Are You Sometimes Feeling Ignored?
Posted by Mitch on Sep 1, 2010
I tend to visit a lot of blogs. I’ve talked about it before on this blog, how I used to subscribe to nearly 250 other blogs, but at some point I got it down to around 104. Of course me being me I have added some more blogs to my reader since that time, and I’m given some of those an opportunity to show that they at least have something interesting to say on a consistent basis before I start whittling my list down again.
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One thing that helps me determine I’m going to eliminate a blog from my reader is whether or not I ever get any responses from those blogs that I tend to leave comments on. Those of you who have seen me leave a comment on your blog know that I’m not one of those people who often leaves just one line responses. Sure, sometimes it may only be two lines, but you know those two lines are going to mean something and have something to do with the topic, and sometimes those lines are kind of long.
Sometimes you get the feeling you’re being ignored, and nobody likes that. I certainly don’t, especially if I’ve taken time to make a comment on your post. After all, as I’ve written many times on this blog, and many of you have written on your blogs, what’s the point in accepting comments if you’re never going to respond to anybody? If you’re going to do that you might as well just turn off comments, become Seth Godin, and move on with your life.
It’s not just blogging that sometimes leaves me feeling ignored. There many times on Twitter where I reach out to both people I know and people I don’t know and comment on some of the things they share. Most of the time you never hear anything back from those people, which once again leaves me wondering why I’m even bothering to try. At this point I pretty much know that almost nobody who’s using Twitter on a consistent basis is going to the website to post their comments or to read posts from other people. Everybody is using some kind of platform to check out their Twitter messages, which means pretty much everyone has created some kind of filter so that they see messages from people who write comments to them. If they haven’t done that then they’re idiots, and I doubt that people who are participating a lot on Twitter are idiots.
In my mind, people who do the two things I mentioned above are missing the point of social media networking. They don’t call it social “seminaring” or social “sharing whatever I have to say because I’m important and you’re not”. If they did then the word “social” wouldn’t be a part of it at all. I don’t like it when it’s people I don’t know, and I certainly don’t like it when it’s people I do know. There are a few people I have eliminated from my Twitter stream because I felt ignored, even if I’ve talked to them in the past. I don’t expect people to respond to everything I say to them, because sometimes there’s just nothing to say in response to a previous message. But I do expect some give and take every once in a while, and if I’m the only one giving then I’m getting out.
The one thing almost everyone knows if they visit this blog is that I’m going to respond to their comments as long as they’re more than one line. Of course, if we’re doing a back and forth at some point one of us has to end, and it could be me. Beyond that, I get to everybody at some point, and even if I don’t always respond to your comments, I always respond to a comment made by a new visitor, in hopes that they will return again and again. If anybody ever feels ignored by comments they leave on this blog, just let me know; but I don’t see it happening.
Are you feeling ignored by some of the blogs you visit? Are you taking care not to ignore people who visit your blog?
Post #802; An Interesting Period
Posted by Mitch on Aug 31, 2010
Well, talk about a strange period. I wrote 102 posts actually in just over 3 months, to the point that I’ve gone a post over and this one is actually #803. It’s a far cry from how I got to post #701.
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Over the past month, what I’ve done is written a bunch of posts in advance because of the social media workshop I had coming, and then when I had a couple other things that hit my mind, including that post last week on the process for updating Twitter Tools, I inadvertently went past the number without realizing it. No matter; I actually do these particular posts more for myself than anyone else so I can chronicle where I’ve been and where I’m going.
First, let’s stick with my norm, which is to indicate what my top 5 categories were for the month:
Sunday Question – 14
Social Media – 13
Personal – 11
Marketing – 8
“Sunday Question” was a new category for this period, as I realized that calling it “personal” just didn’t quite work. On it’s own, it should probably always make the top list since it inherently has at least 12 posts for its category for now. I’m thinking of running it until the end of the year, then evaluating it to see if it’s worth continuing. Sometimes it garners pretty good conversation, while other times people are somewhat reluctant to state their opinion on my questions. Hey, onward and upward.
