What Should I Blog About? Part 1: Possible Topics for a Personal Blog

If you've been blogging for long there's a good chance you've encountered that periodic curse of authors through the ages: writer's block. Or in this case, blogger's block. You may just find yourself sitting there, perhaps at this very moment, staring at the screen wondering what there could possibly be to write about and marvelling at how you've managed to type all those words so far. What were you thinking? Must've been a fluke, having all those ideas and opinions to express.

Fear not! You're not alone - it's happened to countless writers before, and generally with a happy ending. OK, maybe with the exception of Hemingway. And Virginia Woolf. Possibly a few others. Anyway, moving right along...in this post I'll look at some strategies for breaking through blogger's blog when writing you personal blog. In a future one, I'll be reviewing similar strategies for professional blogs about a particular industry or trade.

Writing a blog is a lot like having a conversation, with the added benefit of not having to worry about anyone interrupt you - well, except yourself. And as with most conversations, there are sometimes lulls in the discussion before it heads off in a new direction. Remember the last time you had one of those lulls while talking to someone? How did it end? Did you come up with a new topic out of the blue, or did the other person? Or perhaps you both just shrugged your shoulders and just walked away. Well, this is one of those moments in your ongoing conversation with your blog.

Perhaps your blog can help break the lull and come up with that new topic for you. Go back through your past posts and see if there are any opportunities to elaborate on an earlier topic, or jump back on a train of thought where it left off. Maybe you posed an open-ended question that this the perfect opportunity to answer. Or presented one side of an argument and can now play devil's advocate by presenting the other side. Have a debate with yourself - a blog is one of the few places you can do so without being looked at strangely.

If that doesn't work, review your own recent personal experiences, positive and negative, and see where those take you. These could include

An encounter with a person, place, or thing you intensely dislike. Rant in excruciating detail about exactly why it was so unpleasant. Be humorous, if possible. Humor is the blogger's greatest ally. After caffeine, of course.

An encounter with a person, place, or thing you absolutely adore and can't live without. Explain just why they are the absolute bestest in the world. But don't get too schmaltzy or self-indulgent. That's tedious. If it's a person and they're cute, don't hesitate to post a photo to illustrate your point.

Your last vacation, if you took one. Include the highlights, the lowlights, things you'd recommend to fellow travelers, and if it didn't go well, a diatribe about things you hated. You can get a lot of mileage out of things you hate. Why do you think there are so many blogs?

Alternatively, explain why you haven't been able to take a vacation in years. Or decades. Of course, if it's work related, it's a good idea not to name any names - but that doesn't mean you can't go into some interesting detail. To be extra safe, say it happened to a friend of yours: "This guy I know who works in Boston at a company that shall remain nameless hasn't taken a vacation in 15 years - here's why it sucks to be him. His boss expects him to provide sponge baths not just on weekdays, but..." Etcetera.

The last movie you saw, musical artist/hack you listened to, book you read, video game you played, trashy supermarket magazine you thumbed through, celebrity you ogled, software you installed, appliance you used, and so on. You must have an opinion about at least one of those events. Include photos whenever relevant.

Speaking of photos, they're worth a lot of words. How many, I forget...but a lot. So when in doubt, post a some photos. They're fun to look at, take up lots of space, and can make your blog seem fascinating without a lot of effort on your part. You can read more on the subject in my post about photo blogs.

Still hitting the cursed wall of blogger's block? Maybe this just isn't the right time to be writing a blog post. If you have a gut feeling that this is the situation, the best thing you can do is accept that fact, however annoying, take a deep breath, get up from your computer, and go do something else for a while. Take a walk. Get some coffee. Play with the dog. Attempt to play with the cat. Take a shower. Mow the lawn. Go make out in the park. Occupy your time doing whatever it is you do when you're not sitting in front of this screen, and don't think about your blog for at least an hour. And maybe in that time you'll have seen, heard, smelled, or done something worth blogging about.

