Why & How to Reward Commenters
I love it when people leave comments on my blog. I want to know other people’s opinions, so I can either ridicule them meet new people or enjoy hearing the opinions of others. But commenters are few and far between, so it is important to be sure to reward them and encourage this rare behavior.
Commenters will further your blog’s community. If someone wrote something provocative, which is usually a good thing in blogs, their post will encourage others to react to it or leave their own feedback.
People will want to continue to do something if there is a positive reward for it. That’s just overly simplified psychology. There isn’t usually much reward for commenters other than a nice “nofollow” link. For those who are not interested by search engine optimization, “nofollow” links are tagged specifically, so they will not affect your page rank. That’s one reason people don’t have incentive to comment.
A good solution to this problem would obviously be making your links “do follow” (no special tag on them in code). I would recommend publicizing the fact that your links are “do follow”, which mine are, but I would go a step further than that.
Putting up a “Top Commenters” section in your sidebar creates a competition people to post comments and earn a link to their site on the sidebar of my site, meaning it will show up on every single page.
Some people take it a step further, which I believe is desperate behavior, and they will do a weekly giveaway for commenters for a small prize, from an iTunes gift card to a free webcam.
When people feel rewarded for their comment, and they feel that it means something, they’re more likely to comment again. When you add the element of competition, sooner than later you will find that something will be in your moderation queue.
- 20th August 2011
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How to Trick GoogleBot
According to Matt Cutts from Google, 2 way back links do not help with your site’s page rank. Here’s an example, Site A links to Site B and Site B links to Site A. It’s a mutual relationship, and there is no reason that these links should carry any weight with regard to your organic search traffic.
When you introduce a third site, though, things get much more complex, and it allows for your links to become quality one-way links that will affect your site’s search traffic. Take a look at this diagram.
Blog 1 does not link directly to Blog 3, but Blog 3 links directly to Blog 1. It’s quite complicated on paper, but it works quite well out in the search field. To make it work, just find two friends with sites (sites in the same niche will demonstrate better results), and decide which sites will link where. Not only is it good for building traffic, but it’s also a nice tool for meeting people.
- 19th August 2011
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The AdSense Conspiracy: How Google Profits from Disabling Your Account
From the looks of it, Google is a great company. They make tons of money, yet almost all of their products are free, and they’re of high quality. The biggest problem from a consumer’s side is that it is impossible to get support from Google. I have a little information about Google that I’d like to expose to the public, so you can see exactly where my roots of Google displeasure begin.
I signed up for an AdSense account back in 2007 or 2008. Since I am a minor, the AdSense account was not in my name but one of my parents’. I made about a dollar per day off the AdSense account, and it seemed that I was heading in the right direction. Out of nowhere, my AdSense account was disabled due to “invalid click activity”. But let’s examine my AdSense account before it was disabled.
I had about $70 in my AdSense account. Google’s payment threshold for AdSense is $100. I wouldn’t be sent a check until I reached the $100 and withdrew it from my account. That is perfectly fine, but now that my AdSense is disabled I have no way of making any additional advertisement revenue. My account was stuck at $70, and I would not be getting a check for the $70. While this is buried in Google’s AdSense agreement, I think this is an example of shady behavior.
That means that, since they do not have to pay the publisher for those ads, but the advertisers still paid those costs, that money goes straight into Google’s bank account, so they have made $70 off of my AdSense account in addition to the percent that Google takes per click. And guess what? I’m not the only one who has had my AdSense account disabled.
Crowd Source
I wanted to give some insight to the idea, nicknamed “Is This Awesome” on Interstice Labs. It’s basically a tool for crowd sourcing in which the users can easily give their opinions and vote on the idea or change. While I am choosing not to give the name I am reserving for this project, I will summarize its goals and give a basic design preview:
- “Crowd Source” allows users to give their opinions on something a company has done or released. It’s like a large discussion platform.
- Users like to give their opinions, and companies value opinions of their customers.
- Users will receive points for giving their opinions, and the points may be redeemable for cash or a sponsored product.
- 18th August 2011
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