”
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Starting Your Blog Social Media Campaign Via Commenting
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 8, 2011
Last April I wrote a post to add to my Blogging Tips series titled How To Start Getting Visitors. It was a super basic tip on how to get some notice for one’s blog by contacting certain folks and letting them know you had a blog.
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While that’s nice and all, one couldn’t quite call it a campaign towards increasing awareness. In essence, it was really like becoming an insurance salesperson and calling all your family members first, then all your friends, then your pseudo friends, and after that not knowing what to do with yourself.
I decided it was time to at least get more people going on this front. I do this because of two things. One, I had a meeting last week with a couple of ladies who wanted ideas on how they could create awareness of their new business through social media. I told them about blogging, based on what it is they do, and then told them the process they should go through to get going. Two, I made the same recommendation recently to someone who visits this blog, and though I’m not sure if he’s done the entire campaign I know that he was willing to listen and give it a try, so I have high hopes.
This is mainly for beginners, but it’s also for people who aren’t getting any real traffic to your site as well. This isn’t a talk about niche marketing; it’s a talk about working the process, meeting the blogging community, and getting known by others. And if you want some more starter information, check out my blogging tips.
Let me set the scenario for you; it’s possible you’ll have more or less time, but this is a great starter scenario. You’re someone who doesn’t have tons of time, but you want to get people to your blog. You write 3 posts a week, and often you have some time left over after you’re blogged, or some on days when you don’t blog. We’re going after the 30 minute process for you to undertake.
Your goal is to make comments on at least 5 blogs during that 30 minute time period. What you do is go to Google Blogs, which can actually be found by going to Google, clicking on “more”, then scrolling down a little bit. When the next page opens, you’ll see all sorts of blog posts on trending topics that look like news. But they’re all blogs, though some aren’t personal blogs. That’s really your goal, because you want the opportunity to stand out; that plus big time blogs like Huffington Post don’t have CommentLuv; this is a part of the strategy.
In the search box, put in a topic that you want to read on. It could be something in your niche, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Believe it or not that statement is controversial, because everyone else will tell you that you need to comment on blogs in your niche because you want targeted traffic. At this stage what you really need is traffic, and you also want the opportunity to not only show that you can talk to people and offer something good, but you still are hoping for the opportunity to stand out. So, you will be looking at blogs in your niche also, if that’s a part of your strategy, but that’s not what it’s all about. Networking; that’s what it’s all about.
For the first two weeks you need to be committed to commenting on at least 5 blogs a day. You can continue going to Google Blogs, but hopefully in your searches you have found a few blogs that you like well enough to return to. That’s important because something blog owners like are people who will come back more than once. You also want to look for a mix of blogs that have CommentLuv and those that don’t. You look for CommentLuv because it highlights previous blog posts of yours; you look for the others because you don’t want to look like one of those guys that “only” comments on CommentLuv blogs; it’s just a little smarmy.
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In the next two weeks, you’re going to comment on blogs that you’ve found you like and now you’re going to make sure to look for blogs within your niche. The thought now is that you’ll have started establishing yourself with at least a couple of people, you’ll have left your links on their blogs, especially if they have CommentLuv, and now you’re going to go out on a campaign to see what others in your niche are saying and take the opportunity to make sure they know you’re around.
After four weeks, look at things this way. If you only had 3 days a week to do this process and only those 30 minutes, you’ve made at least 60 total connections, whether some of those folks received return visits or not. You’ve planted the seeds of knowledge that you’re out there. I would almost guarantee that you’ll have started seeing more visitors, especially if your titles have captured people’s imaginations and your content doesn’t stink.
Once you see the process starting to work, you’ll be hooked. I’ll throw this out there; how many of you who visit these days saw me as one of your initial commenters? How many of you picked up on that and decided you were going to start commenting on other blogs? How many of you found it contagious and uplifting when people finally started coming to your blog? You may not have followed it in the manner I’m recommending here, but you did this in some capacity, right?
Yes, blogging does take more work than just writing posts. But your rewards on the end could give you more than you can imagine; that sounds nice, doesn’t it?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Using CommentLuv Effectively
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 11, 2011
I don’t have to say this, but I will; I love CommentLuv, and I’m glad Andy created it. It was probably one of the first plugins I ever added to this blog, when I really had no idea what a plugin was, and it’s served my purposes well.
