This is the third article from the How To Build Reputation With A Blog series.
Today will talk about an important part of this process, namely the part in which you start to interact with your audience.
Listen To Them
Taking it off of your chest will make you feel better, but I don’t think it will add to your reputation, on the contrary. As you advance in the blogging world you’re going to realize that negative comments and positive comments aren’t different at all. They’re just reactions. Some of them are signs of a positive reaction you ignited with your post, some of them are signs of a negative reaction. And it’s ok to be like that. You’re not the beholder of the absolute truth and you don’t know their personal circumstances. They have the right to say whatever they want. And you have the right to take from their comments whatever you want. I had my own share of negative comments in some (quite popular posts), you can find one of them here: 33 Ways To Start Your Day.
I started (a little abruptly, I admit) with negative comments because they are pivotal part in the blogging process. The moment you’ll start to generate negative comments is the undoubtable mark of popularity. You’re becoming important. Your words are counting enough to get on the people nerves. You’re bringing in a change and change is always received with rejection (people love their comfort zones, you know). I’m not saying you should hunt for negative comments, that would be equally easy and lame. I’m saying that if you do your job constantly, at some point you will create some opponents. It’s natural, don’t be upset. Don’t get nervous. Don’t panic. Go on and do your job as usual.
Comments Policy
A blog is about interaction more than it is about broadcasting. The huge success of this phenomenon is due exactly to this part. Traditional media is a one way communication process. Blogging (and social media) is a two way communication process. Your readers can openly state their opinions. And that’s a very good thing.
As a general rule, I think you should keep your blog open to comments. And to answer to as many comments as you can, if possibly, to all. There will be milestones when you could get rid of the comments, but only in some special contexts, I’ll talk about them in a second. In the beginning, you should keep your blog open. And pray for some comments, too. Answer to them carefully, even if the are just short sentences like: “nice post, I like it”. Just say “thank you”. Answer to them even if they are (or especially if they are) negative comments. Try to find out why they are negative. In other words, don’t get offensive or defensive. Try to start an interaction.
From a certain level, managing comments could become harder than maintaining the blog. Especially if you get 50-60 comments per post or more. From this level up, I think you could update your comment policy. You can gradually go to answer only to certain comments, and then you can leave your readers only share their opinions or discuss. Some of the most popular bloggers found an interesting way to keep the interaction going on, while getting rid of the chore of maintaining or answering to hundreds of comments for every post: they created special forums. On these forums people will still have a chance to make their opinion heard, but it will be a much more open discussion space. I think Steve Pavlina did that a couple of years ago, and also Leo Babauta did that recently.
Email Strategy
A good part of your interaction will be hidden from your blog. Namely, you will be contacted directly, most of the time by email. You should have a strategy for answering emails as well. Some people think that because of the private nature of this communication channel, it wouldn’t count as much as comments and tend to be a little lazy when it comes to email, or even ignore it completely. I think this is a mistake. Not only it will create a (maybe false) image of an isolated individual, but it will make people reluctant to get in touch with you in the future.
Almost my entire business communication related to my blog is done by email. I couldn’t imagine how I could create some revenue with my blog without creating a more personal approach with my audience. Some of my readers become my blog business partners and I become a blog business partner for some of the blogs I follow. Not having a proper email strategy in place will create a serious financial handicap in the long run. Seems hard to believe but it’s real.
I usually receive three types of emails: people are asking for advice, people are asking for business opportunities and people are just telling me that my blog helped them. Didn’t got any angry email so far, but there’s time. And I have patience :-). I had my share of online hatred and irony, mostly from Romanian bloggers, but no direct email so far. Anyway, my email strategy goes like this: if I can give advice, I give it within the time frame of a week. If I can’t, I refuse politely, usually in a day or two. If the business opportunity looks interesting, I follow up. A few of my most profitable affiliate deals were created as a result of some long email discussions.