One interesting thing I recognized for the first time while checking the stats for this post is that when I go into Google Analytics and pull up the individual posts that had the most activity during the period, it automatically resets itself back to a one month review, and I’d never noticed that before. Therefore, some of the numbers I’m going to post here are going to look skewed against past figures, but that’s okay. Actually, the funny thing is that when I changed the dates, only one article changed from what was in the original list. Three of the articles on this list were on the last list, and the one before it as well. And this time, as opposed to the last 100, there is one article written during the period that’s on the list, tied for 5th. Here’s the list:
Webshots – 377
Getting Google Desktop To Index Thunderbird – 309
I’m still amazed that article on “cleavage” is still going that strong; how amazing is that? The “sexting” article is the newest one, written in June, and the one on Google Desktop, written in November 2008, continues to be a big draw, even though I’ve written a newer one since then.
As for the posts with the most comments on them, I had one that really kind of took off, but otherwise comments were actually down this period, strange compared to activity. So be it; I’ll need to continue to work on things that people can comment on I suppose. Here are the top 5, though it’s going to be 6:
Are Americans Stupid, Or Do We Just Not Care? – 46
My Hot Tub Adventure – 33
Sunday Question – How Much Do You Like Yourself? – 32
During this period, I started talking more about the concept of influence, as I realized that to realize a lot of my goals I’m going to have to increase my influence both online and locally. I also learned how to add feeds to this blog, my other blogs, and some of my websites, that show the most recent posts from my other blogs. That’s my attempt to increase the visibility of everything I have across the board.
So I’m on my way, and I hope that over the next 100 posts, actually 97 posts I guess, I get into more topics that y’all will enjoy and learn from and share your thoughts on. I want to be as big as one of my favorite new blogs to visit, Twist Image by Mitch Joel. Check it out at your leisure.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled program.
Does Your Content Stink? Kind Of A Rebuttal
Posted by Mitch on Jul 8, 2010
A couple of days ago I came across a post that kind of intrigued me and kind of bothered me at the same time. Actually, my mind said it was fulfilling one of the points of the author, and in that case it probably worked as he expected. In another, however, I’m in almost full rebuttal mode, hence I’m writing about it on my site instead of his.
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The post is titled 10 Signs That Says Your Content Sucks (a phrase that I’ve never liked, so I’ve never said it, but I did have to quote the title), written by Chris Peterson of Blogging With Chris. Actually, though it says 10 signs, only 9 of them actually ask you a question for you to determine if your content stinks. And I have to say that I disagree that if these points apply in some fashion that it means your content stinks. I want you to read his post so I’m not going into full details with it, but I will at least mention what I’m countering. This means I won’t hit all his points; no need.
First point, journal entries. In essence, he says no one is interested in our lives. Actually, since I decided to be more personal on this blog, I’ve had way more traffic and received a heck of a lot more comments. Beforehand, I think many folks had no clue who I was or what I was about. You can play it too close to the vest in not divulging any personality sometimes. Remember what my most visited post is all about; it was personal and social commentary, and I doubt anyone learned much from it.
Second point, number of comments. The reality is that some of the best stuff written on the internet is not only never seen, but never commented on. Blogging turns out to be a community, and if you don’t give yourself to trying to reach out to others, unless you’re famous for some other reason, you’re going to get neither visitors or comments. Judging your content based on only comments is useless.
Third point, if time were the great predictor of how many comments people were going to get we’d all take a week putting together our posts. Every post isn’t a home run, just like every song on an album (or CD; I still like to refer to them as albums) isn’t a top 10 hit. If you’re looking for that kind of perfection you’re never going to attain it, and you risk alienating your audience because they have no idea when something new is coming.
Fourth point, fan mail. Yes, I get some fan mail. But I receive a heck of a lot more comments than fan mail. Truthfully, I didn’t start getting fan mail until probably the middle of last year; it threw me off initially. I tend to view it as some people wishing to express a point of view, but not wanting to be “outed” on the blog itself. On my business blog, I get a lot of email responses whenever I write on topics of racism and diversity instead of comments on the blog. Are those posts better, or are they scary enough for some folks to not want to put their name on it in the blogosphere?
