One of the tips for growing your readership commonly touted is that if you'd like to get comments on your blog, leave comments on other blogs. Fair enough. Except doing that leaves me feeling lukewarm about the whole process. Though we live in a "scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" kind of world, I have to ask myself what the point of this comment exchange might be. Do I simply want people to say something... anything just to acknowledge my existence or pat me on the back for putting words to screen? In the end, I suppose that wouldn't quite satisfy.
Comments used to be an indicator of readership. But with the birth of Twitter, Facebook, and other social mediums, the frequency of comments has dwindled for most bloggers. There are plenty of times a reader of this blog will tweet a comment directly to me rather than post one here, simply because they prefer that kind of exchange. I'm beginning to prefer that kind of personal dialog myself. Because if you take a look at the string of notes left on the successful (read that as frequently commented) bloggers, quite a few of the blurbs are left there as a form of self promotion or blatant brown-nosing. It makes me wonder whether that big name blogger would rather the self-promotional note not be left at all.
So what's left here? Content. Writing. Ideas, Big and Small.
Maybe now that I can worry less about how many comments I'm getting on each post I can get down to the business of creating content worth reading? Because though I don't necessarily want you to log in and respond here, I certainly like it when you to come back, and when you read.
Credit for that terrific photo goes to Duty-Man
