The 5 Best Ways to Track Your Comments on the Web.
1,350 views
A blog is not written just so it can be left there to rot. Aside from the fact that you want to share some relevant information to other people, you also probably want to have more and more readers interested in what you have to say. In addition, blog commenting is also as important to make your blog appear more active.
Like to comment a lot? Ok, then find your last 20 comments and the replies they received. Tough job, right? You can’t remember the last 20 websites you visited, let alone the last 20 you’ve commented on. Never fear, though: there are ways to keep track of your comments online. Maybe one day you can collect all those comments and write a book. (Not a great book, admittedly, but anything is better than Paris Hilton’s Prison Diary.)
It is a fact of life that not all your readers will readily post a comment to your blog. Even if they find that it helped them a lot, not many can spare some time to put on a simple comment. This happens all the time. You could either make your blog more interesting or have friends and other acquaintances make some comments to get the ball rolling.
- Co.mments offers a very simple way to selectively track conversations on blogs. Register and drag a bookmarklet to your toolbar; open up a page with a conversation you want to track, and simply click on the bookmarklet. The conversation will be recorded for you on the co.mments page. You can subscribe to your conversation via an RSS feed, and if you want to track them on the co.mments site, you might want to learn a couple of keyboard shortcuts which will make your life much easier. Co.mments also offers a code snippet which you can put on your blog: it makes it easy to your visitors to track the conversations there.
- CoComment offers several installation options: you can either use a simple bookmarklet, or a Firefox extension, which brings the benefits of some advanced features. The extension will bring a new button to your toolbar: click it when you’re on a comment page, and you’ll be presented with a window which enables you to add the page to your tracking list. Of course, to be able to access your comments, you need to register at the site.
The actual tracking list is quite advanced: it allows you to filter conversations based on several criteria. You can even blacklist certain sites, or claim your blog through Technorati and then edit posts and comments through CoComment. Finally, you can monitor your community: the people commenting in the same places as you, posting replies to your comments, or the people you’ve added as your favorites. All in all, CoComment offers a very complete package for comment tracking, and we highly recommend it. - Commentful works similar to CoComment - you can also choose between a simple bookmarklet or a Firefox extension, or you can add pages you’re commenting on to the watchlist manually. The extension will enable you to add pages with comments to your watchlist via a new item in your rightclick menu. The watchlist doesn’t have as many features as CoComment, but it’s presented in a very aesthetically pleasing list. It’s also possible to receive notifications of new comments via RSS.
*notice: during our review Commentful was annoyingly slow; we believe that this is a temporary issue and that we were just unlucky, but it’s something to have in mind. - Diggwatch. For all you heavy Diggers, this neat app will come as a godsend. It enables you to track your comments on Digg, your friends’ comments, and comments on stories posted from a certain domain. No registration is needed, just enter your Digg user name and fire away. For each comment you get the user name of the commenter, as well as the number of positive and negative votes the comment got. Just bear in mind that tracking a huge amount of comments from your friends might take a while.
- del.icio.us. We’ve picked up this one here. We think that any of the above approaches actually works better, but if you’re a hardcore del.icio.us user you might want to track your comments with the help of this bookmarking service. To make this work, add “&tags=self” (the tag doesn’t have to be “self”, it can be anything you like) to the end of the standard del.icio.us bookmarklet. Now, whenever you’re on a page you’d like to track comments for, click on the bookmarklet and it will be tagged with “self” on del.icio.us. Later you can track conversations by filtering your del.icio.us bookmarks with the “self” tag.
The thing about having a few comments into your blog is for your other readers to see that it is not dead and not being read. Nothing like a dead-looking blog to take the interests off potential readers who will stumble into upon them.
This is more so for blogs that have the sole purpose of advertising their business. You can tell these blogs apart from the links that are embedded into them. If you try to click on those links, you will be directed to another website which is more or less related to what the blog is all about.
Blog commenting also have the intent of gaining more relevant links to have in your site. It can be noted that like forums, leaving comments on blogs is a way of placing links which people can also go through. Blog commenting had long been a form of free advertising that businesses take advantage of. All that needs to be done is to find a blog that is interesting and is known for their readability.
Blog comments does not have to be positive all the time. There are no rules that state that negative comments should not be put into blogs. This is because readers will not always agree on what you have to say. There will be those who need to voice out their opinions about your post. If this happens, do not feel put down. Accept negative comments as something to learn about. You can learn more from negative comments rather than positive ones.
Blog commenting has also become a source of income for some people. For posts that needed all the publicity they could get, they pay other people just for commenting on their blogs. These are those who only makes use of blogs to optimize their websites and gain more visitors to whatever it is they are marketing on their blogs.
Overall, people have realized the value of what blog commenting can do. In time, you will be able to see and reap the benefits that comments can do to your posts if ever you are intent on pursuing it early on… [read more]
If you liked this tutorial, add us to:
Digg.com | Netscape.com | Del.icio.us | Reddit.com | Stumbleupon.com | Google.com | Yahoo.com
Related posts:
- No related posts found.