Fifth point, hate mail. Why would I intentionally want to put out a post to receive hate mail? Who am I supposed to be, Rush Limbaugh? I don’t ever want hate mail; I’d rather be ignored if someone didn’t have the guts to post their rebuttal on my blog. However, I have received a version of hate mail twice ever; didn’t like it one bit, especially since one was on a tribute to my dad, thus it was way out of place.
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Sixth point, is it my responsibility to educate or expect someone to learn something from every post? It’s an interesting point, and one that I believe is what finally makes some people give up blogging. If you don’t diversify, you’re going to stagnate and want to go away. Did anyone learn anything from my cleavage post, easily the most popular post ever on this blog? What about my story about losing and finding my keys? Were people entertained? Yup! Is there anything wrong with entertaining? Nope. Charles Barkley once said “I am not a role model”; well, he got that one wrong, but what’s not wrong is that “I am not everyone’s educator”. I’ll educate when I want to, like my recent post on PHP 5, but otherwise, as Wanda Sykes like to say, “I’m a be me.”
I think that’s enough. Chris actually made me think, which is good, even if I disagree with his premise. Darren Rowse’s blog gets plenty of comments, but at least half of his posts these days are written by someone else. Are those posts all great content, or are those people who visit because he’s the Problogger? Sometimes, lousy content gets lots of comments, even more than good content; I see it all the time. It’s about connections and community as much as the content. Without content, nothing moves. With good content, you’re afforded one type of opportunity; with bad content, you’re actually afforded another type of opportunity.
But does your content stink based on the number of comments you get? There’s no real way to affirm that. What say you?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
How To Tell A Post Is Spam
Posted by Mitch on Jun 5, 2010
You know, I wouldn’t think that most people couldn’t identify spam when they see it. However, I’ve been to enough blogs and seen enough spam even on those blogs where people seem to usually monitor what’s going on in their comments area.
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Heck, I know spam is getting pretty sneaky. Sometimes it’s hard to tell a good comment from a spam comment. If you’re not paying attention a new spam comment will show up on an old post, which is why I recently talked about making some posts private.
Still, you must be vigilant in fighting the great spam battle. If you don’t, not only will the spammers win, but those savvy visitors of yours that see you can’t tell spam from the real thing might decide to stay away. So, let’s see if I can help you out in some fashion.
1. Watch out for insulting spam. There are obviously trolls whose job, so they feel, is to make everyone else’s life miserable. Insulting spam is usually pretty easy to determine, though; it’s never on topic.
2. Watch for spam that’s not on topic. Maybe I should have started with this one, but I’m bringing it up now. There is spam that looks pretty good and you might miss it because you don’t read to the end. If a comment starts out intentionally evasive, it’s probably going to continue being so, or else it will introduce something that makes no sense whatsoever.
3. Set your spam filter to move a comment with even one link in it to your spam folder. Sure, every once in awhile you’re going to get a legitimate post in there, but what I’ve seen most often is someone following up a post with a link in it with a second post saying “hey, my post didn’t show up”, or something to that effect. I hope everyone checks their spam folders.
4. One line comments. Unless you know the person, you should probably just delete all of these anyway. Keeping something that says “nice post” is an insult to your blog, and is most probably spam.
5. Check out the email addresses. Most people aren’t using Hotmail anymore, but even if they are, if the name before “@” doesn’t make sense it’s probably spam. If the name you’re given is of one sex but the name in the email address is of another sex, it’s probably spam.
6. It used to be that spam didn’t come with images, but now it does. Make sure you read the comment instead of relying on the fact that there’s now a gravatar attached.
7. Now spam can come in your name. That used to be an easy tell as well, but some of the more sophisticated spam can read who the author of the post is and add it to their comment.
