Get Respect With Your Visitors Monday, November 24th Blogging

After the success of my post ‘get respect with your blog comment‘, I thought I might expand on the issue a little bit, and talk about another issue of ‘respect’. I have noticed this slowly creeping up on a lot of bloggers - a lot of them are ignoring the fact, and not giving respect to their visitors!

Now what do I mean by this? Well, when you own and operate a blog, you are lucky enough to be visited by people who are interested in what you have to say, and if they particularly like something you have said they might leave a comment on your blog – possibly thanking you for the advice, maybe even offering their own! A lot of bloggers leave it at that – just posting up their thoughts and admiring the comments left to them by their ‘fans’. However what they are doing is showing these people a lot of disrespect, and quite a few bloggers end up losing readers and commentators because of this reason. I have personal experience of this - I used to visit and post on a blog very frequently, but had no response from the creator of the blog. Since then, I have stopped commentating on it, and his site has slowly shrunk in the amount of followers that he had. So how do we prevent this? Well, there are a couple of ways of solidifying yourself some good readers, as well as making some great friends.

First right off the bat, is that anyone who decides to leave a comment on your site, you should always try to leave a reply. They have taken the time to read what you have written and actually leave a thought about it! You should show the commentator some respect by either replying to the comment or even just thanking them for visiting. It only takes a minute or two to do so, and is a very friendly/sociable thing to do.

Another thing I try to do is visit the blogs of the people who have visited my site. If they have taken time out of theirs lives to read what I have to talk about, I should be able to spare them a little bit of my time to check out their blog / website! Even nicer is to return the comment on their site, leaving them with a comment regarding their post. However if you are going to leave a comment, don’t make it a comment saying something like ‘Thanks for visiting my site!’ as that is just patronising, and shows you didn’t even bother reading what they had to share. If you can’t think of anything to comment, then don’t worry about it – you don’t have to comment! You could always send a nice message to the owner via email, thanking them for visiting the site, and complementing them on theirs! There is actually a nice plugin that I use myself – which emails new commentators on your site a nice little welcome message, thanking them for visiting. It is called Comment Relish and I highly recommend it.

Obviously your not always going to be able to visit everyones blog, or maybe even reply to all the comments left on your site (we all don’t have the amount of time we would like) yet showing your visitors some form of respect – be it in your posts, competitions, or even little emails - is paramount to making new friends, and ensuring return visits to your blog. If you ignore your visitors, your blogging is worthless.

Dan