plain pixl

Estimated reading time: 4.0 minutes, 5.0 seconds, containing: 817 words

I am a horrible blog reader, because nine out of ten times I will read a great blog post that gave a lot of informational value to me and yet I will not even post a thank you comment, and I was trying to figure out why I am acting this way, so I started to look around the internet and to see how people attract comments on blog.

Cold facts about blog commenting

1. People will give away prizes, money, extra advice, whatever other perks to get people to post comments, and still the results are less than favorable
2. Even when you do get them to comment, some comments are written in a way that is bringing more distraction from the subject and not building up the opinion factor of the community that the site owner wants to have for his site.
3. Sometimes you will get people who visit your site just so they can write their "first comment" remark instead of actually reading what you have to say and be a real contributor to the site.

Now I'll try to write all the reasons for my lack of commenting actions, and they range from plausible to ridiculous, and I think I will go first with the ridiculous ones:

1. First of all, I am lazy and sometimes I just listen to my instinct of get in, get what you need and go out (which is a terrible instinct by they way, it's almost like a stealing action)
2. Second reason I have is because sometimes I feel like I don't have a smart enough thing to say and my simple thank you will pale in comparison to the context of the post or other "well thought comments".

And now for the plausible reasons:

1. Lots of times when I look at other posts, I'm taking a quick break from my work, and I fell like I should get as much info as possible from as many sites as I can, and having the feeling that there are so many things out there that are worth checking out is not helping me think otherwise either.
2. I read a comment that captures what I meant to write and I don't want to sound redundant.
3. Third reason is because I feel like my comment should have value since I want to reply to a valuable post, so if I don't have something good to say I would rather not say anything.

Not commenting brings value to nobody

From now on I will try to break my rule of not commenting unless I have something useful to say because commenting can help the authors in several ways:

1. The more comments, the more the search engines sees the site as an active site and display its content higher in the search list, and let's be honest, how many awful sites from the 1990's are top of the search rank instead of the newer and better written content that other sites have and yet they are not in the top rank! That's why many sites like nettuts will give away free books just for entering comments or subscribing to the rss, a super good deal for the user that gets a lot of things for free and you are doing just a little work to help them continue delivering free and quality materials for times to come.
2. Authors will get a boost even from a simple thank you, because it's the best way to see that what they wrote helped other people and those people wore so thankful that they wanted to reply personally to them giving their gratitude and opinion on the subject that the author wrote about (this is a super good way of helping the author create better content, for you, the reader, so just a simple action out of your part can bring a benefit to you in return).
3. Third of all (and this is a big one in my opinion) advertisers could see that the author can get the readers involved into taking actions even as simple as writing comments, but people who take actions are more likely to participate or buy things that the advertisers would advertise, so it would worth more for them to display ads on that site since it attracts readers who take actions.
4. Fourth of all if there is no feedback the author can't know if he needs to improve the quality of the content, or to have a better grammar, or if he improved since the last batches of posts that he posted.

Taking an action against this phenomenon

I've decided to break my excuses, and to give value where value is due, and comment for the sites that I appreciate, that have a good subject, that is worth commenting, that is worth praising.

Now what about you? Will you comment more? Will you give value back?

Or will you keep it to yourself???