5 Little Words, 24 Hours, 100 Comments

Blogger Chris Brogan wrote just five little words on June 10, 2009. Within 24 hours, those five words had already provoked over 100 comments and counting!

What was it that created such a stir? With just those few words, Chris struck a chord that continues to resonate throughout the blogosphere, screaming - debate with me! That five-word post was thought provoking (to say the least) and had the necessary elements to stir up controversy, to explain his point of view on the subject of Facebook, and excellent marketing ability.

Brilliant, Chris, just brilliant.

Blog Tip: The Flavor Comes Out When You Stir Up the Pot

Don't Be a Blogging 'Yes Man'

Being polite and agreeable has its place, but it's not in the blogging world. While there are a plethora of eager-to-please bloggers out there circulating their sheeple shit, very few bloggers are willing to share their true opinions. Too many bloggers forget that not only do we have a voice, but with the right words - we have the ability to communicate with millions. The ability to seek truth and relay facts on an international level within minutes from the homes of billions around the world is fantastic - and yet it a completely accessible communication medium to anyone with a voice and a computer with internet.

Media bloggers pumping regurgitated news blurbs on all the major networks fail to present the burning questions of our time, let alone finding answers. The internet has turned many people into truth seekers and instant researchers, obtaining answers in just a few clicks. Some argue that bloggers are the journalists of our future; others believe that bloggers are nothing more than idiots with web access and a meaningless opinion.

The fact of the matter is, bloggers have become part of a pivotal point in our social society, as well as a major contributor to the continued success of many online businesses. Bloggers are being noticed as having the ability to create hype and fame, as well as destroy lives and spread rumors that reach millions in the blink of an eye.

So what really makes bloggers and journalists different? While many journalists pride themselves on their education and their degree, believing that their credentials cause ears to listen - their degree and reputation cause them to repress many of the truths that they once sought to expose. Bloggers, on the other hand, display a fearlessness unlike that of traditional journalists. They often have no reputation to destroy, but are often discovered based on their controversial views - and the courage to share them openly.

Don't be afraid to stir up the pot; throw in a little controversy to mix it up a little. Have the courage to share the facts you find with others. Be confident enough in your research to contradicts the mainstream media coverage of a story, or the details of hidden facts kept from breaking stories on the news. Go ahead, YOU break the story!

The Untold Story of How the Three Little Pigs Built Their Blogs

Learn From the Mistakes of Others

Well, as we all know - learning from your mistakes saves you the time and hardship of making them again. But two of the three little pigs didn't seem to learn much from their ordeal with the big bad wolf. I don't know if you ever knew the names of the three pigs, but the one who built his house out of straw - that was Gary. Larry was the one who built his house out of twigs, and George, well - he built his home out of bricks.

Keeping Up with the Jones's

All three pigs moved from wolf's territory just after he huffed, and puffed, and blew two of their houses down. They moved out near the old information highway, which is far away from the big bad wolf. The three little pigs moved into a new neighborhood called the Web, which is now almost entirely dominated and powered by Ooogle. But the pigs weren't intimidated by Ooogle's laws of the land, and each had a plan to become part of the blogging community.

Their new neighbors, the Jones family, said that almost everyone in the community has recently redesigned using the Web 2.0 model - and the pigs just had to keep up with the Jones's.
Each of them quickly began to build their blogs, each with different types of blogging platforms, different types of writing styles, and offered very different information on their blogs.

Gary's Blog Was Build from Straw

Gary actually built a pretty nice blog. The design was clean and simple, he had decent content, but his approach to getting more traffic was a little weak. Basically he just submitted to a few blog directories, trying to avoid dealing with Ooogle and the laws of the land. He sat, and he sat, waiting for visitors - but they didn't come. His traffic was close to zero, and Ooogle completely ignored his blog. He thought he could be doing more, but he didn't really know what to do. Gary would have to learn a little more about building traffic and becoming a part of the community before his blog would have the strength to stand up to Ooogle. Gary's blog fizzled.

Larry Built His Blog from Twigs

Larry wanted to build his blog quickly, so he used articles that he had posted on an old website he had. Well, one of Ooogle's laws of the land is that you never post duplicate information, so Larry's used articles quickly got Ooogle's attention. Ooogle banned him from the query results page, saying he posted duplicated information. Larry's blog fizzled.