Key terms: writers block, writer's block, brainstorming, ideas, creativity, expression, no clue what the hell to write about

Pinging and Why Everyone's Doing It

If you've blogged for any length of time, like an hour, you've probably come across the term "ping" somewhere out there in the blogosphere by now, or else right in your own blog dashboard. For instance, Blogger gives you the option in the Settings > Publishing tab to send pings to Weblogs.com, which tracks updates to blogs on a near real-time basis.

But I'm already getting ahead of myself - what are these "pings" exactly? A ping is a digital signal (in XML-RPC format, if you care) that your blogging platform or another pinging piece of software can send out on your behalf each time your blog has been updated with new content. Pings are typically used by blog and RSS search and tracking services like search engines, news and RSS aggregators, and RSS feed generators and managers like FeedBurner. So they're a pretty hot commodity for services that want to make sure they're including the latest blog content as soon as it's been published. For example, following a ping, a blog search engine will know to send its crawlers through your blog to index your most recent post for its search results.

Pings also allow these blogophilic services (yes, I just made that term up) to allocate its resources wisely: if there's no ping, they'll assume there's no new content, and will send their crawlers to go index some fresh content instead rather than recrawl what's already in their database.

For you, the blogger, this makes pings a very good thing. Lots of sites out there are just waiting to receive them, eager to include your blog's content prominently in their search listings or RSS feeds. And pings are free to send and can either be sent automatically, or in mere seconds via a manual pinging service.

What's a manual pinging service? Well, one limitation of some automated pingers, like the built-in one in Blogger, is that it doesn't ping all the sites out there that are waiting to hear from you. So there's a need for services that can send multiple pings en masse to many ping-hungry sites at once. All you do is enter your blog's name and URL, select the sites you'd like to ping, and the pingers will do the rest. Here are three well-known ones for you to try:

Ping-O-Matic
PingOat
Blog Flux Ping Service

Let the pinging begin!

Key terms: ping, pinging, blogflux, blog flux, pingomatic, ping-o-matic, pingoat, pingout, ping oat, ping out, send pings

Turn Your Blog Into an Email Newsletter

I'm sure you've seen those sites with the newsletter sign-up form, inviting visitors to submit their email address and join their mailing list. If you're like me it probably seemed like a great idea, but you found the prospect of maintaining the mailing list, putting together a regular newsletter, and coordinating the mailings too complicated for your taste. And you're right, if you were trying to do all that yourself it could turn into quite a headache.

And yet it's still a great idea. After all, a blog is so much like a newsletter that it makes perfect sense to convert each post into a mini-email update. And there are undoubtedly some readers would prefer to read it in that format. Maybe they only find time to check their email in the course of their day, not surf the web. Or maybe they work someplace where their web access is extremely restricted. Or maybe they have no clue what an RSS feed is and don't really want to know. Or maybe they're just nostalgic for the old days of Usenet, when most important online communication came in via their inbox.

The good news is you can broadcast your blog via email pretty easily with a service called FeedBlitz. I found it while I was searching for sites to help promote blog RSS feeds, and it caught my attention immediately since I've always wondered if there was quick and painless way to distribute a blog via email. That's exactly what FeedBlitz does: they'll instantly convert your blog's RSS feed into an email and distribute it automatically to your subscription list.

Here's how it works:

You sign up for a FeedBlitz account, login and enter your RSS feed into their "New Feed" menu.

After you submit the form, they'll email you a sample email with all your recent blog posts. Double check it to make everything looks OK.

If it does, you can then log into your account and grab their HTML code that allows you to add an email subscription form to your blog. Paste this code into your blog template whereever you'd like it to appear, republish, take a minute to make sure everything's formatting correctly on your blog, and if it is, you're all set - you're now a newsletter publisher as well as a blogger!

Ready to get started? This complete intro to the FeedBlitz service tells you everything you'll need to know.

