One of the major frustrations that bloggers have had with Entrecard is the poor management and lack of customer support for bloggers. It has been a little over a week since the new ownership has taken over and I am personally impressed with the changes and direction they are moving in. In case you are not a member or if you are and have not been paying attention, here are the two major changes that have taken place so far.
Most bloggers strive to make their blog a community where people can learn, interact and exchange ideas. This is often achieved through the comment section. It has been said that comments are the lifeblood of a blog and I definitely agree with that statement. Many blogger, both new and experienced, have a difficult time attracting comments to their blog. A while back I wrote a post on how to get more blog comments. In this post, I want to get a little more specific and talk about rewarding your commentators to encourage them to start and continue adding value through quality comments.
Conventional wisdom tells us that people are more inclined to take action if there is something in it for them. As an example, I think back about when I first started college and there were dozens of credit card companies that were trying to get new students to sign up. What did they do, they gave something away, usually a tee shirt or something along those lines. The tee shirts probably cost them a buck but by offering the small reward more people were inclined to sign up. The same is true with blog comments, if you are willing to give a little and reward those that take time to comment, you will be ensuring that people will take the time to actually do it.
I came up with a list of 7 ways you can reward your commentators:
1.Make your links “do follow”, this is self explanatory, as you are rewarding your commentators by providing them a quality backlink to their site. To ruly reward them, I recommend installing the commentluv and keyword luv plugin.
2.Install Top Commentators plugin- This is similiar to the above reward where you will be providing a backlink and increased visibility to the people who comment most.
3.Create a post once a month that links back to your top commentators. I started doing this several months ago and it is a great way to reward your commentators with a link and hopefully drive a bit of traffic too.
4.Become active on their blog. When ever someone comments on my blog, I visit there blog and I usually return the favor and will comment on theirs. If the content is good, I will subscribe and become a regular reader and commentator. Basically, you can reward them by being a regular contributor on their blog.
5.Follow and Retweet. As a reward you can follow and engage with your commentators on Twitter. If a tweet catches your attention, go ahead and retweet it.
6.Give some social networking love. Another way to reward your commentators is to seek them out on social networks and link up with them and promote their posts.
7.Another reward is to reserve some ad space for your top commentators. I am actually going to implement this next month. I will be rewarding the top commentator for August with a free month of advertising on the sidebar of my blog.
As you can see, these are small rewards but every blogger would love to get as many links and promotion as possible. I know I do!
The last way to reward your commentators is by simply saying Thank you. So, Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! for all the excellent comments and helping build a community here with this blog in such a short time frame.
What are you doing to encourage and reward your blog commentators?
I was recently thinking about the importance of a blogroll. When I first started blogging 2 years ago, bloggrolls were a big deal. It seems that some bloggers are not really utilizing their blogroll. I am about 6 months into this blog and I have really neglected my blogroll section. I have a total of 4 sites listed in my blogroll and they are all mine, 2 are other blogs that I own and 2 are blog directories that I own. It is about time that I focus on this part of my blog. Some bloggers link to other bloggers that they respect, and others use the blogroll to exchange links with other bloggers. Both of these are great uses for the blogroll section, but I am interested in monetizing this section of my blog. Here are 3 ways that I am going about monetizing my blogroll.
I am hoping this is will contribute nicely to my bottom line. I am curious to see how you guys are using your blogroll?
Let me know if you are just linking to bloggers you like, doing a link exchange or if you are also making money with your blogroll.
I am thrilled with the daily readers I have here on Tycoon Blogger. The regular readers are the lifeblood on any thriving blog community. I have been thinking of how I can crack the 300 visitors per day mark that seems to be the pattern of my blog lately. The conclusion that I came to is that I need to promote my blog to new readers. I have devised a plan that will target 3 areas that I hope will result in increased readers to my blog. I will be tracking this throughout August and will provide the results at the end of the month.
Here are the three areas that I will be focused on.
What are you doing to promote your blog to new readers?
It is Saturday and time for another installment of “Blogger Spotlight.” This is a weekly series where I interview a famous or up and coming blogger and ask some questions to learn more about them and their blog. This week I interviewed Karen from Blazing Minds. If you have not been to her blog, I highly recommend it, it is full of blogging advice as well as personal posts and other entertaining topics.
Here is the interview:
I’m also a bit of a Twitter addict so I love to post there as well, ok, I just love the internet LOL