8. If the comment is written to the “webmaster”, it’s spam. Who really uses the term “webmaster” anymore anyway?
9. If the post is in another language and you’ve only ever written in one language, it’s most probably spam. Back in the day I used to copy some of those messages into translation websites to see if it was saying anything pertinent; just scrap it and move on.
10. Finally, if you’re not sure, even with these tips, you can always test the waters by sending an email to the email address. Write a short post saying something like “just seeing if this email is valid before I allow the comment on my blog.” If you get a rejection back, or heck, if you get nothing back, consider it spam and kill it. Even if it’s not really spam, if the person on the other end doesn’t respond, then they probably had no intentions of coming back to your blog, in which case you didn’t need their comment anyway.
I hope that helps. Of course, if you have Askimet on your blog it will help even more.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Making Posts Private
Posted by Mitch on May 29, 2010
Last August I wrote a post asking people if they turned comments off on their blog, and overall it seemed many people hadn’t thought about it, though our friend Rummuser does after 60 days. At the time, I couldn’t ever think of a reason why I might do it, then another commenter, Doug, mentioned possibly doing it with posts that have a short message and wouldn’t need to be used again.
I started thinking about this again last week when I noticed some of the posts that spam seemed to be attracted to that was slipping through Askimet. The messages were going to those posts that were either put up announcing something specific and now the moment was gone, such as a webinar, or posts where the period for a comment wouldn’t make sense anymore, such as when I was writing commentary on WordPress 2.6.2, and here we are at WordPress 2.9.2.
Initially I thought about just going back through most of my 700 posts and eliminating the ability for those posts to get comments, then I started thinking about it a little bit more as I was looking at some of those posts. I realized that some of them not only didn’t need comments, but they really didn’t need to be seen by anyone anymore either. Once again, if I had a quick post about something, such as when I posted a quick post years ago when I launched my website marketing book (which is sitting up there at the top left, if you haven’t checked it out yet) reminding people that the launch date was fast approaching, why would I need to let it sit out there. It’s not going to help in SEO purposes, and I can’t figure out why anyone would need to see that particular page again.
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I started thinking about making some of those old posts private. What privacy does is eliminates it from the general public, yet allows you to keep it within instead of just deleting it. That way, you still have your consistent count of posts, you can still go back and track demographics if you want to see what your traffic looked like during a certain time period, and who knows, you just might want to look at it again some day to see where you either went wrong or right on something.
To make a post private in WordPress, all you have to do is be in the editing part of the post, click on the Edit link next to Visibility, and select Private, which is at the bottom. Hit OK, hit Update, and you’re good to go.
Does it hurt or help SEO? Some people might say that removing those posts will hurt your SEO because you’re removing things that help you promote your branding. Some people will say that removing those posts will help because they were pretty much throwaway posts to begin with, which means search engines will penalize you for them anyway and thus it’s best to get rid of them.
I have no real clue; personally, I don’t care. What I do know is that it will eliminate the spam for those particular posts, just as eliminating comments will do, and I pretty much don’t have to bother with them anymore since, when I go back through posts, I’ll be alerted which ones I’ve made private.
By the way, based on the other thing I said about stopping comments, I might as well tell you how to do that also, in case you’re thinking about it. That would be near the bottom of the Edit area, possibly at the very bottom depending on your theme, and all you have to do is uncheck the box next to Allow Comments, then hit Update and you’re done.
It’s going to be a long process going back through over 700 posts, but I figure I’ll get it done in small chunks.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
My Gripe With WordPress.com Blogs
Posted by Mitch on May 26, 2010
Some of you remember back in 2008 when I wrote about my gripe with Blogger blogs, which is owned by Google. Back then, I said my main gripe had to do with trying to write comments on those blogs, where you either had to register for the site so you could get notified of comments, or you could choose one of the other options and never know that someone had responded to a comment.
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Now I’m going to gripe about WordPress.com blogs, and I have a minor gripe against them. Once again, it’s the commenting gripe. With WordPress.com, you can comment on the blogs and potentially get a notification. Why do I say “potentially”? Because if you click on the box that says you want to be notified of comments, like you’d do on my blog, you immediately get this email that asks you if you want to subscribe to comments. Well, if you didn’t why would you have clicked on the box?