Start a Blogroll

Actually, before you start one let's define what a blogroll is. Basically, it's a list of blogs you link to from your own blog. Usually your blogroll would go in the sidebar of your blog, and would include links to blogs you read frequently, or wish you read frequently. It could also include blogs you've exchanged links with - they add your blog to their blogroll, and in return you link to them from yours. Exchanging links between blogrolls can be an easy way to begin generating traffic to your blog and building visibility in a community of like-minded bloggers.

If you like, you can also organize your blogroll in various ways. Alphabetically is the simplest and most obvious, but you can also create categories for the different types of blogs based on their subject matter, personal or professional focus, writing style and quality, frequency of updates, or any other criteria that will make your blogroll more useful, comprehensive, and comprehensible.

You can make updating, maintaining and enhancing your blogroll an easier process with a blogroll manager like Blogrolling.com. Their tool allows you to add new blogs to your blogroll by simply clicking a link in your web browser, a much quicker process than going into your blog template and manually adding new links. The Blogrolling tool also lets you categorize your blog list and keeps track of when each blog was last updated. If a blog's gone stale and hasn't been updated for years, you might want to replace it with a more current one.

If you add a new blog to your blogroll, it's always a good idea to let them know by emailing them or posting a comment on the blog. They'll appreciate hearing about the new link, and may even reciprocate by adding your blog to their blogroll. With each new connection you make, you're expanding your network of readers a little further. And it all starts with that first little link in your sidebar...

Key terms: blogroll, blog-roll, blogrole, blogrolling, blogroling, blog-rolling, blog-roling

Blog Your Novel

In the 19th Century Charles Dickens famously serialized novels including "The Pickwick Papers" and "Great Expectations" in monthly installments in newspapers and magazines. Today he'd undoubtedly be doing the same thing, but quite likely in blog form instead.

Blogging offers a cheap and easy way to serialize and publicize literary works online. Indeed, blogged literature has acquired its own web nickname - "blooks." Yes, blooks. Fun to say, isn't it?

So maybe you've got a novel you're working on, or one that's been sitting on the shelf or in your hard drive for a while. Maybe you're tired of making the rounds of potential publishers and literary agents and getting the same old brush-off, that politely worded rejection letter informing you your manuscript just isn't a good fit for their list at the moment. Until they change their tune you might as well upload the first few chapters to a blog, link it up in various blog directories, spend some time publicizing the RSS feed, and start reaching all those potential readers the publishers and agents apparently can't be bothered with.

With a blog, each chapter can fit neatly into its own post, and successive posts can be linked together so readers can find their way through the narrative as easily as turning a page. Readers can also offer their comments on each chapter, feedback that could prove valuable if you decide to revise your novel. You can even experiment with different ways of making all your hard work pay off. For instance:

Offer the complete manuscript as a PDF file available for purchase via PayPal. Readers who get caught up in the early "teaser" chapters of your serialized version may not feel like waiting around for you to blog the next ones. By making the complete text available, you're offering these impatient readers the instant gratification they demand. For a modest fee, of course.

How fancy you get with delivering the full digital manuscript is up to you: you could simply email it upon receiving payment, or if you're more tech-savvy, create a special download location on your blog that's only accessible to paying readers.

Alternatively, you can make your novel a subscription service, with just a few chapters available for free and the rest available to paying subscribers behind a log-in. Blogger, for example, allows you to make your blog available to only selected readers via its "Permissions" settings. Create one blog with your free, publicly available chapters, and then a second blog with your restricted, subscription-only chapters. When someone PayPals you a subscription fee, you can then grant them access to your private blog where they can read your novel in its entirety.

Or, after building up a substantial online audience for your blogged novel, or blook, you could then approach a publisher or agent with your traffic stats and ask if they'd like to represent a popular online literary property. By demonstrating your ability to attract a large readership, you can now make a much better case for the saleability of your manuscript.

