Do you need chat room for your blog?

Most of bloggers do everything possible to bring new readers for the blog and keep their attention on their materials as much as possible. That involves making an interesting, striking, and professionally arranged content. You encourage your visitors to be more active by allowing commenting, arguing, or supporting your point of view. But, can you go further, enhancing even more reader’s participation? Yes, you can.

New web application, Firef.ly, allows all site visitors discuss instantly your content between themselves. A simple code, embedded in your site, allows people who are surfing through it to chat amongst themselves in real time. This will allow you to quickly know what people think of your posts and your blog as a whole, creating a simple and effective chatroom. For site owner, managing the chat client is easy and straightforward. Once you embed the code, a nice bar will appear in the lower right hand portion of your site. With it, you’ll be able to see how many people are on the site at any one time and how many of them are actually chatting.

Definitely, to enjoy the advantages of this interesting and free service, you need to have certain amount of visitors to your blog at place, otherwise, you might be the only one, who will be interesting in content discussion.

In case you were wondering on the unusual domain, .LY is the top level domain extension for Lybia.

To see the new service in action, check the video, showing users communication on TWIT TV site as an example:

Chat Room on your Blog

Additional Reading:

http://www.killerstartups.com/Blogging-Widgets/firef-ly-chat-with-others-online
http://thenextweb.org/2008/08/01/firefly-chat-about-nothing-everywhere/
http://blogbadly.com/blog-content/inspire-reader-interaction-firefly-killer-chat-app/

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NicEdit - Comments Format Enhancement

Comments left by your readers on your Web Site or blog give produce a perception of the site popularity and legitimacy. Therefore, comments are generally encouraged, with exception of junk and spam, that can be successfully blocked by the modern filtering.
NicEdit is a very handy solution that helps, among other applications, to bring more user comments. It is done by significant enhancement of the comments formating capabilities.

NicEdit is a Lightweight, Cross Platform, Inline Content Editor allowing easy editing of comments or any web site content as a matter of fact on the fly in the browser. This Javascript utility can be easily integrated in any site with minimal impact while providing visitors an effective means to express themselves in rich text, making the standard text areas completely obsolete and boring.

NicEdit was developed by Brian Kirchoff and is free to use for any purpose under the MIT license.

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Not all the comments are born equal, or how to respect your customer

Continuing a topic of using comments to increase you blog exposure, started in my previous post http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2008/03/comments-as-source-of-free-traffic-to.html, I want to look on that from other side. Comments, left by your readers on your blog, are even more valuable than the comments you are leaving on other blogs. Why? Very simple. You leave comments to improve your blog exposure, to get more rating and referring links. All that to get more potential visitors. But, reader of your blog, leaving you a comment, has already came. And not just came, but also read your post and is willing to spend his valuable time, sharing his thoughts on the article or asking related question. What might be better than that? Show your respect and appreciation - respond ASAP, giving your feedback and encouraging further communication.

Yesterday, I visited a Web Site ReapMoneyOnline , presenting list of the free High Page Rank Non-reciprocal Directories (directories that do not require link exchanges for posting blogs). I left a comment, asking authors (Jennie and Bong) their opinion, if they recommend submitting a blog to all of 100 presented directories, or there is a minimum PR, where the time investment is justifiable. They feedback was instant and complete: "Webmasters have different views on PR. In fact, a lot will choose hundreds of inbound links over a high PR because they bring in real targeted traffic (we click on a link because we think we can use what we will find at the other end). Some were also able to rank high in the SERPs for their chosen keywords even with a low PR. These are directories, which people also use to find websites related to the information they need (like the SEs). If they provide us dofollow links then we get 2 birds with 1 stone.
However, directory submission is only part of our link-building strategy. But yes, we are trying to get RMO into as many as possible over a period of time (going at a rate of 15-30 directories per week). Unfortunately, we haven’t done any ROI study on our link-building efforts.
The “minimum” PR depends on us and our goals. Some webmasters who flip sites work to get them to PR4 before selling. Others sell at PR7, which definitely takes longer but also fetches a higher price. For us, the higher it is, the better, since we’re pushing RMO as our flagship blog". As you see, blog owners spent their time and attention to give a very thoughtful answer, converting me as accidental visitor to the devoted visitor. With this attitude, I will be back soon.

