Recently I told you that I had seen a metablogger offer the “blogwork” (read:homework) to his readers to write 20 blog comments that day.

I decided to take up the challenge.

I felt that this would indicate 20 per day per blog. Otherwise it would be watered down linkage-wise. So my goal was 20 for About Blogging, and 20 for Bitter Women.

Also, when I first started, I wanted to make this 20 NEW blogs, so leaving comments on places I had commented before wouldn’t count.

RESULTS

1. No freaking way do I have the time/energy to leave 20 comments per blog per day. (I’m now up to 3 blogs, so this would be 60. It’s a nice idea, but I just couldn’t do it.

Monday: I did very well… I left 23 for About Blogging and 13 for Bitter Women.
Tuesday: I felt ready to slit my throat after 20 for About Blogging and 10 for Bitter Women. I’d also abandoned the rule about it having to be places I’d never been before. That takes SO much time to find new, quality, relevant blogs!
Wedneday: I kept pushing on, with 10 for About Blogging and 20 for Bitter Women.
Thursday: I did squat because I was creating The Naked Celebrity .
Friday: Exhausted. Still working on The Naked Celebrity layout, but decided to push myself and wrote 13 comments for each blog.

2. I DID notice an increase in traffic. But not one so substantial that it was worth killing myself over it. This week my traffic increased by about 50% over the previous week, however this was largely due to some serious stumbleupon traffic (thanks to people simply taking a shine to some of my stories), and did not come from comments I’d left. I also noticed an increase in subscribers. Actually, the About Blogging subscribership doubled. (But don’t get too excited. We’re a new blog, so I’m talking going from 11 subscribers to 22. I’m glad to have you, by the way!)

3. The biggest happy result was my own blogs got a boost in comments received.  In ONE WEEK the comments posted made up 20% of all comments on Bitter Women and 40% of all comments on About Blogging.

The most important thing I learned this week was:

4. Keeping Track of How Many Comments I Wrote Inspired Me To Do More. I had thought I commented more than I did. So far today, for example, I have a feeling that I’ve visited lots of blogs. But when I look at my tally, I’ve only actually left 5 comments. I’m doing a lot of post-writing today, so today may not be the day to go out and leave 20 comments elsewhere, however at least I’m not fooling myself into thinking I’m doing more than I actually am.

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Sometimes it’s embarrassing how much I overlook the simplest things! But when ME Strauss over at Successful Bloggers suggested actually, you know, saying thank you to people who had Stumbled your pages, I was dumbstruck with how dumb I’d been in not thinking of that!

One of the people I’d thanked at SU wrote to me recently to ask me how to know who had stumbled what pages. If your stats program from your host doesn’t provide detailed links on StumbleUpon, you might be at a loss. Both awstats (my host’s) and Google Analytics show how many links from SU came through, but not which specific stumble they had come from.

Then I came across the biggest reason to keep my account active at MyBlogLog.com. They don’t send a lot of traffic my way, but their stats DO show such details.

Another way is to simply go to the article of yours that you want to view the Stumbles for, and click the bubble at the top of your browser page.

If the article has never been stumbled, it will tell you, and give you a chance to add it and review it yourself. I personally avoid doing this too often, and only will add my own articles if it’s something I’m REALLY proud of.

However, if it’s already been Stumbled, hitting this bubble will allow you to see any and all stumbles and reviews it’s gotten. If you don’t type in a review, I don’t believe it will record that you hit the ‘review’ button. If you hit the thumbs up button FIRST, however, it WILL record that you came to leave a review. (If someone knows differently than this, please correct me, but this has been my impression.)

Then all you have to do is click the icons of the people who left you reviews and thumbs up, and you can drop them a note in their profile.

Now… I have a whole list of people to run and thank! And if you Stumble this article, thank you too!

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Last weekend, everyone who was blogging about blogging was blogging about Blogrush, begging their readers to sign up through them. Why? Because Blogrush is a new “traffic-generating” widget for bloggers that relies on the users to try to sign up other users, in a sort of Multi-Level Marketing setup. The way it seems to work is that you earn “credits” by the impressions your own site generates, plus the sites of anyone you get to sign up under you, down through 10 tiers of users.

My own feeling about this is that only the ‘A-list sites ‘ who already have a lot of people visiting will benefit from BlogRush’s pyramid structure. I’ve already seen a lot of people complaining that, as smaller blogs, they aren’t getting the traffic they expected (read:none), whereas some of the big boys are saying they’ve earned tons of credits, but the system is so new BlogRush can’t yet process all those hundreds of thousands of impressions they’ve been promised.

And also, once people get used to seeing the BlogRush widget on every site they go to, they’ll tune it out. They all look alike, and I’ve already stopped noticing them, after just a few days. This can happen just as easily with Google Adsense and other ads, but at least with Adsense you can customize it to either blend it with your site, or make it stand out, whereas the BlogRush widget is identical on every site.

