Lately, I have been visiting many blogs to leave comments. I must admit, when I started, I didn’t realize how many different profiles or ways of signing your comments there were. Google has blogger, there is wordpress, and a whole stack of other IDs.
Syndicating Content
I have joined the TSA (Tribe Syndication Association). I recommend it for those who want more exposure to their blogs, particularly to entrepreneurs, internet marketers and network marketers. It is a small and growing group that is going places.
Why Leave Comments
Comments are useful to your blog posts. First of all when people see that a bunch of people are reading your posts, they are more likely to stay and take a look around. Second, it exposes your posts to a wider audience. The whole idea of networking is for people of like mind to share information. In the sharing, we all grow and learn and new relationships form. A third advantage is that your post may get syndicated through Twitter, Facebook, and the many Social Networking hubs. This is much more likely if the person doing the syndication has their own comment on the blog. It is a win/win as they get credibility for sharing useful information and you get more visitors as a result.
What I have found, is that many blogs are very hard to leave comments on. There are a number of systems, and I think we would be all better advised to find something that is easy to use. Here are a few tips to get your blogs working for you in the areas of comments and syndication.
Hints To Improve Syndication Of Your WordPress Blog
Watch the video first, and then read the accompanying notes!
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- Add the commentluv plugin. This makes it relatively easy for people to leave comments and passes links back to their site. When you leave a comment with this plug in, it grabs your avatar (picture) and puts it with the comment, and they can put a website to link back to. Readers can see the latest post at the time they left their comment.
- Reverse the order of comments. You can do this with a plug in, or a simple change to the comments section of your theme. The video shows you how to modify the theme. Place <?php $comments = array_reverse($comments, true); ?> in the comments.php file directly above <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?> Then save the updated file. You need to be very careful when doing this!
- Add the dig dig plug in and configure it to place syndication icons for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Stumbleupon at the bottom of your posts. This makes it easy for people to syndicate your copy.
- One more thing is a tidbit on how to change the appearance of headings on posts. I found that some themes leave certain headers that don’t look nice. It is a relatively simple matter to modify the CSS file to get things looking how you want them.
You are welcome to send others to this post. I can tell you, many bloggers have no idea about this stuff. If you wish to learn more, join the TSA and get the free 10 day boot camp. You will be surprised how much you learn.
Happy Blogging,
John Gaydon
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