The Reader Appreciation Project

Do majority of bloggers reply to every comment on their blog?

Majority of bloggers prefer not replying to every blog comment they get

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@ComcastCares with Frank Eliason from Comcast on Twitter - Does Comcast Really Care?

What is @ComcastCares

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I’ve been following a story about a fellow RA Project reader RT Cunningham from Untwisted Vortex. RT, who lives in the Philippines, was troubled because his wife had to have tonsil surgery. The resulting trip to the U.S. and the possibility of the loss of his wife’s income became a concern. In a plea, RT wrote about his ordeal and explained that things would be tough for a while.

The Blogging Community Reacts

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger stepped up to the plate and wrote a post about RT’s ordeal.

Other readers and bloggers got behind RT in placing a donation button on his blog.

And the Blogging Community Assists

RT had to take the donate button off his blog due to the massive amount of support shown from many around the blogosphere. It was my intention with this post to continue to spread the word about his ordeal, but I was pleased that RT had received what he considered enough.

In RT’s Circle of Life post, he said this:

I’ve taken down the PayPal donation button that I put in the upper left sidebar yesterday. Within 24 hours, I have received USD $3,004.00. I’m absolutely positive this is more than enough to cover expenses, including those that are unforeseen. I’m also absolutely sure this would not have been able to happen without the support of some key players

Conclusion

This (short) case study demonstrates how the blogosphere can get behind a fellow blogger in need. And it also demonstrates how a influential blogger (like Darren) can remain humble and still help out his readers.

One of the first posts I wrote for this blog back in April of ’06 was how Spam is a reader’s problem too. One of things I didn’t mention on the post was that some bloggers disable comments due to the high number of spam-comments received.

On December 13th, 2007 — about a month ago — BloggingTips decided to disable their comments (due to spam) for everyone except registered users. Within this post I will point out statistically what occurred to their comments section as a result. This post will cover the comments entered from November to today (January 11th, 2008). As of today, their comment section is up for everyone. I am unsure when comments were re-enabled for non-registered users.

A Little Research…

I went through all of BloggingTips posts from November 1, 2007 to January 11, 2008. I recorded the number of comments made for each post. The December 13th date is when comments were disabled, so some of my research is between December 13th through January 11th to see how things changed during that month. Read more…

If you run a blog and you are concerned with its quality, chances are that you become wiser every day. Each and every day you learn new things, you discover better ways of organizing your content, in your wish to offer readers a pleasant and useful experience, hoping to hook them to bookmark your blog. Yet, how often do we forget that our readers don’t have the same experience as we do? We read a lot of blogs, we see them changing, evolving, most of them in the same direction, we got used to see lists of categories, tag clouds or RSS subscription icons, and we understand their meaning instantly.

Do you think you know how your readers behave?

Did you know that more than 300 million babies are born every year only in the US? Do you know what this means for your blog? At least 3 million fresh readers every year. Because most of those children will some day learn how to use the internet. Maybe babies born 10 or 15, or 20 years ago are using the internet today for the first time in their life. If your blog was the first website they found, how well do you think they would be able to navigate through its content?

I have this friend who yesterday saw a website for the third time in her life. The site was one of the blogs I run (which I thought to be perfectly clean, not cluttered, well-organized), and I was asking my friend for feedback. She is supplying all the content for that blog, I’m only functioning as a posting robot for her, because she doesn’t have an internet connection. Yesterday she has seen her blog for the first time.

This is how the front page of the blog looks like (first view and after scrolling down):

Well, the feedback was really striking:

The site appeared to have only one page, I couldn’t find the others. I’m sure they were there somewhere, because you said so, but I wasn’t able to find them. There was no button on the page I’ve seen.

• She didn’t imagine post titles are clickable
• She had no idea what “previous entries” mean, so she didn’t think to click there
• She didn’t click on anything because all she saw was text, and none of the texts were saying “Click here”
• This explains the very low click rate for the AdSense ads that run on single pages (probably not many readers thought to click on some headlines there, so they never saw the single pages)

I’ve never seen something more cluttered in my whole life. Everywhere I looked on the page there were words, so I could hardly focus to read the content because of that. Are you in such a hurry that you have to put everything on the same page?

• She was bothered by the left and right sidebars, because they contained “text” (actually that text were the Recent Posts and Archives on the left, and the Categories and a tag cloud on the right).