I personally don’t think it’s going to live up to the hype. When the smaller blogs see that they aren’t getting any traffic, they’ll remove the cumbersome, ugly widget. When the A-listers that they signed up with aren’t reaping benefits from their signees anymore, how is this better than BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog? In fact it isn’t, and I can tell you that I only get a very small percentage of my traffic from either of those two sources.

The moral of the story here is not that BlogRush is evil. In fact, I’m sure they’ll get the early bugs sorted out and perhaps add some functionality that their users will value and enjoy.

The moral of the story is that we, as bloggers, need to curb the impulse to jump on bandwagons. Be a free-thinker and use your best judgement. Then if you still want to write a blog post promoting the exact same service that 1289083103802 other bloggers are posting about on that very same day, feel free.

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Be A Community Builder…. And by this I don’t mean be “the guy that fixes everyone’s plumbing”, although if you want to be one of those, I hear the pay is good.

About Blogging is adding two new things to promote a sense of community. One is Lucia’s Linky Love . It’s a dofollow wordpress plugin that will enable commenters to get linkbacks to their own sites. (Currently, if you leave a comment on a blog, you do not get link “credit” for it in Google/Technorati with relation to their rankings. This plugin fixes that.) However, to prevent “human comment spammers leaving insipid, irrelevant comments just to get link-juice”, I’m setting this plugin to reward only users who comment 3 times. This way if you’re a regular participant, you get some linky love! (Adding later today! Post first… fiddle with Wordpress second… one of my self-discipline blogging rules. )

Another idea is one I’ve seen in the blogoshere called “IReply”. This is just a pledge that many bloggers choose to make saying “If you comment on my blog, I will reply.” Sometimes that can be difficult, depending on what people say, but over at DayJobNuker.com , he took the idea one step further, and I think it’s great, and very workable!

I’ve made a couple of changes for practicality, and added one point…

…for every new person who leaves a comment on my blog for the first time. I will:

1) Visit your blog or website
2) Visit Several Pages
3) Leave a comment on a post if have something to say
4) If I like your articles/posts, I will bookmark them in Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, or other appropriate Social Network.
5) If you tell me that you have subscribed to my RSS feed then I will subscribe to yours as well.

Jaynes Note: It is against Google’s (and probably others) TOS to ask for or promise to click-throughs on ads, therefore I’ve modified the “pledge” a bit.

These are fantastic, and I’m going to start doing all of these things right away!

If you’re willing to take the Community Builder pledge(ish), saying that you’re willing to make an effort to do these things for your readers, then why not make a post or put up an icon saying so? I’ve created four icons… two black and two white (one set is smaller to fit on a sidebar). If you ask me, I will also gladly send you the layered png files so you can recolor or rework them for your own site. (My email address is on the header image.)

If you do that and link to this post, I will also add a link to your post/blog here!

Here are the other images I created … use them freely!

Other “Community Builder” blogs:

• Blogging for Bitter Women
• DayJobNuker

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Lately I’ve been struck by articles I’ve come across referring to a concept of A-list bloggers all the way down to Z-list bloggers. The thrust of it seems to be that if you’re not John Chow, you aren’t anybody.

I’ve even found tips for joining the A-list (which turned out in reality to be basic tips on getting more traffic.) and a calculator for determining which list you’re on . (According to them, this new one is D-list, and my other older humor blog is C-list, if you’re wondering.) She even provides a little badge I can put on my site, showing off my C/D-list status.

On Technorati you can see a list of who is most linked to, some with an impressive 24,000+ links.

So we’ve established that some blogs are, well, more established. Some are popular, and popularity breeds more popularity, but this isn’t high school… unless for you it is. For most of us it’s not.

To equate new bloggers with talentless “Z-list celebrities”, aka, reality show whores, who do anything for attention out of sheer desperation for the limelight is … do I have to say it? Wrong. Not wrong as in morally wrong, because that’s just silly and melodramatic. However it is incorrect.

• Don’t let anyone tell you what “list” you’re on.
• Don’t give up! Gaining readership takes time!
• Do listen to the experts! But ask yourself if their advice makes sense, and check more than one source. Google is your friend.
• …But don’t let feedback drive you in circles . Create a (flexible) plan, so you know what YOUR goals are.
• Small/new blogs can have a huge impact. Stay original, and don’t try to copy the “A-list” crowd. Use your OWN voice!
• Write Often. Sometimes short punchy posts made often are better than long, detailed posts.
  
• Interact with other bloggers… even unknown ones.

The goal of blogging is to reach your audience, so do the things you need to do to build that audience. But connection is the goal, not list-achieving. The moment you shift your focus away from the purpose of your writing/interacting, your blog suffers.

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