Natespost

   Having gotten most of my technical chores out of the way during my first week, now I will devote my full attention to getting traffic. If you read my first post, you know that I don’t have the money to buy traffic generating ads. So what to do? I found an excellent article on this subject written by Alan Johnson at theratingblog.  He started out by becoming (and remaining) the top commentator on 50 blogs. Hmmm….Let’s see. Sounds like that would take some serious devotion, and….I’m unemployed, so what do I have other than time? I’m going to do the same, and adhere the following three rules of what turns a blog comment into a click for your blog.

1. Be Helpful - Stay on topic, and try to add something to the conversation that hasn’t already been added. You need to actually read the previous comments to make sure you don’t come across as an idiot.
2. Be Funny - Do this right and it can be very beneficial. Do this wrong, and you’re a complete jackass. REMEMBER….the spoken word and the typed word are two different languages. Sarcasm, in particular, is a very hard thing to make work within the confines of a blog comment.
3. Be Attractive- A lot of blogs have started allowing the use of gravitars in their comments. A gravitar is a picture of you or whatever you like that is shown next to your comment. The only time I will click on a commenter’s link is if they offered something that was helpful or interesting to me, proved to be pretty funny, or hot women. So my gravitar is a picture of an attractive woman that I bought the rights to at istockphoto. (the picture, not the woman) Setup your gravitar at www.gravatar.com

Good luck….now I’m off to go commenting!