Social Media Strategy
I said it before, I’ll say it again: your blog goes beyond your blog. You’re not having only a single outlet, you have access to a lot of streams which can carry and deliver your message pretty fast to a huge audience. And that’s social media. In my experience, as a blogger, there are only a few places which can be of interest: twitter, Facebook, StmbleUpon (since I already talked extensively about StumbleUpon before, and since SU is mainly a promotion outlet, I won’t talk about it in this post, feel free to check out this post: The First Six Months Of Blogging – Promotion) Some people may have had good results using digg or reddit or delicious. I had a few myself, but not enough to draw some clear conclusions or to create some repetitive processes out of them.
From a reputation point of view, being at least on the most popular social media networks is a must. People are hanging out there. And they will expect to find interesting people there. It’s like everybody hang out in the big cities and if you chose to isolate yourself in the countryside, it will take a while to make those big city guys know that you’re around. You may still do it, but you’ll have to shout a little louder.
It’s a “hit and run” network. It has a very good link generation potential, and it can also act like a reputation enhancer. Your followers can act like broadcaster for you, transporting your message to their followers and so on. A few people told me they discovered me not through Google or direct recommendation, but by Twitter. The structure of this network will make it very easy to propagate your message to a potentially very big audience, very fast.
But it has a few downsides too. Being so fast, it means others are waiting for their messages to be delivered too. Your message will get out of focus almost instantly. If you’re not “floating”, meaning if you’re not generating enough retweeting activity, your links, after a 5-10 minutes spike, will become almost dead. The biggest interaction happens in the first 5-10 minutes on Twitter.
This “floating” can happen in a lot of ways and I don’t think this is the time and place in this post to cover all of them. The most common situations are: your tweet has been retweeted by an influencer (an influencer is a twitter person with at least a few tens of thousands of followers), you have a very big audience (hard to believe it will happen in the beginning) or you just got lucky, creating some very powerful viral content. I’ve experienced the first and the last of these situations quite often, especially the last one. There are few posts which are still retweeted daily even after a year: 100 Ways To Live A Better Life.
How do you create reputation on Twitter with your blog? Well, first of all, maintain a clear profile. Create and maintain a twitter landing page. Tweet your posts. Engage in conversations if people are asking you. Tweet other, non-blog related, stuff. People will know that you’re real and not a WordPress plugin. Create interactions.
It’s a place for human interaction rather than link sharing. In this respect it’s more human than Twitter, but it’s also more picky. Building a strong presence on Facebook will ensure a constant (albeit small) flow of links. If you get links from Facebook, you can be sure that those who shared those links are really enjoying your content. There is no reciprocal “pay-off” for sharing, as it may be in Twitter, when reteweeting is often a currency for supporting each other.
I admit I didn’t do much of an effort to create a Facebook presence, other than placing a link to my Facebook profile on my blog sidebars. And yet, I get friendship requests on a daily basis. Many of these friendship requests are generated by my blog. In fact, almost all the requests are generated by my blog.
Being mostly centered around relationships, Facebook will be a nice place to hang out with like-minded people, chat, exchange ideas or just seeing other people lives unfolding in front of you. If you got an organic Facebook audience, I guess the most important thing is to be consistent. Sharing stuff on your wall which has little or no connection with your blog will dazzle your audience (I did it a few times and it does 🙂 ).
Why Is This Important And What Are The Benefits
Direct interaction with your audience is a great gift. You have instant access to what people really like or dislike about you or your work. You know immediately if you did a blunder or if you hit it big. And you have a chance to meet a lot of people in real life. I personally met a few bloggers I respect while I was traveling last year and it was a fantastic experience.
Reputation is not something you carry on yourself, show it to somebody and they will recognize it. It doesn’t work like this. Reputation is in fact created and maintained by your audience. You may brag about how good and skilled you are as much as you want, if other people won’t agree with what you say, it will mean nothing.
So, if you really wanna know if you have built reputation don’t look in the mirror, don’t re-read your blog posts, don’t get out in the front of your house and shout out from the top of your lungs: “I’m the best guy in my field!”.
Just look at your audience. Your readers will never lie to you.
I personally don’t like blogs that close the comment section after a certain period of days. I mean why should you? I think blogs are there to comment and there should be a way to share your personal opinion about things, even if the article itself is old.