George Gained Success through His Blog Built of Bricks

George bought his own domain right away, that way people would take him more seriously as a member of the community. He started out with great content to begin with, and often participated in discussions in forums and joining conversations by leaving insightful comments and sharing useful information on relevant blogs. He even gave away some great information for free. George's blog sizzled! Within just a few weeks, he had his first few visitors, and some even left comments! He commented back, and he visited the sites of those who left comments - leaving a comment for them as well. He was invited to guest blog on a popular blog, and a few of his posts were pretty hot on Digg! He was well on his way to becoming a valuable member of the community, offering useful information to his readers.

The Traffic Formula

Traffic, just like any other measure of success, is the fruition of the hard work and dedication you have put into your blog. If you don’t already have a steady flow of traffic, whether it’s five visitors a day or five-thousand, then you probably aren’t taking the proper combination of steps (or enough of the proper steps) to help people find your blog and take interest in what you have to say.

Quality Content

Basically, the successful traffic equation is simple:

Quality Content + Community Participation = Traffic

This is probably the most important factor when considering your traffic flow. As far as new visitors are concerned, if you don’t offer valuable information within the first 30-seconds of their visit – you’ve lost them. Furthermore, if your layout is confusing, or if your information is outdated, they might leave without reading the great information you offer. The combination of quality content and a good site layout is the proper foundation for a successful blog, and a growing readership.
As debates between the journalism community and the blogging community heat up, there is a more intense expectation of bloggers to produce quality content. Even if you are blogging about Aunt Martha’s favorite recipes, your information could either be jam-packed with useful information – or you could rattle on for paragraphs about nothing but her cat. But if readers are expecting to get a few great recipes from that aunt they never had and are instead pummeled with countless anecdotes about Fluffy – they’ll leave. They probably won’t even stick around long enough to find those delicious recipes – and certainly won’t be book-marking your blog!

Community Participation

Once you have a decent amount of information put together in an organized fashion, you’re ready to get out and socialize! That’s right – in order to build blog traffic in the quickly-evolving web 2.0 world of today, you’ve got to get out and join the blog party. This means joining social networks, forums, community memberships, and commenting within your niche. Find others that have blogs in complimentary subjects, and leave comments that offer value to the conversation. You’ll find that leaving useful and informative comments on highly-visible blogs can turn out to be a wonderful source of traffic.

On that same note, if you participate in community forums, you will find that by sharing valuable information within that community can help seat you in a position of “authority” within your particular niche. Basically, it’s a game of social survival – just like high-school, but in this game the goal is not only to become popular, but to become viewed as an authority in your niche. You want to get people talking about you, and what you have to say. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people open their posts with, “I was just reading an article by Darren on ProBlogger”. I’m starting to wonder if the guy could just write 10 words about chocolate – and people would actually believe that there was a blogging lesson in those 10 words that they learned by visiting ProBlogger that day.
That’s the power of becoming an authority within your niche.

Three Things You Can Do to Improve Your Blog

Improve the Look and Feel of Your Layout

• Organize and De-Clutter - Get rid of widgets and buttons that do not offer anything to your reader, or to you. Eliminate anything that causes a "cluttered" look, or is distracting. smooth out the appearance, align the sidebars and contents in a way that creates a "clean" look and fresh feel.
• Create Usability - place common objects in a place that is to be expected. people will look for certain things to be in a certain area, and readers will appreciate being able to find these things easily. Thanks for the tips, Skellie!
• Add - Elements, colors and pictures - in a non-distracting way, of course. Think of it as a sort of eye-candy, or entertainment for the eyes that keeps your reader interested. Plain text can appear boring and blah when you have been on a site for a while. If you want your readers to continue reading and viewing your content, you'll need a little flair and style!

Increase Traffic

• Build Links - Using link building techniques such as comments, blog submissions, community forums and deep linking will help to build your blog traffic, increase traffic through search engines, and help build credibility for you as a blogger.
• Social Networking - Social networks and social media are extremely useful if your content is able to generate a buzz.

