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Blogging Challenge: Comment on 10 Blogs

Your blogging challenge this week is to post a comment on 10 blogs.

This is not a about comment spamming. This is about learning to comment, practicing comments, and letting the world know about who you are, what you think, and that you are a fellow blogger with something to say.

You can accept this challenge in several ways.

  1. You can comment on 10 different blogs within seven days.
  2. You can comment on 10 different blogs every day for seven days.
  3. You cannot take 10 days to comment on 7 blogs.
  4. Nor comment 10 times on one blog.
  5. 10 comments on 10 blogs minimum. Got it?

Good.

If you normally comment on specific blogs, those don’t count. You have to seek out new blogs for your comment blogging challenge. Blogs you’ve never commented on before. Don’t comment anonymously unless there is no other way to post on their blog comments. Post your name (or blogging nom de plume), email, and blog address in the comment forms to show that you are a legitimate commenter.

Your comments must show intelligence and familiarity with the topic discussed in the blog post. Don’t type, “This is great. I agree.” Useless comment! Really say something. Add to the conversation. Make the blog owner understand that you read their post. You don’t have to agree with them, but treat them with respect and say something intelligent.

After you have done your 10 blog comments, report back here on your experience or write it up on your blog with a trackback here. Describe what you learned from reading 10 new blogs and how it felt to leave comments.

Was it difficult to tell them what you thought about what they wrote? Or easy? Did you discover any new and exciting blogs or blog posts?

What was the response to your comment? Did you pick up any traffic from your blog comments? Did the blog owner/author come check out and comment on your blog? This can take a few days, but check your stats to see if you got any results from your 10 comments.

Remember, a comment you leave on a blog is a small representative of you and your blog. Make your comments speak well of you and your blog, and make sure you have a blog worthy of visitors.

Now go spread your comments around.

This is just one of a series of ongoing . Previous challenges have been:

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network

Member of the 9Rules Blogging Network

This entry was written by Lorelle VanFossen and posted on August 22, 2006 at 1:01 am and filed under Blog Exercises, blogging tips, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

30 Comments

  1. Jason Manheim
    Posted August 22, 2006 at 8:50 am | Permalink

    Hi Lorelle.

    I’ve been a “reader” of your blog for a few months now. That means it’s been in FeedDemon relaxing and I just started reading it. 😉

    I have this problem with adding tons of feeds and not having enough time to get to all of them. But I’m finally managing it. Anyway, I love your blogging challeges and as a fairly new blogger I’m excited to take them all on. Starting with this one. But this won’t count as one of my 10. It just seems like cheating.

    Reply
  2. Collin
    Posted August 22, 2006 at 9:42 am | Permalink

    Jason – why shouldn’t it be one of your 10? It’s a new blog for you to comment on, not one of your regulars and you’ve made a comment… 😉

    Reply
  3. inadvertentgardener
    Posted August 22, 2006 at 10:00 am | Permalink

    Jason, I agree with Collin — if you’re not regularly posting comments on Lorelle’s blog, then it seems to me that this can count as one of your ten.

    As for me, I just used WordPress’ Next Blog feature to rock and roll through a ton of different blogs, and commented on ten of them. Lorelle, I liked this challenge — I do sometimes tend to slide into the “Great post!” school of commenting. I don’t always comment on blogs, and try to only do so when I’m feeling like I have something to really contribute to the conversation, but sometimes I just want the writer to know I was there and that I enjoyed their work.

    But I steered clear of that on this round of commenting, and found myself leaving notes and comprehensive thoughts on a range of things from capturing blog ideas to human brain development to language training by CD.

    I did the exercise all in one shot — 10 blogs at one time — and my stats are already showing a few people coming back to check out my blog from my comments on their blogs.

    Genie
    The Inadvertent Gardener

    Reply
  4. dawn
    Posted August 22, 2006 at 12:02 pm | Permalink

    “If you normally comment on specific blogs, those don’t count.”

    Oh, sure. Make it difficult. I comment on about 50 blogs a week and now I have to find more.

    At least this is #1. Woohoo! 🙂

    Reply
  5. onlycrook
    Posted August 22, 2006 at 4:43 pm | Permalink

    At the moment, I have 402 blogline feeds–how did that happen? A lot of them are filed in probation folders, to be permanently filed in categories if it turns out that I like them. I’m a frequent commenter, and I noticed that I commented on over 10 blogs today alone–different ones (including this blog). (I have an online job, so it’s easy to comment during lulls between questions). Since I comment so much, I devised the idea of creating a comments folder with the URLS of the blogs I’ve added comments to so that I can double-check them later for responses.

    One blog I subscribe to is in Spanish (It’s called Skarcha, and it’s at http://www.skarcha.com, in case you read Spanish). Yesterday, he created a post about how Technorati lists him as one of the top 100 Spanish-language blogs, but he didn’t understand why because, as he put it, I can’t be that popular–I only have about 4 cats as readers. I responded that I was one of the four cats and he replied that since he hadn’t counted me, he must be up to five cats. I’m not sure if the humor translates well, but even though this was a modest interaction, I enjoyed it. Also, it was my first comment on a Spanish-language blog.