I explained what Recent Posts are, and I got the following reply:

Who can be so dumb to put the table of content on the same page with an article? Probably an engineer like you. All books have separate page for the table of content. If people want to see that table, they click on its correspondent button and go there. I want my site to be read like a book, I want to browse through the pages like if it was a real book. On the pages, I want only the content, with no disturbing texts on the edges, no matter how useful you say it is. If you are keen on keeping those sidebars, OK, but please fill them with pictures.

Because her initial brief was that the site should have a header with a photo, I just did it that way. Look what she commented on that:

There is something wrong with the header photo: it looks like a broken TV image. All I saw was a very narrow photo fragment. Did you do that on purpose? I remember I’ve seen the same kind of broken photo on another site. Please replace it with a normal, square picture.

Wow! Again I got the comment that only an engineer like me could chop a photo that way and believe the readers would like to see that on a site. It’s useless to say that I’ve spent about two hours to find those “horrible” pictures for her header (as she wanted photos from Paris, and I’ve never been there, so I had to find some royalty free ones), and to “chop” them in that style.

My point in telling you this story: niche blogs are different

If you are thinking to start a blog in a niche other than blogging, internet marketing or computers, beware at your audience: they see things in a totally different way than you do, so you’d better take a few testing steps before investing lots of work:

1. If you want to know how readable your blog is, ask your grandmother to take a look at it.
2. If you want to know how appealing your blog layout is, ask a 7 years old child to take a look, while you watch the process.
3. If you want to know how to improve your blog, ask your audience for feedback.
4. Photos are important. A magazine without photos would be boring. The same way, a site can be boring if the eyes have no support for relaxation. Use pictures. Your readers want them.
5. Test, test, test. You have lots of free analytics tools, so you can test every move you make. I’m going now to change my friend’s cooking blog the way she wanted, and then I’ll compare the bounce rates and the number of page views per visitor. If they will improve, then she’s right. If not, we will ask for more feedback and test again.
6. Think out of the box. How do your readers use your blog? When do they read it? My friend said that she would take the laptop with her in the kitchen while she would cook following a recipe she found on a website, so the text should be big, to be seen from a distance.
7. Don’t be afraid of your readers. They can help you, but you have to ask them for help. Don’t get upset when you get negative feedback. Try to understand the reasons behind that feedback. Many times you’ll discover golden nuggets.
8. Don’t bend your ears to everything. Lots of readers mean lots of opinions, and keeping everybody happy is impossible. I’m not going to listen to my friend and remove the Recent Posts and Categories from the front page, because I still think they are in the benefit of her readers. I’ll just move them in the header section, after I replace the header photo with a square one.
9. Educate your readers. Newbies are excellent, as they are a source of fresh feedback, but we cannot stay in the Stone Age for ever. Even if your blog is not about blogging, you can still write some articles to let your readers know that what they read is a blog, that they can subscribe to it for free, that they can interact with you and with the other readers, also for free. Teach them how to use your blog. If your content is interesting enough, they will learn.

If you have the curiosity to test your blog with an internet newbie, I’d be very curious if you shared some insights with the rest of us. Thank you in advance, I’m waiting for your comments.

Well, you’ve built quite a good blog, you wrote a bunch of pillar articles which made you an authority amongst your peers, you reached the Alexa skies with your stats, your RSS counter is almost hitting four digits, so you’re happy.

What next? It depends. Next, it can be that you decide to pass some of the fame to your readers, as they were the ones who made all these happen. After opening your mind and your life for them, you now open your blog. This is what Courtney Tuttle just did, by inaugurating the You Blog section of Court’s Internet Marketing School:

Every Friday from here until the end of time, I will be promoting a post from You Blog to the main site, where it will be read by all of the visitors here and 950+ RSS subscribers. Since my site is already a top 20,000 site in Alexa, there is plenty of traffic to go around, even to those posts on You Blog that don’t get promoted to the main site.

Additionally, thanks to one of his readers’ idea, Court updated the announcement and let us know that all posts published in the You Blog section will be linked to from the main blog every weekend, thus increasing their visibility and their chances of getting known.

This is an act of courage from Court’s side, as it is very easy to ruin a credibility built over one year’s time in a couple of minutes. All you need is to do something offensive enough to make your readers change their opinion about you. However, I suppose he will not allow every single post to pass through, so offensive materials will not be published.