Improve Your Content

• What You Offer - Consider the usefulness of the information you offer
• Provide Resources - In doing so, you earn the opportunity to become recognized as a resource, and you yourself may ending up an expert in your niche.
• Avoid - Stay away from writing styles that could confuse or distract the reader. If you have bad writing habits that prevent readers from understanding your point, you'll quickly lose any potential readers.
• Create Usability - User-friendly, easy to read information. Create content that is laid out in a way that is easy to understand, and readers know you have a point. Their time is valuable, and your content should convey to the reader that there is something of value that you have to offer. If your posts are long and indirect - readers are more likely to get bored and move on.
• Study - Go back and look over past posts. Re-read some of the older ones that you once considered great posts. Compare your writing style and ability to convey your message with now - and see how you've grown or changed as a writer.
• Read - Make sure that you are regularly reading other blogs, whether for inspiration, ideas, commenting opportunities, or simply to learn more about your own niche. Don't get yourself stranded on a blogging island.

Search Phrases and Keywords - A Traffic Building Exercise

Try any number of combinations of a phrase, and see how different the search results returned for each phrase can be. For example, open four individual browser tabs (or windows if necessary).

Google the following phrases:

• hammer tools
• hammers tool
• tool hammers
• tools hammer

When I Googled the four above phrases, I got different results, or the same results in a different order. Without scrolling down on each page, I can already see that MyToolStore came up within the top 5 listed results in all four searches. You can experiment with this using almost any phrase, in almost every search engine, and it will produce the same result - single or plural nouns, as well as the order of your chosen words will have a direct impact on the results returned.

Why should this matter to you? Well, you see . . . your will appear in the search engines much in the same way as the tools and hammers. The average search phrase is about 4 words, and that will also produce more specified results. For example: If you are searching for a hammer, you are likely to also type in what type of hammer you are looking for. If you just typed in hammer, you would get too many unrelated results - but if you typed in "geology hammer" or "rock hammer" your results would be much more specific.

Since your blog will appear in these results as well, or articles that you write, you'll want to use certain keywords and phrases in your writing - naturally, of course. You can easily implement this tactic by replacing words like "it" and "this" with keywords and key phrases that search engines will pick up on. For example: In this article, I have used the following words: blog, blogging, write, and writing – a combined total of nine times so far. (This will increase with the next sentence!) When I ran a search for the word “blog”, the search tool included the word “blogging”. But when I entered in the word “blogging”, it did not pick up on the instances of the word “blog”.

From this simple exercise, you can conclude that the root words are more likely to produce results that include other variations, as long as the spelling of the root word remains intact. For example: “Write” will not bring up results containing the word “writing” because the ‘e’ in vary was replaced with the letter ‘i’ in writing. The more you mention a certain subject in your blog posts or article writing, the easier it will be for search engines pick up on your keywords, and will eventually regard your website or blog as “relevant” to a certain topic.

Increase Traffic Through Link Building

Okay, for all of you who are looking for insta-traffic, you're likely to be disappointed with this advice. We all want instant results, but the reality of the situation is that we - as bloggers, must work for this. True, there are a few exceptions to the rule, but most bloggers are starting from scratch, and building traffic will not be an instantaneous, single-action button click. If it were that easy, the blogosphere would be weighed down with splogs (or spam-blogs) that offer no value to the reader.

Comment Traffic

Now, keep those A-listers in mind; they should be part of your plan to build traffic. If you are already reading an A-list blog, either for inspiration, learning, or just for entertainment, your first step should be to start participating in the conversations. Posting a comment on an A-list blog is a spectacular way to get noticed, especially if you write an insightful and edifying comment. A well placed link in a comment, or even a comment well placed (such as in the first five comments) will create visibility, and quite possibly become a permanent source of traffic.

Forum Traffic

Forums are a good place to become part of a community of bloggers. While many people believe that you can just sign up for membership in a few free forums and place their links, then disappear - this strategy will often fail. To develop any sort of real traffic from forums or message boards, you must first earn the respect of your fellow community members. Many bloggers don't want (or feel that they don't need) the support of fellow bloggers, but this line of thinking will often put you on a blogging island.

• Fact: Bloggers often link to other blogs they read, especially when they find a blog particularly useful or valuable.

Not all Links are Created Equal

The basic rule of thumb when it comes to placing links is simple: Links placed in high-traffic areas will have more visibility = more traffic for you. For example: if you place a link on a rarely read blog, your link will be rarely seen. When you place a link on a site where it will quickly disappear will cause your traffic flow from that link to also disappear. This means that if you are placing your links on a site like Craigslist, your links will have a maximum 7-day shelf-life. Much of your time spent placing links such as this will be lost, and so will your traffic.