On this blog, which is self hosted, I already have that selected, so if you get anything in the mail from me it’s because you commented, and you can decide to unsubscribe from comments at any time if you please. On WordPress.com blogs, you have to check the box, so one would assume there wouldn’t be any questions that you wanted the blog comments.
To be somewhat fair, I will say that I know why they do this. It’s a double opt-in system, verifying that the person whose name and email address that’s been used is the same person who actually wrote the post. It’s known as a double opt-in as opposed to a regular opt in because you initially had to check the box to tell the blog that you wanted to get comments. For some blogs where you don’t get a choice as to whether you want to check or uncheck a box, you might still receive a message asking you if you want to subscribe to comments, but in that case you didn’t really opt-in the first time, hence it’s not a double opt-in system. You really wanted to know that, didn’t you?
Anyway, with this system, if it gets a bounced email back, it knows to move the comment to spam. If someone else’s email address was used, certainly that person wouldn’t want to receive any more responses, but in this case the concept is somewhat flawed. At best, if someone forged a person’s email address and that person gets the response, they’d have to follow the link back to the blog, see the posting, and request that it be removed because they didn’t write it. I wonder how often that sort of thing really happens.
In my mind, one uses a double opt-in system if they have an automated email system set up for something like subscribing to a newsletter, since spam email can easily get into that, or some “friends” will do a drive-by subscription as a joke on a friend. But for a blog, I really can’t see the reasoning behind that.
Still, I have to admit that I’m more apt to comment on a WordPress.com blog than a Blogger blog because at least I can choose which of my 3 blogger personas I wish to use. But I must admit that I never subscribe to the opt-in email that shows up. Occasionally, if I’m so predisposed, I’ll pop back to a blog that I’ve commented on to see if it ever got a response, but that’s mainly only for friends of mine. For the rest… I guess it’s a one and done most of the time.
I wish WordPress.com would address that, or at least make it an option for their users. I get that it’s free, but does free mean it has to restrict what some people can do? The fix is probably in the paid version on that site; does anyone know for sure? I will say this; I’m glad it’s in the free software version for those of us who pay for our own hosting.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Now My Word Is Gold?
Posted by Mitch on Apr 30, 2010
A funny thing has been happening over the last couple of weeks, and I’m not quite sure why.
I have people writing me and asking me to look at their blog posts, then either write about it on one of my blog or actually post the entire thing into my blogs as a guest post. These are people I don’t know and have never heard of, and frankly, coming out of the blue the way it did, initially kind of freaked me out.
Then I got a little upset because I didn’t know these people. I’m sure every once of us has written something and wanted to share it with our friends who don’t follow our blog, or our wives and other family members. But I can’t conceive of searching for someone and asking them to go through all those hoops without building some kind of relationship first. And the idea of reposting an article from someone else’s blog; can’t conceive of that either.
One guy even told me how to do the entire thing; how presumptuous. To his credit, I did decide to go check the post out, and man, you think I write long posts sometimes. It was nearly 4,000 words, with pictures and graphs; almost more of a white paper than a blog post. When I told him I wouldn’t know what to do with that, because it was overwhelming, he wrote back to tell me how I could do it. After I wrote him saying that I didn’t know him, he’d never written anything on my blog and never participated in a discussion, and wasn’t following any of my feeds. He did say that he went through Google Blogs looking for folks who write things on his particular topic and my blog came up, so he was just submitting to everyone.
By the way, it’s not for this blog, but it’s definitely been for my other two blogs. I hadn’t thought my opinion on health care had gotten all that much further than just my own business blog, but I guess the word is starting to spread a little bit more than I had anticipated. And my finance blog is hitting kind of a renaissance as well. That one, by the way, now has all sorts of people wanting to advertise on it; but that’s the next post.
What’s your thought on someone you don’t know reaching out to you, asking you to read their stuff, then write about it on your blog? Do you find it intrusive or flattering?
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