Dragos
You offer great tips on reaching your audience and promoting you blog. I discovered you through Sandra and I’m glad I did. Really nice site you have here. I’m a novice writing a blogging tips blog not an easy task, but I love the challenge. I’ve bookmarked you site for further reading. I’ll be reading and re-reading your ‘reputation’ series as I see great value in it. I love what you say about having patience. Not a virtue I have much of, but blogging is teaching me that. Wishing you all the best in your blogging!
You have great tips here Dragos. I learned early on not to take negative comments personally. I love it when people aren’t afraid to express a difference of opinion. So far, its been done respectfully and I think I could handle it even if that wasn’t the case. I just love interacting with readers and seeing how they respond to what I’ve put out there.
As a new blogger myself (about 2 months in) I really appreciate the tips. Thanks for leading by example!
I find most comments that say things like “nice post” are spammers. In fact, there are a lot of longer comments that may seem like true comments but are in fact, spam. Cut and pasted on dozens of other blogs word for word.
When I do get real comments, I can still take the time to answer each one at this point. I love those that truly take the time to leave a comment after reading a post. I think they deserve to be answered as well as I can. I always point to Liz Strauss who seems to answer every comment to her.
It’s been said before that comments make a blog a blog.
Have you tried Akismet? It’s a really good spam filter.
Hi Dragos,
Enjoying the series so far. I think I’ve been really lucky with my reader’s comments so far – not a negative one in the bunch and I’ve got 000’s so far. I’m sure that I will PO somebody at some point, but nothing to the extent that you’ve talked about. I guess that’s certainly one way to grow a thick skin though. Don’t let the negative people get you down. I don’t really agree with those who have turned off comments – personally, I think it’s a cop-out as there are other ways to manage your readers, but each to their own.
I can imagine how it will be to deal with answering 100 comments per day. I’m sure you can get away with it after some adaptation period, but maybe the time spent answering comments will start feeling like underused. Or something like this…
The commenting and exchange of ideas is half the fun of blogging. I love seeing how words are received and interpreted and it’s fun to banter over a post or just sincerely thank an author. For me it’s not only about building a reputation but enjoying a huge part of this playground we all share. I am liking this series very much! 🙂
Glad you’re enjoying the series. Interaction is fundamentally fun for every human being, but when you try to build reputation is also mandatory.
Excellent and very practical. I especially appreciated the advice about receiving negative comments gracefully. It’s an art to learn not to react – useful in blogging and in life. The section on social networking was also full of jewels. I’m really enjoying the series. Thanks so much!
Thanks for the comment and for the links on your blog, Sandra. Appreciated. And yes, that’s the spirit 🙂
Indeed, keeping up (and trying to be nice) with comments can be stressing. For a recent post I wrote, I got around 30 comments in a night, lengthy comments. Some of them a little bit harsh or slighltly insulting or condescending. Luckily I’m getting stronger in the “let go” you suggest… Anyway, it took me one hour answering all of them, felt really tiring.
The article still got more comments, and luckily I could cope with them as they came, but answering takes its toll. But as every blogger is also a commenter, if you don’t feel like answering, think again. Don’t you feel better when you get an answer for your comment?
Ruben
I know the feeling, I got 100 comments on one of my lists and I tried to answer to all of them. Eventually, I realized people were just expressing their feeling, and they weren’t necessarily looking for interaction. It really is different from post to post.
I really strive to live this way in my blogging, and in my life too. The interactions I have with folks are all like little threads that weave together to build a strong supportive community. Yes, it’s good for my blog, but it’s bigger than that. It helps create a place and a space that feels safe and supportive, and when people see me on other sites, away from the blog, that same sense of approachability and comfort follows along. Community is a blessing – a lot of work, yes, – but so rewarding.
You know what they say: if it’s too easy, it probably doesn’t worth. It’s difficult, but really rewarding.
Hi Dragos,
One of the greatest & unexpected surprises of starting my blog me was the level of interaction with the commenters. People leave such genuine, honest comments and my response helps take the conversation deeper. It is an unintended benefit to regular readers. In fact, I’m so pleased by the level of comments, I started a “Best Comments of the Week” feature… winners receive a complimentary copy of my book.
That’s a pretty neat idea, Rob, I’m sure it will create some noise 🙂