Blogs have become a very effective way of communicating on the Internet. Huge conversations are started everyday through blogs. Blog authors start the conversations by posting new articles and others post comments and ping back the original blog from their blog. Commenting is a good way to join in the conversation but if done properly can really get yourself noticed. So why would you want to get yourself noticed on someone else’s blog? Well if your read Blogging Tips you are obviously interested in blogging yourself and may have a blog. Gaining readers from commenting on other blogs is a great technique to grow your audience.
In this post I want to give you some tips to help separate yourself from the other comments and really stand out.
- Comment on things your passionate about - When you comment on things your passionate about your comments are usually more thought out and will just naturally stand out for its content.
- Add missed points or disagree - When you point out things the author missed or disagree with the author you get a reaction something like this. “Who does this peron think they are?” Always a good lure to get the author and their readers to at least explore your blog.
- Use a catchy avatar - Lots of blogs, like this one use your MyBlogLog avatar to display next to your comment. Now that your avatar got your comment noticed its up to your words to close the deal.
- Threaded commenting systems- Some blogs get tons of comments so if your not one of the first to comment chances are you’ll never get your comments read. If the blog uses threaded comments I like to comment to the first or second comment. This is a sneaky little trick you can try out.
- Use <strong> - Like I am doing here with each point in this post, you can use the <strong> tag to bold high points in your comment. Just put <strong> before the words to bold and </strong> after.
Ok so lets see how many of you take advantage of these tips here. Lets see if you can get your comments noticed. 
Bobby_Rio | November 22nd, 2007 at 11:51 am #
One of the best things I’ve found is to ask a really good question as a comment. Unless the blogger gets so many comments he doesn’t read them, he will most likely address your question and put some focus on you.
A Blog about Nothing | November 22nd, 2007 at 12:26 pm #
What plugin does this site use to display the avatar next to the comments? Also how valuable do you feel nested/threaded comments are versus generic linear for generating conversation?
Kevin | November 22nd, 2007 at 5:23 pm #
I think very few people use the strong tags while commentating, myself included - nice tip
A blog about nothing - We display avatars using the MyAvatars plugin. I recommend it
Wayne Liew | November 22nd, 2007 at 7:26 pm #
How about ways like commenting on a frequent basis or be different from others?
When people see your avatars often in the comment section, they tend to be curious about who you are and will click at it to check it out. (I guess)
When people are posting long comments, post a short one or vice versa. I think this will gain our comments some attention and clicks as well.
A Blog about Nothing | November 23rd, 2007 at 12:13 am #
@Kevin - Thanks! I’ll take a look at it.
Baz | November 23rd, 2007 at 8:50 pm #
What do you guys use for threaded comments these days?
I’ve heard of Brian’s Threaded (Nested) Comments, but haven’t been hearing much about it lately.
I’ve come across, WP Threaded comments, but these only thread on level deep.
jblanton (Post Author) | November 23rd, 2007 at 11:00 pm #
Brian’s threaded comments is the pug-in I have used in the past. It works nicely with no modification most of the time. Once in a while I run into a problem and just have to play around with it to work with a particular theme.
jblanton (Post Author) | November 23rd, 2007 at 11:02 pm #
Bobby_rio, Yes that is a very good method. It will also get others commenting as well. Thanks for adding to the conversation.
Baz | November 23rd, 2007 at 11:52 pm #
I don’t think my MyBlogLog works properly.
When ever I comment with my preferred name “Baz L”, the avatar doesn’t show up.
If I switch back to Baz, however it works fine.
Any ideas?
Kevin | November 24th, 2007 at 4:16 am #
I played around with brians threaded comments but after trying it out on several designs I quickly realised that it is badly coded. Theres no commentating and there were a lot of divs out of place etc which clashed with some templates so I had to spend a lot of time breaking everything down bit by bit.
Andy MacDonald | February 26th, 2008 at 4:00 pm #
A great post. i am very active on a number of blogs in terms of comments, and i write for a few blogs too. (including bloggingtips.com). I have found that you can actually get quite a bit of traffic from comments and make some friends.
keep up the good work.