These are just a few ideas to get you started...and if you're creative enough to write a novel, you're certainly creative enough to come up with even more ways to promote it online. Write on!

Key terms: novel, fiction, narrative, literary blog, litblog, literature weblog, blook, serialize, promotion, publicity, publication

Start a Photo Blog

Maybe you're tired of staring at text, text and more text on your blog all day. Then before typing yet another word you should consider starting up a photo blog. With the right blogging platform it's the easiest thing in the world, and a great way to share your photography with a larger audience. All you'll need to get started is a digital camera and the software to transfer images from the camera to your computer - which should come with just about any new digital model you buy these days. My camera's an old Canon PowerShot S200 Digital Elph and I use the Canon's ZoomBrowser software that came with it to import and edit the photos on my laptop. ZoomBrowser's fine for my purposes, but if you've got a high-end imaging suite like PhotoShop installed, you have even more options in terms of editing and enhancing your images.

One the key steps in preparing photos for a blog is to reduce their file size a little bit. Images coming straight from a digital camera can take up quite a lot of memory, many megabytes worth, which can make them slow to load in a web browser. There's no point in having a photo blog if it takes 10 minutes to open and no one waits around past the first two. By reducing the resolution of your photos you'll make the files a lot lighter and therefore faster to upload and view.

If your original photo files are in a memory-hogging format like TIFF, Bitmap, or PhotoShop's PSD, you'll also want to convert them to a web standard format like JPEG, which will reduce their file size even further. However, whatever you do, don't discard your original image! Make sure to "Save As" rather than save over the original photo, since you'll need that high-resolution version if you ever want to order photo prints or maybe even sell high-res images from your blog.

Once you've got a set of images you'd like to feature on a blog, any blogging platform worth its code will enable you to upload them with a few quick clicks. In Blogger, which I use, there's a little image icon in the toolbar of my blog edit page. When I click it, I get a form that looks like this:

In fact I just used this form to upload the image of this form. Mind boggling! By selecting the photo file you'd like to upload, the size you'd like it displayed in, and its orientation on the page, you can specify exactly how you'd like each photo presented. With Blogger, it's important to know that the photo will appear at the top of your blog post after you upload it. You can then cut and paste the image code to whereever you'd like it within your post.

Once you've got photos uploaded to your blog post, you can then add your own titles and comments using the standard text interface. You can also invite your blog readers to add their comments, or submit their own photos for display in your blog. This is where I get most of the photos for my own photo blog, The Yard Art Project. You could even run a photo contest to encourage submissions and generate buzz about your blog.

If you don't feel like setting up a blog but would still like to share your photos online, there's no shortage of free services that will let you do so. Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa are two of the better-known ones. Both allow blog-like captions and comments from you and your friends that make photo sharing so fun.

So if you've been wondering how to share your photos online, that's just about all there is to it. Now you have no excuse for letting all those great photos languish unviewed in your camera!

Key terms: photo blog, photoblog, photo blogging, photo bloging, photo sharing, photo shareing, digital photography, dijital photos

Tag, Label or Categorize Your Blog Posts

That's a lot of verbs for one headline. Why not just say "tag your blog posts" and call it a day? Well, different blogging platforms have different names for what I consider the same basic process. Maybe it's a legal thing. If you're writing a Blogger post (which I am) you have the option of attaching labels to it, which will classify it with other posts into a handy subject-specific archive. Way more useful and interesting than the standard date-based archives, imho.

If you're using WordPress, the same classification dealies are called "tags." In TypePad, they're known as "categories." In LiveJournal, which is owned by the same people as TypePad, they're also called "tags." To be frank I don't know what the subtle differences are, but I'm pretty sure they're a matter of degree, not of kind. If I had to come up with a single generic name for the things I'd probably go with "standard categorization nomenclature," or "SCM". Yeah, SCM. You know, on second thought, scratch that - "tags" is probably the best all-around name. Though it does make you feel like you're running some sort of yard sale.