By becoming part of the community, (i.e. getting involved in the conversations, regular participation, helpful advice to fellow bloggers, etc.) you have the opportunity to develop relationships with other bloggers. This can turn into a valuable source of traffic, especially if you regularly contribute valuable information. Bloggers will link to your blog or certain posts that they feel are useful to their readers.

As a forum member, you also have the opportunity to place links to your blog in your signature. This is especially useful for the active forum participant, especially if you post useful information. By doing so, you will earn respect, and your blog and posts in the forum will be perceived as valuable. For example: if you post tips or information that other bloggers charge money for, people will automatically click the link to your blog to see what else they can learn from you. All too many new bloggers feel that the good stuff should be kept secret, and instead their blogs end up full of fluff. Keeping some of your best secrets to yourself is normal - but to keep it all to yourself could downgrade the usefulness of your blog, and it could easily be disregarded as useless babble. Some of the most famous and successful bloggers share some really great information and that is often what sets them apart from the rest.

Breaking News Can Bring Your Blog to the Top 10 in Google

It's not always easy to make it onto the first page of a Google search, but there are a few things that can help boost you up to the top. One of the best examples I can share with you comes from one of my other blogs, Blogging Mt Hood. Most people in the U.S. are familiar with the story that brought my blog to the top - unintentionally.

Since I live in the Mt Hood area of Oregon, I decided it would be fun to blog about the local events, people, places to go, and local news from the locals' point of view. Well, nearly one year ago, three hikers went missing on Mt Hood. When I decided to write about what happened in our local area, the tragic events that took place on the mountain became the very thing that brought my blog to the front page of Google. Because two of those hikers were never found, people continue to search for answers from across the country, and visit my blog to read about it.

While I would certainly hope that there is a more positive news story you are able to follow - I encourage bloggers to include current events in their blog posts. I would even suggest finding out what some of the top search terms are for the day - and if any apply to your niche, then be sure to include it.

Now don't get me wrong, including names like Paris, Lindsay or Britney in your blog may not be the best way to bring visitors to your blog - even if they are in the news a lot. People continue to visit Blogging Mt Hood because the story is relevent to the blog, and they return to read many other blog posts, not just the tragedies. In fact - if you were to use a famous name to bring people to your techie blog - you'll quickly learn that even when people do land on your site due to specific keywords, if they aren't relevent to your blog topic - the visitors will quickly leave.

Increase Your Blogging Traffic With an Innovative New Tool

Recently I received a blogging newsletter from one of the big timers that said that there was a widget that could increase your blog traffic. I figured it couldn't hurt, so I have signed up for it as well. The widget is actually kind of appealing, and it offers to display your blog across other widget users' blogs for each time that your widget is viewed. So if your titles are catchy enough to human readers, rather than search engines, you'll get click-thru traffic. It seems like a fairly simple concept. I'll try to keep you updated as to whether or not it actually works well as a traffic tool. If you're already familiar with BlogRush, then let us know how it's working for you. If you haven't already tried it, check it out!

Sending Pings When You Update Your Blog

Each time you update your blog, you want to let the search engines know that you've got new content, not to mention the many blog indexing sites that are on the web. Many search engines, such as Google, calculate how often your blog has been updated in the past, and only visit your site periodically based on that calculation. If you decide to update sooner than usual, you definitely want to take advantage of the "bulk ping" sites in order to update make that new information more accessible and available. (A ping is when your site communicates with other sites to say "I've updated.")

One of the quickest and easiest sites to send multiple pings from is Pingoat. I've mentioned thier site in the past, as it is simple to use and pings most of the popular blog indexes on the internet. Technorati is another good site to be a part of, allowing you to ping directly from their site, but lately their traffic levels are so high that they have trouble keeping up with the technical difficulties that some users are facing. You can ping the sites on Pingoat as often as you update your site, but if you try to ping when you have not updated, it will let you know that you are updating too quickly, and could reject your ping attempts. It's better to produce more content before trying to ping again.

How To Produce a Traffic Spike in Your Blog Stats

If you are writing consistently, but haven't yet seen an increase in traffic, there are a few things you can do to create an instant traffic boost. But all things done in order, you need a great blog post first. Not just a good blog post, but a really awesome post. You also need a really intriguing blog title, as well. This title will be the grabber for your readers in this style of traffic boosting, so it should not only be a great description of what your article is about, but grab the attention of the reader in a way that they just can't resist but to click on your article's title.