You probably ask yourself what’s in this for Court, besides more work for the same money? Well, maybe he just got fond of his readers and he wants to help them build their way. Any good teacher would do that for his students.

What do you think? What’s in this for Court? And what’s in this for you?

4 days ago I was told by Sara about Google disabling external website addresses [urls] in all Blogger.com comments. 2 days ago Cerebral Mum also sent an e-mail saying that the act of disabling external websites in all Blogger.com comments was not an example of “user appreciation.” I read more into the topic, and realized that I agree.

The situation: Google disabling comments

What Google through Blogger.com is doing is not allowing readers to leave their external website addresses in the comments they are leaving. . That means you can only leave a comment if you are either a Google/Blogger.com user, or if you wish to be Anonymous with a nickname. As of this writing, Blogger.com is not allowing any field in the comments area to allow any commentor to enter their website url. A snapshot of the new Blogger.com comment page is included below.

What it means?

This means that if you want to leave a comment, you can either use your general name or nickname to identify yourself, or sign up for a Blogger.com account and log in through that account to leave a comment. This results in people having only a single fixed identity on Blogger.com, which is the blogger.com account itself. Otherwise, your only other option is to use a nickname to identify yourself. With millions of people having similar names, there will be no way to identify where “Michael” leaving a comment about pastries is the same Michael that left a comment last week supporting the idea of eating food while driving or if it was the other Michael who left a comment on how to hide from squirrels. One of the most unique identification elements online, a website, will not be allowed to be used in identifying you anymore. You are either a Blogger.com user, an Anonymous person, or no one.

All of this also means that the things you were told and expected to expect are now changing, and you were not consulted in any manner when such a change was being decided. Because of this, the following 14 effects result in you not being appreciated by Blogger.com .

The 14 bad effects

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This June I embarked on one of my first group projects entitled Peeve Week 2. During that time, many controversial articles were written. One article I wrote has been highly controversial with pretty much nobody agreeing with my view.

The purpose of Peeve Week was to get out opinions on subjects. I took that chance, and I ranted about my views on tattoos.

The first few commenters were from people who knew me. Then Google Image Search took over, and the commenters came from all over. It’s been five months since I wrote the infamous post, and the commenters still come once or twice a week.

Within this post, I’d like to point out the types of negative comments I received on my tattoo post and how I have handled the negativity.

Comments that Enlighten

When I wrote my tattoo post, I wrote it from my point of view. I wasn’t really concerned with others’. It was my opinion, and I was going to get it out there for Peeve Week.

However, some of the commenters were very good at explaining their position and enabled me to see where they were coming from.

These types of comments are valuable as they help the author see an alternate position to an argument.

Comments Seeking Advice

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Bes and I began RAP (the Reader Appreciation Project) back in early March of ’07. At that time, the focus was spreading the word about the project and to get the blogosphere to take readers seriously and not for granted.

I had released one WordPress plugin previously, and I told Bes if we want to get some links in and some traffic, perhaps we could give out some plugins that help out readers. Not only could we write articles, but we could also give away downloads.

Bes was all for it, and I released my second WordPress plugin called Categories and Posts. The plugin was fairly popular and brought in some links, which was nice. My ultimate goal was to get our Technorati ranking up.

Ajax Edit Comments Released

I began to work on other projects, and then one of the readers of RAP suggested a plugin that edits comments. I searched high and low for a plugin, but couldn’t find an elegant solution. I told Bes I was going to write my own. Read more…

It’s a porn site. It’s a social networking site. It’s an adult community site. It’s Doug Parent’s creation. Doug Parent is the owner and creator of what he and many others call the “Adult MySpace.” I had the pleasure of talking to and interviewing Doug via e-mail, regarding the topic of Reader Appreciation.

Doug Parent left a comment on my personal site last month, and that got me thinking: Dougs’ comment was nice, yet his site was an adult site that many people would object to. How could Doug fit into the concept of reader appreciation? Should Doug be appreciated based on the site he owned?

Doug was kind enough to answer the questions I had for him. Below is the brief interview that took place between me and Doug. Please keep in mind that you may think Doug’s link below is not safe for work nor children.

Interview with Doug Parent – 7 brief questions

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