Is There Treasure In That Blog? Take Time To Find Out

It’s important to comment on other people’s blogs. It lets you get involved in the wider online conversation, you can bring people back to your own site, you develop links and a reputation. There’s a lot of articles out there on how to comment effectively. Most of them talk about the importance of using Google Reader (or an equivalent) to pull together all your blog feeds, so that you are sure to comment regularly. That’s great, but it’s also quite limiting. There’s great content out there that you’re not finding, hidden in the backstreets of the web.

Google Reader is great. I use it every day, it brings me great content, and I comment regularly on posts from my RSS feeds. I only subscribe to about thirty feeds, but even then, if I don’t check up for a couple of days I’m going to have a bunch of articles to try and catch up on. Which means that there must be a tipping point when you just have too many feeds to monitor effectively.

You’re Limiting Your Commenting To A Fraction Of The Audience

There must be at least 200 million blogs around these days, probably more. I couldn’t find much data after 2008, but even then Technorati was tracking 112 million and the China Internet Network Information Center was tracking another 70 million just in their own country according to the Blog Herald!

Let’s be conservative and say that a tiny 0.1% of that 200 million are blogs about web design/freelancing/coding. That’s 200,000 blogs. Let’s go further, and say that three quarters of those blogs are inactive. So we’re down to 50,000 active blogs about web design and related subjects.

You’re a crazy tech news junkie, so you’re subscribed to 1,000 blogs via Google Reader. That’s far more than most, you’ve got your finger on the pulse. Say you’ve even found time to comment on most of those blogs at some point in the last year.

You’ve interacted with 2% of the total active blogs in your subject area.

You’re also always interacting with the same 2%. The blogs that you’re subscribed to. Sure, they may be the more active or more popular blogs, but it means that you’re never reacting to content on 98% of the web design blogs out there.

Google Reader Is Your Organized Approach, Take A Random Approach Too

We use Google Reader to organize the blogs we subscribe to. Subscription suggests that we’ve developed some kind of longer term interest in the content of that blog. We need to organize that content, particularly when we’re pulling in so much information from so many different feeds.

But we shouldn’t neglect the fact that there’s other good content out there. Content that we might be the first person to find, to comment on, to promote to others. We’re not going to find it through Google Reader. We’re not going to find it through Twitter either – ever noticed how 90% of the retweets you see are from blogs that you’re aware of already, even if you don’t subscribe?

Every couple of days I do a Google Blog Search for “web design”. It brings up a mixed bag of blog articles, from self promotion, to rubbish, to a few gems. And it’s the gems I’m looking for. They may not be from well known blogs, they may not be something I’ve ever seen before, and that’s great. I’m going to comment on them. I’m going to spread the word about the great content. It helps a blogger who might be struggling for a profile. It helps me, because I become a valuable visitor to that blogger; they’ll probably visit my site in return. It helps the community as a whole, because it means that we’re not just limiting ourselves to the same well known blogs for all our content.

Someone Else Will Do The Same For You

Those are my favourite kind of visitors. The ones who stumbled on my site completely randomly, and liked the content enough to stay for a while and make a comment. They weren’t directed there, my site wasn’t recommended, they were just surfing and they thought that my site, out of the billions on offer, was worth a few minutes of their time. How cool is that?

I believe that good things come back to reward you. So spend a little time taking a random approach to blog commenting, and find some blogs you (or anyone else) have never heard of. You’ll find some great content, and you might even make someone’s day.