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The thing is, I’m betting that my reasons for using CommentLuv are somewhat different than yours. Not all of you, of course, but an overwhelming majority of you. If you’re not using this plugin to increase your visibility in the community then you don’t know anything about networking. If you are, you might still be going after low hanging fruit rather than getting into the meat of it all (now there’s an oxymoron, talking about the meat of fruit). Let’s find out, shall we.
First, having CommentLuv is a must if you can. I know some blog types can’t use this plugin, and that’s a shame. On the surface it encourages people to visit your blog and leave a comment, knowing they’re potentially going to get traffic back. This is the reason most people use it.
Second, looking at comments both on your own blog and other blogs you comment on is crucial to expanding your network. I’ll admit that I don’t always read all the comments on other blogs, but I do read the ones on mine. However, what I will do is scan through all the comments and look at the blog posts that people are highlighting at the end of their comments. This gives me a lot of blogs to check out based on being interested in a topic that they’re highlighting; I think that’s pretty neat.
Of course, if you sign up on their CommentLuv site, when you comment on someone else’s post you get to choose which of your last 10 posts you wish to highlight, which is a benefit to your commenting as well. If your last post was kind of a throwaway or one time post, you might not necessarily want or need to keep highlighting it, so having the ability to choose between multiple posts is definitely a good thing. It also helps if you happen to comment on a post more than once, as it allows you to select a different post each time.
Also, did you know that if you hover over the heart after someone’s CommentLuv link that it will give you a little bit of information about that person? Nothing intrusive, just whether that person is registered at the main site, how many times their link on that particular blog has been clicked on, other blog links this person has commented on, and at least a few other posts that someone has written on their own blog. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.
Of course, some of the bit time bloggers would say you’re encouraging people to leave your blog and thus messing up your effectiveness. After all, the links through CommentLuv don’t allow to add code to them so people won’t leave your site. But I think it’s a legitimate risk to take because it pays in spades in the long run (no, that’s another phrase I don’t really know, but I know how to use).
So, what’s stopping you from using it? Disqus? Intense Debate? Blogspot? Drop them; go this route! 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Google Chrome Revisited
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 18, 2010
In September 2008, I wrote a review on this blog concerning Google Chrome. It wasn’t the most positive review, but it was brand new and I said I’d check it out again at some point. That point is now.
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First, let me tell you why I’m doing it. I’m a Firefox guy, but as you may remember, I wrote in August about some of the problems I’d been having with it. The sucker was constantly freezing up on my computer and I couldn’t shut it down via the Task Manager, so I’d have to reboot to use it. Also, this problem started with CommentLuv in the past month where I’m visiting blogs and having to refresh a few times to leave a comment so the program will pull up any of my posts. My hope and test was that Chrome would alleviate those issues.
Installation is still goofier than anything else I’ve seen. You still get this super long EULA before you can download it, and I decided to read the entire thing to see if there were any traps in it. If there were I missed it, but I made sure not to allow it to add anything else to it when I downloaded the loaded it up.
It says it installs fast; trust me, Firefox loads at least 10 times faster. And when the browser finally showed up I have to admit that it looked a lot more like Opera than what I was expecting. There were two tabs at the top, with a plus sign where I could add more tabs, and a menu bar; that’s pretty much it. I pulled up the Help link so I could figure out how to use a few more things, such as wondering where toolbars were. Seems they don’t use toolbars because they say it slows things down; I’d never heard that before, but I did some reading and they’re not the only ones saying it, so I’ll leave that for now.
To set things up, everything starts by clicking on this little wrench at the top right. I did change a few settings, nothing overly brash, but one thing I set that didn’t seem to change anything was making the default fonts bigger. When I closed and reopened the browser, that setting didn’t take hold, so I found myself having to enlarge every page I went to later on.
