Archives for January 2009

Do Comments Justify the Success Of a Blog?

by Melvin · Jan 7, 2009

Most people and friends who just have recently started a blog normally ask me “why is my blog not getting comments? I look at my Analytics and I see the traffic but no comments” I responded then “time will come and just be patient”. But then at the back of my mind there are a lot of things going on so I decided I need to post my thoughts here. Ok, getting in into the number of comments into blogs, most people, I think are so wrong into thinking that the number of comments to blogs justify how successful a blog is. Although comments are for sure one of the things to look at when analyzing a blog, I think it only plays a very small percentage on it. I am now blogging for almost a year overall and about 7 months with a blog kinda related to internet marketing and make money online and I really have seen it all with this niche.

I used to have a basketball blog and it drives traffic like crazy before and it only receives 5-6 comments a day. Now I got this Melvin Blog that gets an average number of traffic and yet I almost always get 10+ comments per post. Does it mean its a successful blog? No way! How about blogs getting 20-50 comments per post? Not either!

Blog comments can pretty much be gamed and by saying gamed, I don’t really mean blackhat. Sure I have 150-250 good friends and only 5-6 of them knows I blog. Only 3-4 of them read this blog. So you see, it really depends. Now if you have 200 close friends that are addicted to blogging as well, then chances are you’re going to get nice number of comments.

Most people reply to each and every comment in their blog, some comments always on a blog that comments on them and so. But the thing is that it really just plays a small role on determining a blog’s success. Don’t get me wrong, sure it’s nice to have people that always care to say something or people that share their stand.

It also works well on the eyes of advertisers and so. Maybe we can also add the fact the maybe the blog’s content isn’t as great as others that’s why its not returning the expected number of comments. It’s all true but the main point is you cannot take a look at the other blogs who get 100 comments and say they are an established blog! You can’t say I’m a smaller blog because I get fewer comments.

I know you also know a lot of blogs that are getting thousand uniques a day and do not get much comments but certainly there are a number of factors to look with how commenting really works, why people comment on posts/blogs, and if it really makes a blog successful or just makes it look successful.

Upcoming Contest And Some Announcements

by Melvin · Jan 4, 2009

edit: My contact form is not functioning well, henceforth send an email to melvin@melvinblog.com if youre intrested in sponsoring

Hello everyone and hope you just had a nice holiday altogether.

Last week I mentioned that I have a pretty nice plan for my blog for its first full year at helm. So today I’m letting you know that there will be contest brewing up here soon. And by saying contest, I just don’t mean “contest” like most people would say “oh another fuck up contest” or “just another contest”. I am really preparing well for this contest which happened to be very first contest of the Melvin Blog. In contest, what I really had in mind is you, readers more than any traction that I can get for this one. I wanted to give you the best you can for reading and still making this blog a profitable special one. So here I am really working so hard to make this contest an unforgettable one to everyone!

So did I just say this is a special contest? What makes it special in the first place? Although I don’t want to disclose as much details here, maybe giving you a sneak peak wouldn’t hurt right? 😉 Basically some premium sponsors for this contest are affiliate networks like Pepperjam Network and Copeac giving away hardcore prizes. And who’s sitting on the backseat side of the premium sponsors? Oh I am very elated to say Dean Hunt, Caroline Middlebrook and Zac Johnson have all shown interest with sponsoring this contest. Now what are they sponsoring? That’s the secret you have to watch for! 🙂 So if you don’t want to miss this one maybe you should now subscribe to my feed.

Just as I said I wanted this contest to be special I am still looking for more sponsors so we could definitely add up the prize pool and make it more fun. You could use the contact form to give me your offers. With regards to sponsoring prizes, I would definitely love to see something more creative rather than just the usual ad spots for some months, or a text link or such stuffs like that. Maybe a cup of coffee or a book? It’s all up to you guys.

The Melvin Blog Incentives

So another announcement is that the newest portion of the blog is now alive and its what I call the incentives part of Melvin Blog. Basically the site is like “get paid to” type of site but more direct in approach. The site pays people to complete offers and basically some offers have cash pots wherein participants can win bigger cash for participating. Unfortunately, the launch of it went flat and only one has eventually completed an offer and of course ended up winning the cash pot of $5. Obviously it’s a loss but eventually there’s a room for so much improvement. I would also like to hear some suggestions to you on how I could possibly improve it. 😉

Spam Spam Go Away

by Melvin · Jan 2, 2009

Everyone who has a blog knows that pain of dealing with spam comments and trackbacks. Of course, the more popular the blog is the higher the spam content it may receive each day. For this blog, I think it has about 3000 spam comments caught by Akismet since it started last May. Now while Akismet does a very nice job of catching spam comments from your blog, we cannot ignore the fact that we still always double check it, in case it catches false postives. Right? Although normally the rates are very low then and it seems that Akismet has improved so much since the day it started.

So here now I am going to show you other guides/tips that can help you fight and reduce spam on your blog:

Comment-Timeout – I am pretty surprised not a lot of people use this plugin but what this plugin does is simply close the comment form of the blog posts that are older than 3 months or so. You can set it to whatever you may wish for but certainly its a nice plugin that helped me reduce the number of spams I receive every day. Comment-Timeout is a nice plugin I swear!
Hold a Comment if it has 1 link! – Now this is what i have just learned last month. Basically there will come a time a guy will follow you and comment genuinely. In wordpress, upon approving the comment of a certain guy/email, it basically just accepts each and every comment of that guy then. So after quite some time, the spammer then use that to spread spam links on my blog and fortunately I thwarted him before he could do so much. Always hold a comment for moderation if it contains a link!
Use the Comment Moderation Box – In the settings of your discussion in wordpress admin, you’ll see a semi-sized box wherein you can put ip, emails and etc. What you might want to put here is the list of proxies provided by TOR. You can also search for other open proxy ips and try to list them as well. Proxy is a great way to surf anonymously but oh boy spammers just take advantage of it so well!
Wp-ban – This is another wordpress plugin and it does display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name or referer url trys to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned. There will be statistics recordered on how many times they attemp to visit your blog. It allows wildcard matching too. I don’t use it here, but if you have a very popular blog or maybe you are the target of the spammers, then it can be useful.
Trackbacks – trackbacks are one easy way to spam and spread links on other people’s site. What happens is that spam blogs will send a trackback to you w/your own content. Before I wasn’t aware w/it, so I just approve every trackbacks I receive. You must always take a look at a site before accepting their trackspams!

So that’s it. What you will find out is that most of the solutions are just inside wordpress itself. If you know a little programming then you expand things more depending on your knowledge. Just always back up! 🙂