Why use these tabs/labels/categories, anyway? (Ya know, I think I'll just call them tags from here on out. Sorry Blogger.) For one thing, they make your blog easier and more interesting to navigate. People can click on a topic of interest in your tags and immediately jump to all your posts on that subject. To make sure your tags get used to the fullest extent possible, it's a good idea to include a list of them in a prominent place on your blog. For example, you could list out all your current tags in the sidebar, so your readers see them as they're scrolling through your posts. If your tags are well-chosen, you're likely to get a lot more page-views from each visitor as they click through them. One challenge of blogging is that valuable older posts can get buried and forgotten in the archives. By tagging them, you can help them continue to get the attention they deserve from interested readers.

Another advantage of tags is they expand your blog's virtual "footprint" in search engines like Google. All those new, subject-specific tag pages should start appearing in search results, attracting visitors searching for the topic you've tagged - people who might not find your blog otherwise. In addition, because tags are by definition highly relevant keywords, having them embedded in each blog post adds to that post's search relevance. To put it another way, if a search engine had to decide whether to display two nearly identical posts, one with tags and one without them, it's likely to rank the tagged one higher because of all those meaningful keywords.

In general, the best features you can add to your blog have multiple positive effects, and that's definitely true of tags (or labels, or categories, or SCMs, or whatever...) They improve the user experience, increase your page views per visitor, help keep old content from languishing unloved in the archives, and can help your search rankings. Why do you think I use so many of them?

Key terms: tags, tagging, taging, labels, labelling, labeling, categories, catagories, subjects, topics

Promote Your Blog's RSS Feeds

Ever wonder what exactly you should be doing with those RSS feeds that come with your blog? Or maybe you're just wondering what RSS is - well, you wouldn't be the first person.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's a data format based on the XML standard, which allows the efficient, standardized transmission of digital information from place to place. That could be from website to website, from database to database, from database to website, and so on. What RSS means to you as a blogger is that you have an easy, ready-made format for syndicating whatever you publish on your blog. And just how would that work? Here are a few examples:

A fan of your blog can add your RSS feed to their RSS reader (sometimes also called a "newsreader"), which will update them every time you add a new post by displaying a link to the headline, along with a few sentences or even the full post, if you choose to include it in your feed. Popular RSS readers include My Yahoo, Google Reader, BlogLines, and NewsGator. (You can find a list of the most popular RSS readers in this article.)

So rather than needing to check your blog every day to see if you've posted something new, your fan can just sit back and wait for your latest post to pop up in their RSS reader. Much more convenient.

Another use of RSS feeds is to syndicate your content to someone else's site. For example, the site StockBlogs.com is based almost entirely on RSS feeds from blogs about the stock market. StockBlogs will display the latest headlines from each blog, along with related information and some advertising (of course), and visitors can then click off to whatever blog post interests them. The result is a nice source of traffic to the featured sites via their RSS feeds, and a useful resource for stock researchers looking for commentary from the blogosphere in one central location.

There are a number of ways you can promote your RSS feeds to take advantage of these traffic opportunities. First, and most simply, just make sure they're prominently displayed on each page of your blog. Place a link in the blog's sidebar with the text "Subscribe to My RSS Feed!" or something similar, and any RSS-savvy visitor will be able to easily grab your feed and add it to their reader.

Make sure your friends know about your blog's RSS feed. Millions of people use Yahoo email, and if they have a Yahoo email account, they already have a My Yahoo page with RSS capabilities. All they'll need to do is sign in to their Yahoo account and add your feed to get instant updates whenever you update your blog.

You can also add small graphic links called buttons to your blog that will allow RSS users to subscribe to your feed with just a couple clicks. You can download the graphics and code for dozens of these buttons from this handy page.

Another RSS promotion strategy is to submit your feed to sites that feature RSS content. These include specialized sites like StockBlogs, as well as RSS search engines and directories. Here's a list of sites I've had good luck submitting my own RSS feeds to:

Bloogz RSS Finder

RSSFeeds.com

2RSS.com

FeedShow
(shares revenues they earn from your feed content with you!)