I’ll say this; pages do load pretty fast. I turned off pre-fetching, which can slow things down, and I’m sure that helped. I also changed the theme, which is under one of the default tabs when the browser opens for the first time, so that was pretty cool. I learned how to import bookmarks from Firefox, and one of those was my bookmarks toolbar, so that’s one toolbar I got back, and all the other bookmarks are aligned under this button to the far right that says “other bookmarks”; that makes sense.
As for plugins or extensions, there seems to be a lot of them but not the one I’m looking to use, unfortunately. I like being able to see PR or Alexa rank when I visit new sites, and the closest I could find that works with Chrome was SEO Quake, and I don’t like running that all the time. But that’s a personal preference thing; I’m sure you could find something to use.
The important stuff now. I can’t tell you if the browser will lock up and shut down like Firefox had been doing, but I have to admit that Firefox hasn’t messed up in this way for me in the last month or so. There’s no way to test for that, I’m afraid, except to leave it open for a month or so; that’s probably not going to happen. I did check resources and it’s using about 2/3rds less than what Firefox consumes, so that’s a benefit.
But when it came to CommentLuv, it seems I have the same problems with what’s going on with them on Chrome as I have on Firefox. So, at least this tells me it’s not a browser issue; heck!
So, once again, I don’t think it’s bad, but it doesn’t fix the main issues I have with Firefox and thus don’t warrant my changing just yet. But it will be another browser I’ll use to look at new webpages as I create them.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Four Things I’ve Noticed Lately
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 5, 2010
I love visiting a lot of blogs and leaving comments where I can. Because I’m all over the place, I tend to start noticing some things that maybe others hadn’t noticed. There are 4 things in particular I’m going to mention today.
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The first is that I’ve noticed on many blogs this thing at the bottom of the comment area asking me to click the box to prove I’m not a spammer. I thought that was a little odd until it hit me that it’s come about because of a new plugin called the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin, created by Gail Gardner and Andy Bailey. This is in response to problems they and others have had with Akismet, something I don’t have a problem with but I understand the issue. Many people have said they haven’t had a single bit of spam since adding it; a couple of people said they’re still getting some. Still, it might be a nice addition for some of you to check out.
The second is that I’ve noticed that WordPress.com blogs aren’t sending me email asking me to subscribe to comments anymore. Man, that was greatly irritating to me, as you know if you’ve read this blog, because that’s the reason I was hesitant to leave comments on those blogs, just as I still am with Disqus blogs. I also noticed that I haven’t gotten that message from the last two Intense Debate blogs I wrote a comment on as well. Now, here’s the other side of that. To date, I’ve only gotten two notifications from blogs I’ve left a comment on as it pertains to any of these, and both were WordPress blogs. This tells me that either the owners of the blogs have to go in and select to send notifications to people they respond to or it just doesn’t work for everyone for some reason. I’ve tested this by going back to see if people have responded to a comment of mine, and if they have then I know I never got the notification. I’ll just ask those of you who have WordPress blogs on their site to check out your settings.
The third thing I’ve noticed seems to be happening only to me, unless other Firefox users have seen it but haven’t said anything. This is in relation to the CommentLuv plugin, which I absolutely love. Lately it seems I visit some blogs, write a comment, and the CommentLuv thing doesn’t see my blog. I thought that was wonky and decided to write the folks about it. However, I closed my blog once, popped it back up, went to the same site and put my information in and suddenly it was working again. This tells me the problem is with Firefox and not CommentLuv. I have absolutely no idea what that’s about or how to fix it. I do know that I went through the last update for Firefox and maybe it’s related to that somehow. But I haven’t been able to find on the search engines where anyone else has complained about this.
The fourth thing is that it seems that Twitter Tools isn’t fully working properly. In this case, if I write a post in advance, when it posts Twitter Tools doesn’t show it. It probably took me a couple of weeks to notice this, and it seems to be holding true for all 3 of my blogs. If I post immediately, it goes there, but otherwise, it’s a no-show. This is problematic because I write most of my posts beforehand and schedule them, and if I have to go back and post the link manually it defeats the purpose of having the plugin to begin with. On this one I’ve seen other people complain, but to date there’s been no real fix for the issue, though many think it’s related to the Twitter oAuth thing we all had to do back in August.
That’s all I have. If you’ve noticed anything odd, or wish to comment on any of the above, please share.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
