Blog Improvement Project: Task 7

This week the Blog Improvement Project is focusing on comments - specifically, how to get more of them. The task is divided into three parts:

Take an inventory of your blog comments.

In the fortnight before tallying, I received 573 visits, and 37 comments on 13 posts - that’s an average (mean) of 2.85 per post and 1 per every 15.48 visits. A lot of room for improvement there!

Pick 3-4 of the techniques from the articles to implement over the next two weeks.

After reading those articles I have to wonder - does anyone really take comments so seriously as to blog at all hours in order to find the commenting peak hour? (Wouldn’t do me any good - there is no peak hour round here!)

Anyway ... my chosen techniques are:

1. Get much better at responding to comments left here. And do so as promptly as my night-owl blogging habits and time zone will allow. The people who comment early on such memes as Teaser Tuesdays and Booking Through Thursday do so while I’m asleep!
2. Leave more comments elsewhere, on a greater number of blogs - a New Year resolution which still needs work.
3. Ask questions. I’ve worked questions into a few reviews, and I like it so much I’m going to keep it!.

Spend the next two weeks trying to make your posts more comment friendly. By Saturday, April 18, write a post about which techniques you used and how well you think they worked.

Over eight days, I received 28 comments on 8 posts, and 397 visits: an average (mean) of 3.5 per post, and one for every 14.18 visits. An improvement! The average number of comments per post, while still low, rose by 22.81%, and the number of visits required to generate a comment fell by 8.4%.

However, these results were affected by the fact of there being several nights over the test period when I didn’t blog at all, due to tiredness or illness (I currently have a miserable cold, which at least provides a good excuse to read all day; only the need to post this and add links to the Saturday Review of Books got me to the computer tonight). Which means - I hope - that if I had actually been as busy commenting as I had intended, the results would have been much better.