Let's highlight what we can learn from this example:

1. Site has a valuable information, encouraging visitors participation. This is, definitely, a core of the successful blog.
2. Blog has disabled the nofollow tag, so every comment will result in link to your blog, improving your blog rating. An additional reason for people to visit the blog, read it, and leave feedbacks.
3. Authors do not passively enjoy incoming traffic, but activity communicate with their visitors, giving informative and instant recommendations. I noticed, that this particular case is not an exception. Every comment receives immediate reply.

As customer support manager in a High Tech company, I know, that it is good to find a new customer, but it is more valuable, if the customer comes to you again and again. Blogging should follow the same marketing rules, where respect for the client will be always appreciated and paid back.

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Comments as source of a free traffic to your blog

In the course of investigation of the possible ways of bringing more traffic to the blog, leaving comments on other people blogs popped out as an acknowledged legitimate way of getting more exposure to your own blog ( http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2008/01/6-advices-on-blog-posting-techniques.html)

In this post, I want to review the commenting features and commenting techniques to increase the possible benefits in more details.

1. Leaving informative comments. Comments leaving technique brings the best outcomes when your comments are informative. Do not simply say “Good post” unless you have nothing else to say and yet you want to complement and encourage the author for the post. Avoid posting unrelated comments, targeting just your own exposure appearance, as it might give you more harm than profit. A thought provoking bloggers reaction or at least a meaningful quality comment only will get you good traffic. However, your controversial post should be justified and expressed politely, like in every intelligent interpersonal communication.
2. Leaving comments on the blogs with content that is related to your own blog topic of discussion. It is recommended to invest your time in the blog that are related to your own blogs in terms of the placement niche, topics of discussion, or somehow logically connected to your own posts. The reader, impressed be your post in the politics, might want to check your blog for more information about your views and bout yourselves as a person. He follows your link and gets to the blog, related to football. If the visitor is not a football fan, he will leave immediately, and will not be able to enjoy your thoughtful posts, just because he is not interested in football.
3. Your brand name and popularity. The blogging world is big, but there are popular blogs, popular names, you meet again and again in the blogosphere. Active participation brings your name higher on the reader’s perception lists, definitely, if you post quality, informative, and interesting comments. You get more popularity and your blogs get it too. Eventually, you build the constantly increasing group of followers that are waiting for your posts and when seeing your comment on their own or other blogs, they are drawing to read them just because they see your signature. Popularity does not come overnight, it is result of long, time-consuming, brand marketing strategy, so do not expect immediate returns, applying it.
4. Direct traffic to your blog. Blogging experts found a direct relationship between amounts of the valuable posts you make on other blogs with numbers of the received comments on your own blogs. So, the simple recommendation is - do invest your time in the commenting marketing technique and you will see immediate return on investment (ROI) through increased traffic you get.
5. Backlinks. Following straightforward backlinks targeting approach might be considered as artificial by some experts. But, it is fully legitimate and, as you following the appropriate, quality content submission guidelines, it will give you the guarantied automatic traffic. Look through the database of the blogs having the “no follow” link disabled from the comments, which means that if you comment on these sites, you will get an actual link. Excellent D-list with more than 200 applicable blogs can be found through the link: http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/. If you prefer posting your comments strictly on high page rank pages from these blogs, go in Google and type there: site:URL of blog from the list and choose high page rank pages on which you can leave comments.
6. Virtual personal relationship. By commenting on the blogs, you can create informal virtual personal relationship with the author of the blog. Leaving your comments regularly in famous blogs, you can even form good relationship with the top bloggers. It is not easy to get accepted to the top bloggers circle, but who said that your posts are not worth to be on the top?

Additional Reading:
http://www.bloggingtune.com/what-everybody-ought-to-know-about-blog-commenting/
http://www.bloggingtune.com/4-things-which-determine-the-traffic-you-will-get-from-comments/
http://roberteilers.com/2007/10/24/writing-blog-comments-equals-free-targeted-traffic/
http://www.earnexperience.com/archives/black-hat-blogging-techniques/

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Advanced Trackbacks, Comments, and Rating with Haloscan

One of the limitations of the Blogger platform is inability to send trackbacks when you make a post. A trackback is a simple acknowledgment, sent via a network signal (ping) from the originating site to the receiving site. Trackback requires both sites to be trackback enabled in order to establish this communication. A free service from Haloscan allows a blogger to send trackbacks to other blogs, and also display the trackbacks which have been sent to the blog. Haloscan also puts comments features on the higher level, allowing advanced comments management and enhanced performance. And, finally it offers blog visitors to rate blog entries, merchandise items, services, pictures, or any other objects on the site, based on a 5-star rating scheme.

Membership is absolutely free. Sign in: http://www.haloscan.com/

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