Commenting is an essential element of any blog and it’s been explained, emphasized, and proved repeatedly. Along with you, it permits your readers to share their opinions and ideas in public.

And sincerely, it’s quite appreciative when someone goes through your entire post, scrolls till the bottom, and comment after analyzing it.

Recently, I met a friend who realizes the importance of comments on our blog and sincerely appreciates it. He, like me, wants to personally reply each comment he receives from his readers. I believe it’s a nice and genuine idea to make readers feel special and attended.

Replying to each and every post is quite lengthy and challenging. However, the efforts are worth in the end. So, we decided to come up with a list of things to be kept in mind while commenting. Every lengthy task requires planning. The list is definitely helping us. However, this list is also targeted to many bloggers, whom I have noticed, are replying to their comments in a dire comportment.

1. Addressing the commenter by their name:

   Knowing your readers personally is indeed one of the most effective ways to build a decent affinity. And it starts with addressing them by their names in your reply or emails. The best way to start a reply is “Hello ‘Commenter’s name’”. Now, that isn’t as robotic as you think. It’s quite courteous.

   I really appreciate when someone addresses me by my name. I feel they care about their readers and have enough consideratenesses to get the name right. And I like when someone addresses me by my first name. What do you prefer? First name or last?

   A subscriber recently asked me an interesting question about commenting. He got many comments on his first blog posts. However, many amongst used their site name to comment, instead of first name or last. His question was “Is it okay to address them by their site name?”

   It is, but only after making sure that you have tried enough to get the name and couldn’t find it. However, sometimes it may sound strange to address someone by “Hi Earn $100 every hour. How do you do?” Instead, you can click on the link and visit their blog to know their name. Most often, you will get it in the ‘About’ page. Or

   

   you can try visiting their recent posts and comments. Chances are high that you will find the name.

   However, if you are not so sure about the name, or can’t find it at all, you can opt to use the website name. But phrase it in a way that doesn’t sound funny.

2. Talk to all the commenters:

   This is what I have learned from my experience. Replying to one commenter and not to the other for the same post isn’t chivalrous at all. The person who doesn’t receive a reply will definitely feel ignored and aggravated. See, how easily you lose your readers.

   Okay, I agree many comments just says “Good Post”, “Great article”, or “Hey, it’s amazing”. Understand that although these are very small comments, at least they took the pains to write something, unlike thousand others who visited your blog but didn’t bother to comment. It doesn’t take much time to reply “Thank you for stopping by”, or just “Thanks”.

   The probability of getting a response again on such comments would be very low. It’s also possible that many wouldn’t ever visit your website or check your response. However, you need to remember that there are many other readers who visit your posts and check the comments and responses. For them, you are doing a great job.

   Bear in mind that responding to ever comment is quite difficult to manage, especially if yours is a blog that attracts huge traffic and numerous comments per post. So while preparing a schedule, allocate some time for replying to comments.

3. Ask them:

   If you really want to give a personal touch, don’t do the regular commenting process. If you don’t understand a particular comment, ask them to clarify it. Remember, it’s like a chat session. You need to interact with them openly. You can also be casual, but within limits. Asking questions is also a good way to keep the conversation going on.

   These are some essential points that we have come up with. We occasionally keep adding points to your list of ‘replying essentials’. I would really appreciate if you can contribute some points to enhance the quality of our list.

The complexities faced by new entrepreneurs today aren’t similar to the ones faced by people some years ago. To start a business a couple of decades ago, you would have required:

• Money to rent an office space
• Money to buy office equipments
• Money to pay your employees
• Money to provide health insurance to them
• Money to pay for licenses, utilities, and taxes
  

Okay I agree these costs have to be incurred today as well. But we can opt to work from home as well; a benefit that we couldn’t have enjoyed then.

So, the constraint of huge capital has been now eradicated. You don’t really have to spend huge amount of money to gain money, which was not the case initially.

But you do have to spend ‘some’, in order to star a blogging business.

Some? How much is ‘Some’? A vague answer would be not much. If you are looking for the precise amount:

$8 every year for domain name

AND

$100 every year for Web Hosting

These are the costs you have to necessarily incur to start a blogging business. There may be some other expenses which may vary from person to person like buying a new desktop or notebook, fees to pay for web designing, and probably some software. So, my vague answer still persists, ‘Not Much.’

