Started a blog some months ago and are yet to receive a comment? That is a bad situation indeed and I can tell from experience that it is very frustrating.
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A collection of top tips to boost your social media effectiveness
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The 10 Most Important Questions I get Asked About Twitter Below is a great article by Jeff Bullas on his blog (click on the headline for the full article)
Twitter is a complete mystery to a lot of people. Twitter in fact was never meant to be a social networking site according to its founders. It was initially created as an internal messaging system in 2006 for the pod casting company Odeo in 2006 and broke through into public conciousness in 2007 after winning an award at the SXSW conference. It has now evolved into world wide real time messaging system on steroids. Who Uses Twitter? Twitter is used for a wide variety of online activities by different groups and individuals including: Journalists use it for monitoring politicians and celebritiesCompanies use it for breaking news in real timeMarketers use it to create buzz about brandsBloggers use it to promote their blogs So why did I start using Twitter and what have I learnt since sending my first tweet? Here are my responses to questions I have been asked in interviews over the last 12 months. The 10 Most Important Questions I get Asked About Twitter 1. When did you set up your Twitter account? Do you remember why you did it? I set up my account in December 2008 after stumbling upon conversations about Twitter on blogs I was reading. It seemed a curiosity at the time with some potential so I started playing for a few months until I discovered its marketing power in March 2009 when I started my blog 2. Do you have your own Twitter strategy? My strategy is quite focused I use it primarily to promote and distribute my blog posts to a targeted audience globallyEngage and have conversations with people on Twitter both publicly and privately on the DM channelFor networking with people both online and offline 3. How should marketers use Twitter? Any tips or tricks that work for you? Know who your targeted audience is and follow them. The secret etiquette of Twitter is that a lot of people will reciprocate and follow you back. Tools that I have found effective for doing this are Twellow.com and Tweepi.comCreate great content on your blog and tweet it to that audienceI use Twitter as a tool to automate the distribution of my archived articles from my blog. Each post is broadcast once every 6 days. Some people don’t like agree with this strategy but Twitter is a tool and I use its reach to market my blog and with 65,000 Twitter followers it is very effective marketing tool.The secret is to not only build a a large quantity of followers but also targeted quality followers. 4. Why do you think people are following you? Is it because you are popular in your field or it is more about the way you are using Twitter? I believe the reason that people follow me is because of the content I create on my blog which I then promote by tweeting. This has now created such momentum after 2 years of concentrated effort that 3,000 to 4,000 new followers join every month. 5. What are the main lessons you are usually teaching your clients when it comes to Twitter? What are your observations – do they know how to use it successfully? For most people Twitter is a mystery. I treat it as networking channel on steroids. The main lessons are Know your audience and provide information that they need by listening to their feedbackGet clear on your goals for Twitter. Eg increase followers, drive traffic to my blog and create new contacts that I can meet in person that create business opportunities such as speaking engagements and consultingUnderstand it also can be a great personal branding platform in conjunction with a blog 6. Do you think that Twitter is a “magical marketing tool”? Or is it a new way of communication that we need to learn how to use? For me it has seemed magic because I don’t know of any other tool that can get your message out so quickly. It also can seem magical because for most people it is new and exciting. In essence though it is a new way of communicating and marketing that needs to be learned with its own strange vocabulary and quirks including #Tags, DM, and @ 7. Can you be influential on-line if you are not doing something substantial off-line? Online influence can be created without being an offline somebody. There are many influential people on Twitter because they learnt the art of creating online influence. A great tool for measuring this influence is Klout.com What I am experiencing is that online influence can become significant in real life and people start seeking you out for speaking, interviews, and business opportunities. 8. Does Twitter help you to “sell” yourself and to promote your services? The short answer is ‘Yes’ but to elaborate it opens doors to paid Keynote speaking engagements, consulting and workshops. In combination with my blog which is my name as a domain name (jeffbullas.com), it has created a very synergistic personal branding platform. What is also important is that my Twitter handle “jeffbullas” is consistent with my blogs name. It is important to have congruent branding across multiple online properties. 9. Have you got a special Twitter story? Something that you still remember and makes you smile/laugh/cry/angry? I remember being contacted by Scott Monty the Global Social Media Director for Ford about a positive article I had tweeted about Ford and that they had picked up with their Twitter monitoring tools. It surprised me that my little Tweet had been sifted from the ‘noise’ on the web that has led to us now becoming Twitter friends and communicating regularly via Twitter. I don’t know of any other free marketing social media tool that could have achieved the same result in that space of time. 10. Tell us what “success on Twitter” means to you? Success on Twitter is to be able make a difference by putting educational and original content into the Twitter torrent and to influence a global audience one tweet at a time. It has continued to surprise me with its reach and immediacy. It has contributed significantly to making my blog a success in just over 2 years with readers to jeffbullas.com now numbering over 140,000 per month in 190 countries. Delete the scoop?