Plazoo.com

Inform.com

BlogDigger

And this is just the tip of the feedberg - there are many more RSS directories, search engines and aggregators out there. You can find dozens of them on this RSS submission list, one of my favorite bookmarks.

Once you've submitted your feed to all these RSS sites, the next step is to keep them fed with fresh blog posts!

Key terms: RSS, R.S.S., Real Simple Syndication, sindication, syndicate, sindicate, feeds, feedreader, newsreader, subscribe, subsribe, subscription, agregator, aggregater

Use Blog Directories to Reach New Readers

A great way to increase your blog's visibility is by submitting to web directories that specialize in blogs. Submission to most of these directories is free, though some will request a link back from your blog in exchange for a directory listing, and a few charge a fee to review your submission and add it to the directory. I generally stick with the free ones, but if you've got money to burn, the paid directories will be happy to help!

There are many advantages to being listed in a blog directory. First and most obviously, someone browsing or searching the directory can find your blog and you'll have a new reader. Secondly, search engines like Google will notice your link in the directory, and will count it as a "vote" in favor of your blog. The more links they count in directories and other blog sites, the higher your search engine rankings are likely to be. The result - even more visitors to your blog.

Submitting your blog to a directory should be a very straightforward process: first, find the directory category that's most appropriate to your blog's subject. Then, use the directory's submission form to fill in the key details about your blog: the title, URL, a brief description of what it's about, and in some cases your contact information. Most reputable directories will review your submission within a few days, and you'll usually receive an email notification letting you know if your blog has been accepted.

Here's a list of blog directories that I've submitted to with success in the past. If you have others to suggest for this list, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Blog Catalog
http://www.blogcatalog.com

Blogrankings.com
http://www.blogrankings.com

Bloghub
http://www.bloghub.com

Blogwise
http://www.blogwise.com/

Globe of Blogs
http://www.globeofblogs.com

Eatonweb Blog Portal
http://portal.eatonweb.com/

Blogflux
http://www.blogflux.com/

BlogHop
http://www.bloghop.com/

Bloglines
http://www.bloglines.com/

Blogburst.com
http://www.blogburst.com/

LS Blogs
http://www.lsblogs.com

Blogmarks.net - a social bookmarking service
http://www.blogmarks.net/

Bloggernity.com
http://www.bloggernity.com/

Bloggeries.com (paid submission last I checked)
http://www.bloggeries.com/

BlogBib (also paid submission)
http://www.blogbib.com/

Submitting your blog to these directories can be a fast, easy way to expand your audience and get your blog noticed. Fame and fortune can't be far behind...right?

Key terms: blog directory, blogger directories, directorys, dircetory, diretory, submission, rankings, listings, categories

Increase Your Blog's Audience With Post Pages

If you're looking for easy ways to boost your blog's readership, one of the easiest may be just a couple clicks away. I'm talking about the ability to create "post pages," which simply means that each blog post you create will exist as its own stand-alone web page. But you'll need to make sure you're taking advantage of this feature in whatever blog software you use.

In Blogger, for example, blogs don't automatically come with post pages enabled. In a blog without post pages, the posts are strung together on the main blog page and in the archive pages, but can't be accessed individually through their own URLs. To give each post its own URL and web page, you'll need to click the Settings tab and then go to the Archiving settings. Here you should see an option called "Enable Post Pages." Select "Yes" from the pulldown menu and republish your blog, and each post will then have its very own web page. Using this post as an example, scroll down to the bottom and click the link where it says "10:57 AM". See how it brings up a separate page? Every post on this blog has the same time-stamped link at the bottom, which leads to its own web page.