So for new entrants, money cannot be termed as a barrier.

So what are the problems faced by new bloggers these days?

Knowledge

Although knowledge about the business was always a barrier and an important path to success, today is the time when you need it the most. The market today is completely knowledge driven. In recent times, the ones who lead the business are the one who learned knowledge that wasn’t imparted in schools or universities.

Although knowledge is freely available today, we don’t find many people fully informed about anything. You can avail all the useful information through internet, however people don’t. So the one who wins is the one who gains the knowledge and applies it first. He has to rush, he has to hustle.

Hustle

Few decades ago I wouldn’t have believed I someone would have said ‘Time is Money.’ But today, time is more expensive than money. If you don’t hustle to acquire knowledge and apply, you lose more than money. Hence, it is another barrier for new entrants.

You will have to hustle to be the first one.
You will have to hustle to keep up with the pace and rapidity today.
You will have to hustle to compete.
You will have to hustle to be the best
If you fail to hustle, you fail to survive.

So, before you decide to start a blog, don’t forget to consider these barriers.

What do you think? Any new barriers you can think of?

There are numerous ways to promote your blog. However, many bloggers today don’t seem to optimize the usage of available resources. Although commenting on blog post, posting in forums, updating in social media, and retweeting are some of the universal ways to market, there is lot more every blogger can do to improve the traffic.

To promote their blog, people excavate all possible resources on the internet, unknown about the marketing potential their own blog contains. Let me tell you, marketing strategies used to promote your articles within your blog is an excellent technique to attract traffic and hook people once they reach your blog.

The Internal Links

Interlinking within your blog is an effective SEO strategy. This helps you to raise the demand of your older posts as well. For those who are new to blogging or interlinking, let me put it in an uncomplicated way. If you are currently writing about something that relates to some of your older posts, adjust some of the sentence in such a way that it mentions the title of the older posts. If it isn’t possible, you can use the keywords. Now, create a link which will direct the readers directly to the older articles. Hence it increases the reach-ability and demand of the older ones.

Similarly, create links in the older posts as well which will ensure that the reader reads dozens of them, instead of just one. Now just imagine the traffic you will get if any of your articles is celebrated in Digg or tweeter.

Show Off the Best Articles

Old is gold, and I genuinely believe it. Many of my old posts are just superb and I cannot let the die. In fact, no one should. You had spent enormous time researching and posting remarkable articles that are still useful. However, they are generally buried under the not-so-good articles. Is the destiny of those remarkable articles so short lived? No, it isn’t. Let people know about those posts. Stick it on their face, forever. This can be done in a couple of ways.

1. Create a ‘Favorites’ tab:
   Create a tab or bar that says ‘Favorites’ and posts the articles which you believe to be the best ones. It becomes easier for readers to access these posts. This is one of the best techniques ever to get enormous traffic to the older posts. Updating or adding articles in this category depends on you.
2. Rotating Banners:
   This would involve a bit of graphical designing on your website, but it’s worth taking the pains. This method involves creating a banner that keeps rotating and can be placed anywhere on the website. However, you need to make sure that this banner is easily visible to all the readers visiting your blog. Such banner keeps displaying links to older articles.

Simpler Sharing

Promoting your articles through tabs like “Digg” or “Retweet this” button is an effective way to magnetize traffic. However, your promotion process shouldn’t stop here. You need to search for many such buttons that can be added below your article. More number of buttons will make sure it reaches more number of people.

Make use of widgets like ‘Sociable’ or ‘Share this’ to increace the readability of your posts. Make sharing very easy for your readers. However, do not clutter it with countless buttons and make it look ugly.

Abundant Listing

Similar to the ‘Favorites’ tab, create many other tabs that has numerous other good posts. Some of the common tabs are ‘Recent articles’, Similar articles’, and ‘Popular articles.’ All these tabs, share one thing in common: they direct readers to other posts within your blog.

Alright, let’s discuss these tabs in detail.