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Started a blog some months ago and are yet to receive a comment? That is a bad situation indeed and I can tell from experience that it is very frustrating. Getting comments on your articles is a sure sign that you are going in the right direction, since it indicates that you have made an impression on your readers. While it is always great to see positive feedback on your work, even criticism is far better than not getting a single remark.
So let’s get to the point – what to do in order to encourage comments? Aside from quality content, which is a must here and in every aspect of blogging, there are some guidelines to follow if you want to get more feedback on your work. Below I will try to explain some effective techniques for doing just that, so be sure to stick with me!
Let People Know you Want CommentsInstead of being shy and just waiting for comments to start rolling, why not ask for them? Although it is exactly as simple as it sounds, many bloggers never care to apply that approach. Adding a few lines at the end of your article, asking your readers to share their thoughts, is just enough to get you a boost in the number of comments. It works for me, it should work for you as well. Combining that technique with the one below can do miracles.
Engage by Posing a QuestionAnother similar way for getting more comments is to pose a question in your closing paragraph. That is a method, which has proved its effectiveness over time. After starting to utilize it, I definitely saw a lot more interaction. So be sure to leave one or two thought-provoking questions, of course making sure that they are well related to the topic.
Read more on how to end your blog posts: “The End: 4 Solid Strategies for Concluding Your Next Blog Post”
Always Reply to CommentsThe feeling of writing a 200 word long comment and not getting a reply is definitely not a pleasant one. Even though getting interaction is among the main goals in blogging, these days a lot of bloggers don’t have the habit of adding a follow-up. Leaving unanswered questions is unprofessional and a sure sign that you don’t really care about your readers. Remember that by responding, you are building relationships as well. Those can prove a turning stone for the success of your blog, therefore I advice you to take five minutes of your time (it is not that time-consuming, is it?) and write a reply. Check out Tristan Higbee’s point of view on why you should reply to comments!
Give Something in ReturnYou might get kinda confused here – you are giving value, what else there is to reward commentators with? A straight-forward answer – backlinks. Everyone is trying to get their hands on those nowadays. By turning your blog into a dofollow one, search engines will count links in the comments section as backlinks, resulting in higher rankings in search results for commentators’ websites.
In order to go dofollow, you need to scan through the blog’s template and remove rel=’nofollow’ code snippets. Check out a tutorial for doing it in Blogspot – “ How to Make Blogger Blog Do-Follow”. Fortunately for WordPress users, a simple plug-in is all that’s needed – Dofollow Plug-in. Turning your blog dofollow is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways for drawing in more commentators. You also get the chance of submitting your blog to dofollow only directories. The one I’m using isFollowlist and it is a good traffic source.
Consider installing the CommentLuv plug-in, which gives commentators another link, pointing to their latest article. This blog is both dofollow and has CommentLuv enabled, so you get maximum benefit from commenting here. Be sure to do so!
Make Commenting EasyAlways make sure that leaving comments on your blog can be done by a five-year old. That is the area of your blog where simplicity counts the most. No matter how compelling your content and how good your widgets are, don’t expect seeing any comments if finding the comment box, filling in the required information and posting it takes like half an hour. Blogspot blogs have a lot of problems in that aspect, but luckily there’s a solution. IntenseDebate is a great comment system and installing it is real ease.
Give Commentators Higher ExposureUsing widgets can help you improve a lot of aspects on your blog and things aren’t much different when it comes to getting more comments. Top commentators widget for example is a great tool that can be a good motivator for visitors to leave a comment. I will also be implementing it on this blog soon. Adding a widget, showing the latest comments is yet another good idea, getting implemented by more and more blogs.
Applying those techniques is almost sure to get you more comments. They are not time-consuming so I advice you to start working on them right away. If you have more effective techniques, feel free to share them below!