The post itself should be either newsworthy, or just full of fantastic information that the reader feels compelled to continue reading. Most of your blog posts or articles will not have this level of greatness, and it may take you a while to write such an article. This is a very important fact you must realize, that the article must truly be fantastic in order for this tactic to work, otherwise if you try it with too many mediocre articles or posts, readers will get to know that, and once you have the article that truly is great, you may have already let potential readers down and they may not be as willing to read the next one. Once you have that article, you're ready for the next level.

If you would like to see some great examples of the type of article I am speaking of, take a trip over to reddit or digg and read some of the hot topics and articles that are being posted. The articles on the front page of both of those sites are the best of the best. This is where you're going to find your "instant" traffic. When you've got your great article reader-ready and published on your blog, sign into one of these sites, it's free, and submit your article. Within just a few minutes, your article will be exposed to millions of readers, hungry for something great to read. You'll notice a spike in your traffic, which will actually help you in the long-run as well. By submitting your best article, you expose readers to your whole blog.

If it is truly a great article, readers will be likely to come back to your blog to check for more articles, and you could be looking at an increase in traffic on a more regular basis. If you are actually capable of writing articles of this level quite often, you'll definitely develop a larger flow of traffic that continues to grow. However, if your articles don't match that level of greatness, you'll simply enjoy a momentary spike in traffic and your stats will fall near the level they previously were before you posted your best article. You may even get the pleasure of attracting a few new readers who enjoy your blog for what it is.

Three Tips to Successful Blogging

No matter what your blogging motivation is, you're eventually going to want people to be reading it. Whether you're writing a novel online, or blogging in a particular niche to establish yourself as a blogger, without readers, your blog will essentially be for the simple self-satisfaction and enjoyment of designing and writing to your blog. If you are writing a novel online in the form of a blog, you'll want readers to leave you encouraging comments, or constructive criticism. If you're running a business blog, you'll want readers in order to make money, as you will if you're running a niche blog with advertisements, visitors and readers will help generate revenue.

High Quality High Quantity Blogging - If you want to build an excellent readership, you'll not only want to provide regularly updated information, but high quality information that your readers can benefit from. People will come back if they are receiving something, or learning something from your site. Readers will also likely return on a regular basis if they are entertained by what they are reading. Your blog can be simply for entertainment purposes, or your useful information can be written in an entertaining way, both will bring people back for more.

Useful Links and Information - If your blog is providing links to information that is useful to the readers, or information that isn't generally easy to find, your readers will likely return for more information. This is especially true if you regularly update the material on your site, or post to your blog on a regular basis. A great deal of people searching for information on the internet will search for free information before opting to pay for information, so providing it for free would boost your readership.

Credibility - In order to establish credibility, you've got to know what you're talking about. If you don't know your subject well, you'll have to be willing to do a lot of research to learn enough to write fluently about the subject. It's generally good to choose a subject you are extremely familiar with, especially if you want to establish credibility as an expert in your field. However, if you're just trying to get your feet wet, post quite a few articles and posts before you launch your blog or website. Try to get a feel for what it's like to post regularly, and establish a pattern to your posting. That way, you're not overwhelmed with by the need to post as often. While keeping your blog updated in the future, you can rest assured that your readers have enough to keep them reading. Don't launch if you're not familiar with regular posting unless you already have plenty of content. Readers may not come back if you only have one post. Blogging credibility can take months, and hundreds of posts to attain, but you've got to pay your dues in nearly every field. It's rare for anyone to burst out on the scene as an expert in a field if no one has ever heard of them.

A Few Good Places to Add and Submit your Blog

Once you're blog is up and ready to go, or if you want to improve your traffic and ratings, you'll want to submit your blog. Submitting isn't the end of the line though, you'll have to ping the sites when you update to make sure the crawlers are returning to your site often, picking up any new content you publish. This will help your blog get to the top of search results as well, because your content will always be fresh in their system, and pulled up in relevent searches.

Try submitting to some of the sites below, and then go to Pingoat or Ping-O-Matic and ping the sites you've submitted to, letting them know when you've updated.

ReadABlog - Blogarama - Globe of Blogs - BlogDex - Blog Universe - Ice Rocket

You'll also find a pretty extensive list at Pingoat where you can submit your blog, as well as ping them when you update. This is a pretty intensive part of your blog advertising, but once it's done you'll most likely see a jump in traffic after just a few weeks. Don't forget to comment on other people's blogs, and as long as the topic is relevent to your blog, go ahead and include a link. It can help your rankings as well!

