I wish that I had found CoComments a month ago. TheCaymanHost turned me on to this, and it’s going to save my bacon. I can tell already.

In the past week I have posted twice saying “I can’t remember where I saw this, but blah blah blah.” (Referring to a place that I commented, but didn’t bookmark.) My bookmarks are cluttered enough, and now I’m on a commenting rampage, and I can’t bookmark every single site I visit.

CoComment uses an unobtrusive Firefox plugin to keep track of the blogs you visit and the comments you leave. You can also delete references to places you know you don’t want to return to or to track.

*EDIT* You do not have to use Firefox, but I think it’s by far the easiest. Non-Firefox users have an option called Bookmarklet as explained on the CoComment website. *END EDIT*

I’ve only just started using it, and I tell ya, I think it’s the niftiest thing since RSS readers. If you join up, drop me a friend invite! My username is Jayne .

Oh and why am I such a comment ditz these days? Because I ran across a blog (umm, I can’t remember where…. see what I mean?) where someone was giving blog advice and he gave some “blogwork” to all his readers to leave 20 comments on other blogs per day. (I took this to mean NEW blogs… not ones already on your own blogroll or that you regularly visit.)

So I decided to keep track of how many comments I leave, and to try to leave 20 per day per blog I run (which thankfully at this point is just two).

Holy guacamole. It’s harder than I thought! I really thought I was already leaving that many, but it turns out I couldn’t possibly have been. I was probably reading 40 blogs, but only commenting on 3-4 of them.

The experiment I’m running is to do this for a week and see if it raises the traffic I get and the amount of comments my own posts get. So I’ll keep at it and let you know the results next week.

And now, in the meantime, I’ve got a little helper to remind me where I leave all these comments, and the many worthwhile blogs out there.

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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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All bloggers experience some degree of writer’s block from time to time. It ain’t easy coming up with something new every single day. It can be anything from a serious case of the blahs which keeps you from posting at all, to a mild feeling of “Oh crap, what can I possibly write about today” which leaves you fumbling around, posting irrelevant stuff, recycling memes or, in a panic, posting about what you bought at the store that day. Ugh.

Blog writing is like all professional writing. To do it effectively, you must plan ahead. I can hear a lot of you saying already, “But I’m not a professional. This is just a fun hobby for me.” If you want readers beyond your family and personal friends, you must approach it like a professional. There are millions of blogs out there. Good writing and fresh ideas are the difference between gaining a subscriber, and someone just moving on.

One thing I will say… planning ahead is much easier to do for a blog like this than for my humor blog , because humor requires some degree of spontenaity, at least in my case. However, I do have some tips for that type of blog too, so never fear!

So, how can you keep fresh ideas coming?

1. Read other blogs in your genre. This keeps you current and lets you know what others are talking about. But a word of warning here: There is a danger of just recycling other’s ideas, or hashing over something that has been done and redone, so when you read others blogs, do it with a mind to sparking your imagination, not to just copying what has already been said. Unoriginal thought drives readers away. And when I say “other blogs”, I should say “A Huge-Lotta Other Blogs“. Don’t confine yourself to the 10 people on your own blogroll. Be constantly on the lookout for new faces and new sources.
2. Subscribe to a list of news sources that suit your niche so you can have a constant flow of new ideas coming into your inbox/reader/etc. For example I subscribe to News of the Weird , Offbeat News, CNN’s Offbeat section, and quite a few others. I may or may not directly quote one of the articles, but my Bitter Women blog is based mostly around “people are so strange” type of commentaries, or just laughing at the world in general. So news sources that provide that type of material keep the juices flowing! For this blog, I keep in touch with online media, technology trends (such as what’s new with Google, etc), online marketing, etc. Again I may not quote them directly, but I often find something that sparks my interest. When I do, I save it to my favourites list, or star it in my Google Reader. So on days when I am not feeling inspired, I have a folder to go through of ideas.
3. Google Trends - I use this sometimes if I want to see what people out there across the internet are writing about. You don’t want to just be a follower, however, if you see what people are talking about right now, you can often avoid tromping through overused ideas that have been written about time and again for years.
4. Keep a notebook by your keyboard, and even carry it with you. I sometimes come up with the best ideas when I’m not sitting here trying. And often real-life conversations with other people inspire me more than what I can read online. But like dreams, inspiration can fade until I’m left feeling, “I had a great idea yesterday, but I can’t remember what it was!” (I hate it when that happens.)
5. Google Blogsearch - This tool can be used both for finding new blog posts on any topic, therefore leading you to new sources of ideas/friends, but it can also help show you if an idea you do have is overdone. I think any topic can be done well and provide new insight, but you cannot know if you’re putting a new slant on things if you don’t know what’s already been done.
6. Ideas from outside the blogosphere. This is important to staying fresh. For example, if you blog about blogging, then take ideas from websites about writing or marketing or internet trends that don’t have a direct link to blogs. If you blog about celebrities, look at fashion trends, hot vacation spots, multi-million dollar homes, etc, so that you aren’t just spitting out the same old Britney news and showing the exact same YouTube footage as everyone else. Sure, blog about the topical stuff, but if your blog is just a clone of a thousand others, why should people subscribe to YOU instead of someone else?
7. User comments/questions both on your blog AND on related blogs can be a great source of ideas!

These are the ideas that keep me going every day… I hope they help you too! If you have some of your own, let me know and I’ll post them!

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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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When people start their first blog, they read. A lot. Blogs, websites, advice, news… looking for tips and inspiration. This is one habit the newbie blogger should strive to maintain.

Read More Than You Write. This is the blogging equivalent of the old saying “Listen more than you talk.” My granny used to say “This is why God gave you two ears, but one mouth.”

Read More Than You Write. More blogs. More articles. More comments. Visit others. Add to the community.

Do this, and you will not regret it.

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