• Recent Articles:
  All the posts added lately should show up in under this tab. This is quite useful as people search for latest updates, current trends, or recent news. This tab should occupy maximum space of your blog because people tend to be more interested in recent post than the older ones with some exceptions.
• Similar Articles:
  Make sure you add this tab under every article. This tab should further list down 4-5 articles that are similar to the original posts. So, the readers searching information on a particular topic don’t have to search other websites.
• Popular Articles:
  Under this tab, list down the articles that were most commented or most visited. Probably these are the articles that are liked by people. Hence, chances are high that new visitors may like it as well. This tab should be on every page of your blog.

These are very powerful tools to promote your articles within your blog. To get an idea how many bloggers use it, just visit any blog. You may find many other tabs as well like “Most commentd”, “Recently Commented”, etc. You should add these if you have enormous vacant space.

The Implementation

For those who haven’t applied any or all the above techniques, my suggestion is to get started today. Missing even a single one from the above point will keep you from attracting thousand other readers’ everyday.

Starting a blog contest is one of the most exciting things to do. Many believe that these competitions attract huge traffic. Utter nonsense! If you are one of these believers, I am sorry to say that you don’t know much about blogging because traffic is just a diminutive part of what you get out of these competitions. It involves substantial brand publicity, a steep rise in sales, and just about everything you ever wanted as a blogger.

Am I exaggerating? No, I am not. You can actually achieve these things but only through rigorous planning. A minor gaffe while planning the contest can jeopardize your vision and dreams. But don’t fret because here are few things that will not let you dreams die, if you consider them while planning.

Prize money or reward

Prizes are the most important thing, at least from the contestant’s point of view because that’s the only thing they will participate for. Hence, deciding the prize while planning is crucial. You need to ensure that you give away something that will quite useful for the participants as bloggers. For Instance, if the participants are from MMO niche, distribute Wordpress Themes as prize or free ads on various blogs. If you can provide them something useful, you will definitely get quite a lot of constants.

How to get sponsors?

Probably you wouldn’t want to spend hundreds for prizes from your own pocket. You would be fool if you do so because you can easily attract sponsors.

I agree getting sponsors for your contest is quite complicated. Most of the people aren’t able to do it. I can say this because lately many people have asked me about the technique to attract sponsors. Okay. There is not super-technique to attract them. Simply send mails asking them to sponsor. Prior to this, you need to identify and create a list of companies or blogs that you think will be enthusiastic about sponsoring the contest.

These are some of the points that you need to cover while drafting the email:

• There will be direct link to your page and a paragraph of description about you.
• The promotion of this contest will be rigorous and on a large scale.
• The participants can win entries by posting, tweeting, and commenting about the contest on their page.
• You will receive enormous traffic, brand publicity, and boost in sales through this contest.

I am sure many companies with show interest in sponsoring the contest.

The Type of Contest

This would be this most significant element of the contest. According to me, keep it uncomplicated and quite easy entry procedure. This will ensure that the number of contestants entering the competition will be quite high. The very common, accepted and popular formats of contests are:

• Posting comment:
  In this kind of contest, people keep commenting on your blog. The one who posted highest number of comments is declared winner. However, to attract so many contestants, you will have to advertise about the contest without anyone’s help.
• Retweeting:
  The post of your preference would be tweeted by numerous people (the link there directs back to the contest page). This is a great tool of alluring traffic as scores of interet users are tweeting your URL’s. Here other people are advertising on your behalf. So most of the work is done by them and you don’t really have to work that hard to attract traffic.
• Subscring to RSS feed:
  This type of contest will help you to increase the number of RSS subscription substantially. You will notice a huge amount of people subscribing for RSS. However, most of the new entries will leave the list as soon as the contest finishes.
• Posting about the Contest:
  Here, people post the details of the contest on their blog along with your link. This also, sometimes, has sponsor’s links. So you can expect a huge traffic in this kind of contest as well. However, many people will be hesitant about posting your contest on their blog. I would definitely not do it.

You can choose any of the above types, or combine a couple of them. It’s your competition, so you make the rules, right?

Just remember, planning the contest is the essence of the contest. Before releasing the first post about it, make sure you have considered all the drawbacks and planned efficiently.