Blog Improvement Project: Task 8

And now, here’s the task:

Take a tally of where your comments are today. Compare this number to the total you took at the beginning of BIP #7. I just realized this might be totally skewed because of the Read-a-Thon, but we’ll just try and deal with messy data :)

Read article about leaving quality comments and do some online searching for other useful articles. Link to those articles on your blog or in the comments here. Think about how you might implement some of these ideas.

Set some goals about leaving better comments, then implement those goals by leaving as many high-quality comments as you can.

At the end of the next two weeks, task stock of how your comments have changed — has our focus on comments this month gotten you more visitors and good comments on your blog?

Well ... talk about mixed results! After leaving 20 comments in 11 days (pretty good for me, especially since I wasn’t online every day) the number of comments per post went down, the number of visits required to get a comment shot up, but the number of visitors per day increased. I’m not sure what this means, except perhaps that the experimental period was too short to produce meaningful results. Probably the fact that the eleven days included only two reviews - near the end of the period - had something to do with it. Also my omission of Saturday Review of Books link-ups. (I got distracted by the tv - Bringing Up Baby was on.)

So I plan to extend this little experiment. I’m keeping my stats from these comment-related tasks, and I’ll continue challenging myself to leave comments wherever I can. Later in the year I’ll crunch the numbers again, and hopefully they’ll make more sense!