    Reply
  6. inadvertentgardener
    Posted August 22, 2006 at 4:49 pm | Permalink

    Onlycrook, I ran through a couple of Spanish blogs on my way to my 10 comments, and while I used to be pretty fluent, didn’t feel confident enough to post comments. I’m glad to hear others crossed the language barrier!

    Reply
  7. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted August 22, 2006 at 5:17 pm | Permalink

    Which begs the question, if you have a trackback to an “foreign” language post, or want to comment on one, how do you comment when it isn’t your native language. I have a few tricks, but I’d like to hear from you.

    How do you handle translations and comments if the blog isn’t in your language? Or would you even care?

    Reply
  8. Jason Manheim
    Posted August 22, 2006 at 7:24 pm | Permalink

    True. But being that this is where the challenge originated I just felt like it was cheating. Silly I guess but believe me, if I’m hovering at 9 I’ll quicky count this as 1 and bump up accordingly. 😉

    Reply
  9. Jason Manheim
    Posted August 22, 2006 at 7:38 pm | Permalink

    As far as “foreign” language blogs go, I’ve found that even though they may be written in a language unfamiliar to you, the writer usually speaks….hmm…well english…I just realized that may not be your language. But if it is, that holds true. Otherwise a fun thing to do is use online language translators like google translate to do the brainwork. Then you can use a converter to translate the comment to their language…be sure to mention your using a translator and there might be mistakes. Another easy and potentially fruitful way would be to have another blogger who is fluent in both languages translate for you. It’ll make them feel needed and may strike up a new friendship. Lastly, you can learn a new language. 🙂 That’s my favorite.

    Reply
  10. onlycrook
    Posted August 24, 2006 at 9:29 am | Permalink

    I’m not sure why you’d want to comment on a foreign language blog if you didn’t know the language because how would you have read the blog entry in the first place?

    However, although I use them frequently, translator programs leave a lot to be desired.

    Sometimes I’ll translate a blog entry if I’m not quite getting the gist of what’s going on. Translations are invariably bad, but they can give you clues to the original. For example, here’s a translation I made recently of part of a blog posting at Zumo de Red, http://blogs.baquia.com/zumodered/blog
    which is a great Spanish language internet/computer blog.

    “In the technology, as it is life law, the old thing surrenders before the push of the new thing. It is why soon the telephone cabins will seem to us a as archaic object as the gramófonos or the Node.”

    This was a useful translation to me because I didn’t realize that the article was about telephone booths and I needed just that little extra clue to understand what I was reading, but how useful would it be to someone who knew no Spanish?

    Reply
  11. joanna
    Posted August 24, 2006 at 10:46 am | Permalink

    I’m taking up your challenge – I think it’s a great incentive to encourage me to de-lurk on a number of blogs I read regularly, include yours Lorelle! I really value the resources and tips on your site – I have two WordPress blogs and your site plus the WordPress.org support forums makes managing the blogs very simple.

    Reply
  12. Brett Terpstra
    Posted August 24, 2006 at 9:21 pm | Permalink

    I’ll take the challenge. I currently have only 5 blogs that I visit regularly, otherwise I browse digg, technorati and 9rules to find content that is interesting. I leave comments whenever I can, hoping the karma will come back to me and get me some comments on my own blog! I’m on my way to find a few new blogs now.

    Reply
  13. mandarine
    Posted August 26, 2006 at 5:29 pm | Permalink

    Just got back from a week’s offline leave. As usual, this challenge is … challenging. I generally do not post comments to a blog I have not thoroughly taken time to read. I have to get a general feeling about the overall content and perspective of the whole blog, not just the post I’d like to comment on.
    What Lorelle asks is that I actually get to know ten blogs to the point I feel confident enough that a comment of mine will not be grossly out-of-place, then find inspiration for ‘something intelligent’ … before next tuesday. Guess I’d better rush off reading then.
    PS: this one counts as #0

    Reply
  14. mandarine
    Posted August 31, 2006 at 2:52 pm | Permalink

    I give up.
    I managed to comment on four new blogs (not counting comments on regular blogs) over one week, and I am four posts behind on my own blogs. Which means: it takes me the same time to leave a comment on a new blog as to write a post.
    I’ll do my ten comments, I swear, but allow me to take my time.
    For the moment, I can mention four fine blogs, some of which I will probably blogroll (if I can find time to continue reading them) :
    http://aredden.wordpress.com/
    http://sputnki.wordpress.com/
    http://www.ofbooksandbikes.blogspot.com/
    http://abirdsnest.wordpress.com/

    Reply
  15. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted August 31, 2006 at 8:15 pm | Permalink

    Which begs the question of why it takes so long? Are you “that” interested in the blogger behind the blog rather than just the single post you are reading? And you take all that into consideration before leaving a comment? Hmmm. That’s an interesting revelation. And an important one. If right?

