comments on other people's blogs

I've been a little crowded , again , lately ( hey , this is a good idea for a post - making time to write ) and I've just got back and I decided to do a follow-up of an article - why you shouldn't promote your blog .

Let's start with the first item on that list :

Comments on other people's blogs

As we all know very well there are millions of blogs online , not all of them active but still ... this leaves you with countless related blogs to which you can post comments in order to promote yourself .

And you need to promote yourself in a way that matters . Don't just leave a blank comment saying : 'I digg your post .' You need to start a discussion , say something real .

And this means that , most of the times , one simple comment will become a 3-4 comment long discussion . And this in turn means that you need to somehow return to that page once in a while .

But you can't really subscribe to all of them . That would be useless because they eventually become those blogs ( which I'm sure you all have in your RSS reader ) that get the infamous 'Mark as read' .

And you can't really remember every single comment that you posted , right ? After all , a good self promotion campaign involves participating in at least 10-15 discussions a week on 10-15 different blogs . Don't think that you can hit the mother load of visitors by just commenting on one blog .

But you can bookmark them all , can you ?!

'Yeah , sure ... but I also have other bookmarks and I will eventually lose track of all of them in the great bookmark black hole .'

There is a way to do this . The way I see it blogs that you visit split in 4 major categories :

1 : The ones that you read everyday .

2 : The ones that you read just an article or two and decided they deserve a comment .


3 : The ones that have ongoing conversations .


4 : The ones in which you've had a conversation ( or maybe more ) .

Now we don't discuss the first category here because I'm assuming that the blogs in that category have a special place in your RSS client .

But we are interested in the 3 categories that come after it .

The way I see it , in order to do a good comments-campaign you need to have a browser that has a good bookmarks interface ( I heart Safari - you should give it a try : speed , stability , security , great bookmarks interface and many other abilities ) .

The main requirement is that it supports folders with your bookmarks ( I doubt that there are too many browsers out there that DON'T have that yet ) .

Once you get your browser in check just create 3 categories for those categories that I mentioned above :

- one folder for recently commented posts
- one folder for ongoing discussions
- one folder for closed discussions ( this may also be used as a junk folder for long lost blog posts )

And after that just bookmark posts that you commented on . When you get an answer to your comment and that comment turns into a discussion just move the bookmark in the second folder and keep it there until the discussion on that particular post dies - after that move the bookmark in the third folder .

If the comment doesn't turn into a discussion move it directly in the third folder .

I know , it's a very basic plan but ... it helps . Just make sure you don't have more than 15-20 bookmarks at a time in the first 2 folders . And do a quick check on them once every 2 days to see if there we're any replies .

Allow a post to be in the second folder only as long as a discussion lasts .