Update Your Blog Early and Often

Search engines aren't just looking for keywords and page popularity anymore, you've got to keep your site up-to-date. If you haven't already noticed, when you search using search engines, many of the sites on the first page of results are blogs. This is because bloggers are doing something that other website owners are not doing - and that's updating their site regularly.

Search engines are picking up on the most recently updated sites because the content is considered to be fresh and up-to-date. When a site is pinged, it lets the search engines know that there is new content to be crawled. Then when someone is searching for keywords that appear on your most recent articles, they will show up in search results more often. While it used to popular to pay for being listed in the top results, it has now become relatively easy to end up in the top results simply by keeping up with good, quality content on a consistant basis. Chances are, if you stop writing, you'll lose valuable search engine rankings, as well as traffic. And for those of you who don't have very high traffic yet, updated content is absolutly necessary.

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Technorati tags:
blog traffic, blogging, traffic, web traffic, writing

SEO Tips - Keywords, Search Engines, and Traffic

In order to build a successful income online, you've got to get traffic. This is especially true if you are trying to make an income blogging. You've got to put some work into search engine optimization, or SEO, in order to convert web searches into traffic. But you're not looking to get just any traffic, you're looking for targeted traffic. If you've got a product to sell, or if you're looking to build an income from blogging, you'll want to make sure that you are targeting the right audience to bring readers who will actually take the time to read your blog. It's pretty obvious that if you don't have anything worth reading that people won't stay long, so quality content is extremely important. Blogging for money is not easy, but if you want to succeed, you'll have to compete amongst some pretty incredible bloggers. It can't be stressed enough, but high quality content can do amazing things for your blog. If people actually walk away having learned something from your blog, chances are - they will be back. But along with great content, you've got to have great keywords, and even better keyword combinations, which is a large part of search engine optimization. This is how interested readers will find your blog in the search engines.

Recent statistics show that four-word keyword queries have the highest conversion rates. This means that when people find your website in their search engine results, they actually click on your link. Most importantly, targeting the right keywords or keyphrases for your site can keep people on your site longer, because they are interested in the content, based on their search query. However, if you target the wrong keywords for the wrong reasons, you will only drive traffic away from your site, or even if people get to your site using the keywords - they turn around and quickly leave your site to find what they were really looking for. For instance, if you have a blog about furniture, and you target the popular keyphrase "Paris Hilton" all over your blog just to get traffic, you will notice in your statistics that people are leaving within seconds of arriving.

Once you have discovered keywords that are right for your site, you must integrate them into your content wisely. Repeating the words too often could result in search engines regarding your site as "keyword spam", and it won't be included in many search results, if any. You may even find that your keywords are slightly different for each blog post.

Commenting for Traffic

It's among the commonly used tactics for bloggers, but how does it work? Many bloggers who attempt this technique make a common mistake, which is to leave an irrelevent comment on a blog, which is actually considered spam. Comments should be left on blogs that you actually read...you do read other people's blogs, don't you? If you're blogging solely to make money, then you may not have anything relevent to say on another blog. However, if blogging is actually a passion of yours, then chances are you are reading the blogs of others - and enjoying their work. The same way you hope that other people are reading your blog, they are hoping that you will read theirs, and your comments are one way of showing that you are.

When a blogger notices a new comment, often times they will read the comment, and very possibly click on the link to the commenter's blog. You have unofficially invited them to read your blog by leaving a comment. Also, you have left your mark for other readers of their blog, and they may also click over to your blog. Most posts remain visible for at least 30-days, and often times they are permanent, meaning your comment will most likely send a small amount of traffic from that particular blog. If your comment has something profound to say, the chances that you will peak interest in your blog are even better. However, on the flip side, if you leave a spam comment, it may either be deleted, or in most cases - ignored by readers. This is usually a dirty tactic used by sploggers, which is a term to describe "spam bloggers" - a blogger who has nothing meaningful to say, and hopes to earn money by sitting on their butt and claiming to be a blog writer. The point? I digressed - the point is that by commenting on the blogs of others, with a comment that directly relates to the blog post, you will spark interest in your blog, and therefore point a few readers towards your blog. If you're writing an interesting blog, the readers will be likely to return. It's a great way to get a few targeted readers interested in your blog.