So, I was responding to a comment today, and I realized a certain habit of mine that I’d never really thought of before. One of the standard pieces of advice for making your blog known to the blogosphere is leaving comments on other blogs. Preferably related ones. It lets people be aware of you and shows them what sort of material and attitude they can expect on your own site. This can also help create name recognition. If someone sees you commenting frequently on other blogs, and happens to hit your site on google, there’s a lot better chance of them clicking your link first.
Now, I require all my comments to be approved by me before they appear on the blog. This is partially because I’ve had some spam issues, and partly because I think it’s good practice. While comment sections should be relatively open, it’s better to nip problems in the bud.
Getting back on topic, do you what the first thing I do after reading the comment is? I click through to the commenter’s blog. Almost invariably, they have one. I might read a few of the posts on the front page if they are interesting, and even leave a comment. It seems to me that a lot of other bloggers follow this practice as well. It’s useful for starting a conversation between the two bloggers, even if the topics are wildly different.
What this is all leading up to is, if you leave a comment and you have your own site, always take advantage of the url/website option for commenting. Even if your site has nothing to do with the topic of the place you are commenting. You never know what might interest someone. Of course, good etiquette says don’t leave a link to your own site in the body of the post. I delete those links myself, and I know many others do as well.
Pretty standard stuff, yeah, but it never hurts to remind people. After all, I might love their blog, so it’s not like only the commenter benefits.
Atsiko's Chimney 
bigwords88
March 17, 2010 at 6:59 PM
Not sure if I would bother editing the folks who link to their own sites or blogs in the body of a comment, but it is annoying if the comment is waaay off-topic (like, completely irrelevant to anything I have ever said) or just stirring up shit. There is already too much focus on numbers in writing (in general), so I don’t really care if there are three people or three hundred reading my blog – it’s quality, not quantity, which matters. Having the right people read is more important than having a bunch of griefers spamming with backlinks.
And I have to point out that I can’t even spam correctly – when I link in the body of a comment it is normally to someone else’s blog. Yup, that’s me in the Epic Fail t-shirt…
atsiko
March 17, 2010 at 7:48 PM
Well, I don’t get a lot of comments the way, say, John Scalzi does, so it’s certainly easier for me to screen the few comments I do get.
As for spammers, I mostly get Russian vaigra sites and such, no griefers or trolls. However, I think that having more people come through means I will catch more quality commenters. It’s not so much that I am obsessed with numbers, but that more people means a better chance at a good conversation. When I’m at Whatever, there’s some fascinating discussions going on in the comments, and I can’t say I’d dislike having that happen on the Chimney.
ralfast
March 18, 2010 at 2:02 PM
When to comment? Good question. I like to leave a comment, even if it’s “Hey great job!” if I like what I just read. Sometimes I forget to do so. Of course, a comment section is worthless if you, as the blog author, don’t bother to respond in a timely fashion.
atsiko
March 18, 2010 at 3:39 PM
I don’t like to leave “Hey, great job!” comments personally, because I have seen it used as an advert technique on some sites.
I would say “timely fashion” depends on how many other commenters there are. Nathan Bradsford or John Scalzi have enough commenters that enormous discussion can go on with little or no intervention, but smaller blogs do tend to require more tending from the owner. Good point.