What are the advantages of post pages? Well, one of the biggest ones is that they increase your blog's search engine exposure. When a search engine like Google crawls through your blog, it will find each of those post pages and index them separately in its search results. So when someone searches for the subject of that particular post, there's a good chance they'll find it in their search results. On the other hand, if the post doesn't have its own URL and web page, there's not a subject-specific page for the search engine to direct them to, so the blog is less likely to appear in those search results.

Another advantage of post pages is that it's easy to copy and paste their URLs into an email. If you want to show a friend only a specific post from your blog, having a handy URL to drop into an email makes it very easy.

Are there any disadvantages to post pages? Ummm....none that I can think of. So make sure they're switched on and get ready to attract some new readers!

Stop Blog Comment Spam with Word Verification

As I just discussed in my post about comment moderation, blog comment spam can be a real problem for bloggers trying to maintain a high standard of content quality and prevent unwanted posters from clogging up their comments with commercial pitches for their own spammy sites. In addition to enabling content moderation, another useful feature that can help stop comment spammers is word verification. Most reputable blogging software should provide this option; in Blogger, it's available in the Comments section of the Settings tab in the blog dashboard.

What is word verification, exactly? It's a feature that forces all commenters to enter a word or a random series of letters presented in an image file each time they want to post a comment. If the letters aren't entered correctly, the comment can't be posted. By placing the letters inside a graphic file rather than as standard HTML text, the verification feature prevents them from being read by automated scripts often used by comment spammers to post comments on thousands of blogs at once. If the spam software can't read the letters, there's no way it can post a comment. This is a quick and easy way to stop lots of automated spam bots that would otherwise start dumping unwanted crap in your comments.

Of course, an unusually dedicated comment spammer will actually take the time to enter the comment manually, read off the letters and submit their comment by hand. That's why you need comment moderation switched on as well, so you can individually review each comment that's posted.

The big question in the future will be whether spam software can be programmed to read the letters in those image files. In my opinion it's really a question of when, rather than if, this is going to happen. In the spam arms race, clever coders are always at work trying to crack the latest obstacle to them launching an avalanche of spam (a spamalanche?). When the incentive is big enough - and the ability to comment on thousands of blogs for free is a pretty big incentive - someone's eventually going to figure out a way to do it. But for the time being, word verification should do the trick and stop most automated content spammers. So make sure it's switched on!

Key terms: word verification, verfication, verifcation, automated, comment, spam, script, software, spammers

Moderate Your Comments!

Any blog that's been up for a while, allows comments, and has at least a reasonable amount of online visibility will eventually run into the problem of unwanted comments being posted by complete strangers. These commenters are usually out to accomplish one thing: get a link back to their own blog or website and siphon away some of your visitors. They're often running automated scripts or software that allow them to post comments on a vast scale, leaving their spammy messages and links throughout the blogosphere, and annoying bloggers and their readers by introducing a jarring and unpleasant distraction to their blog enjoyment.

It used to be that leaving comments with a link back to your own site would help your search engine rankings, since they counted each comment as a new backlink and therefore a virtual "vote" in favor of that site's importance. But since this led to a deluge of blog spam, Google and other search engines have cracked down by adding a "no follow" tag to blog comment links, which prevents them from being tracked by the search engine crawlers and therefore negates the search optimization angle for blog comment spammers.

But they're still out there, looking for the free traffic that thousands of comment links can bring them. How do you catch them before they stink up your comments sections with the spammy ravings? Turn on your comment moderation feature! Any decent blog software should offer this option. In Blogger, for example, you can find it in the Comments section of the Settings tab on your blog dashboard. Switch it on and all potential comments will be routed to your email for you to review and approve or disapprove before being posted on your blog. This will help ensure that every comment added to your blog posts is a wanted comment, and not some weirdo spammer trying to sell your readers cheap Viagra or fraudulent stock tips or a second mortgage or larger genitalia. Do your readers need these things? In general, probably not.

Key terms: comments, moderation, spam, scripts, software, backlinks, search optimization, moderater, moderateing