Commenting Archives – Gaurav Tiwari

There are more articles about how to write great blog posts than the same on commenting etiquette. Here I have tried to summarize all my blogging and social commenting experiences as a single blog post. In a four years long blogging life, there were several events when my comments were taken positively & produced great discussion environments. I also faced those nasty moments when my words were criticized and harassment took place. It may happen to any of you, if you don’t really know how to make a good comment. A reader with little knowledge is either a learner or a spammer. But a reader with enough understanding of the subject can be both a critic and a customer. In the first case, there is almost no concept of conversion of visits into comments. But in the latter, it exists. As an intelligent reader you often opt to leave a comment. But remain unnoticed just because you don’t know how to write better comments and stand out from the crowd. So stop leaving boring comments and start writing awesome comments with this little guide. This article is for someone who doesn’t know how helpful is commenting in building engagement with other blogs. It helps you gain traffic, pull attention to you and increase the number of links to your site! Here are some ideas on how you can write better comments so that you become a commenting star. Following these can help you attract readership to your own blog from high traffic blogs, build backlinks and make friends. I hope you will like them. Be Comment Crazy! No matter who ever you are, an internet marketer or just a regular reader — if you find a topic discussable then discuss. Try to write a comment on every topic you read and liked or disliked. The more you comment — more you build the confidence to comment. Use Human Friendly Email Address Spam monitoring tools, like Akismet, are not humans. They check relevancy of e-mail addresses before the comments are passed through the spam testing. If you use an email address like adsfgt778xx@hotmail.com you are most likely to be treated as a spammer. It’s (oddly) suggested to avoid hotmail and not-spell-able phrases in your email address. Also, don’t use vulgar, profanity terms in your email address. Use your real name Be truly the one who you are. Let the webmaster and fellow commentators call with your own name. I have always preferred to enter my original name in the comment author field. Care about hyperlinks You can get a backlink by adding a hyperlink to your name. Don’t place useless hyperlinks in your comments. Necessary hyperlinks can be added but those too must be described properly with an anchor text. Be to the Topic Never go off the topic. Irrelevant comments are either trashed or sent into the spam folder. You can however discuss the topics you think can be less or more relevant to the article you are commenting on. Be interesting. Small and uninteresting comments like “Thanks for the post.”, “Great Article, thanks.” are worth nothing. I am not saying that you can’t write a one sentence long comment. One-liners are great to read, but there should be sense. Even the webmaster will not notice your one-liner comment unless you made an interesting point there. If you really want to show your love to the article, do that in a proper way. Here is a good example of a comment which is more likely to stand out from the crowd: Hello Ryan.I just arrived at this article through Google Search. This is one of the best articles on commenting. I enjoyed it a lot. Carry on writing such useful stuff.Thank you and bye for now. If you closely read the above comment, you will know that there is nothing special the comment author has said. But he has been interesting all the time. First of all he made a salutation to the author Ryan and then he told him how he liked this article. He praised and left. I think this comment has got the higher chances to be noticed than the earlier ones. Use good words ‘Good words make a better sentence. ‘ Always be selective about the words you are going to use in a comment. The selection of words should be Polite: Be calm while writing comments. Use formal words and try your best to be polite. Even in offensive situations, try to be polite. There are many ways you can handle nasty situations just by writing formal words. Learn them or just step out of the discussion. Errorless: Crosscheck all the words of your comment before hitting ‘publish/comment’ button. There doesn’t always stand a chance to correct your mistakes while commenting. So be wise.Unrepeated: Whether it is content writing or commenting, special words should not be repeated too often. Not good in English? Just apologize There are more than 200 non-English nations in the world. If you belong to any of them, you must be having your own problems with English writing. If you feel that your comment is not going to be perfect in grammar and spelling, just apologize at the end. Adding “apologies for my bad English” is a very good habit and believe me no one will mock you for your whole comment. Format your words Whenever there is formatting option available in comment box, try to use if most of the time. For example, which of the following two are interesting? First Comment Hello Harry.You’re a wonderful writer but not all the wars were fought the way you discussed above. Germany lost to Britain in 1658, China lost to Japan in 1904. Japan lost to the USA in 1945. I think you should just see this link for your reference: https://gauravtiwari.org/commenting/ Second Comment Hello Harry. You’re a wonderful writer but not all the wars were fought the way you discussed above. Germany lost to Britain in 1658China lost to Japan in 1904.Japan lost to the USA in 1945. I think you should just look at this link for your reference: Commenting The second one looks better to me! What differences you see up there? There is a simple use of HTML in second comment which makes it more understandable. Bold text is used to emphasize a phrase, lists are used wherever they are needed and the naked hyperlink has been formatted properly with an anchor text. Disagree, sometimes. And ask. It is not always required to be in agreement with the writer of an article. Sometimes, you can disagree if you think there is a need for that. This is a very good way to start a healthy discussion. But the agreement should have a reason. Don’t just write that you disagree with a point or the whole post you just read, but also mention the reason ‘why ?’ is the disagreement. If you really made a point, man, you are a superstar! You can also ask questions to roll out the discussion further. Be strong! I know, I shouldn’t write this but, “shit happens”. Sometimes you follow every etiquette possible but still get caught by bad counter responses … or even your comments remain unapproved (in blogs). In both cases, you need to be strong. If bad replies come in response to yours, handle them politely. If your comments doesn’t get approved… try to contact the author and ask him to approve it. return (); ↵ Made a comment by following all these steps and left? Friends, you need to check how well is your comment is performing. Go back to the blog post on a regular basis and check if new replies are posted. So, this was all from my end. Your comments are your own creations. Be creative and keep engaging in wonderful discussions. Happy commenting. :-)