    Reply
  16. mandarine
    Posted August 31, 2006 at 3:45 pm | Permalink

    You said yourself we should say something intelligent when we leave a comment. I need to know more than just one post and the sort of comments people leave before I can tell whether what I want to say has any chance of being accepted as ‘intelligent’. It might as well be seen as outright pedantic or completely amateur, depending.
    Plus, I like to read.

    Reply
  17. mandarine
    Posted August 31, 2006 at 4:02 pm | Permalink

    It’s the second time a comment of mine messes up the normal numbering. Might want to have a look (you can delete this).

    Reply
  18. mandarine
    Posted August 31, 2006 at 4:03 pm | Permalink

    Looks like it has something to do with the time setting. Here, it is 23:03 (UTC + 2).
    (delete this one too)

    Reply
  19. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted August 31, 2006 at 9:56 pm | Permalink

    I noticed that yesterday but thought it was a fluke. I’m going to leave these here as an example for now and let the PTB know what’s going on. Very strange. And good catch!

    Reply
  20. joanna
    Posted September 2, 2006 at 2:07 am | Permalink

    My summary of the blogs I commented on for the first time is now up on my blog. It was an interesting challenge – although I had to stretch it to 8 days rather than 7 to reach the target of 10 comments!

    Reply
  21. Terry Pearson
    Posted September 5, 2006 at 10:52 pm | Permalink

    I found your site by searching google. I was attempting to write a post on my website about the importance of leaving comments. However, when I came across yours, I could not have put forth a better challenge.

    Leaving comments, has really helped me enjoy blogging much more. Thank you.

    Reply
  22. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted September 6, 2006 at 12:21 am | Permalink

    Terry,

    Thanks for the kind words.

    I tried to leave a comment on your blog but the captcha was not working. By the way, those rarely work and they are very much hated. It stops many people from blogging. There are much better ways to prevent comment spam and captchas just aren’t it. I talk more about it in You Must Be Logged In To Comment.

    Here is the message I wanted to leave for you on your site:

    Thanks for the encouragement, and I’m glad that you have come to understand the importance of comments on blogs. Comments are the most exciting part of the web today, with people crossing borders, languages, cultures, and fears to offer up their opinions on blogs. The growing technology in the interactive web is very thrilling.

    And I’m eager to hear what you have to say about the results of accepting the challenge to comment. There are a lot of lessons to be learned by participating on the web rather than just lurking.

    I also recommend How NOT to Comment on Comments as a good guideline for those who are nervous about commenting on comments, or who need a little help and guidance.

    Keep up the great work and here’s a toast to the new joys of communicating!

    Reply
  23. mandarine
    Posted September 28, 2006 at 3:01 pm | Permalink

    After a full month, I finally managed to reach the 10 blogs target. The challenge really helped me to find great blogs. But they are so great that I added all of them in my feedreader: the more blogs I commented on, the more blogs I had to read and keep up with. Should you have put the target at 15 blogs, I would probably never have reached it…

    Reply
  24. JJ
    Posted October 11, 2007 at 12:54 pm | Permalink

    Thanks for the encouragement of making comments. I started making comments on fellow wordpress blogs a few weeks back. Even though I had my blog for just about 10 months I had only about 50 readers a day. After I started commenting and reading other blogs reguraly I would get back comments on my blog from those other blogs I had commented on. Now my readership is well over 180 a day and it looks like today might be another record setting day for readers.

    Reply
  25. annetanne
    Posted January 10, 2008 at 5:09 am | Permalink

    I try to comment on a regular base on every blog in my language, known to me, that is blogging about the same subject as I am.
    But that’s not that difficult:
    I do know 3 (three!!!) other blogs in Dutch that cover more or less the same topic as I do, and one of them only publishes a new post very rarely. So I have to search for related blogs, or blogs in other languages. I sometimes comment in English, but since my French and my German are even worse than my English, I haven’t tried to comment on a blog in those languages. Perhaps I should try?

    Reply
  26. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted January 10, 2008 at 3:25 pm | Permalink

    @ annetanne:

    Try. You can machine translate your comment or give the old school French and German a try. They will appreciate it as much as I do when someone struggles to leave me a comment in English here.

    Reply
  27. Dheeraj
    Posted June 4, 2009 at 9:01 am | Permalink

    Is there any limitation to comment on blogs per day / week.? I am new to commenting on blogs. Need clarifications please… Thanks in advance.

    Reply
  28. dheeraj
    Posted June 16, 2009 at 9:59 pm | Permalink

    hi Lorelle VanFossen, Thank you for your feedback & comment :).

    As you have mentioned it is true that it would take time to get reply from the blog owner. Let me try the challenge even though it is too late.

    Reply
  29. Angelique
    Posted January 27, 2011 at 7:20 am | Permalink

    I totally agree with your thoughts. Comments really need to become valuable and relevant both to the author and the reader. Otherwise it will be recognized as spam.

    Reply

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