Your Blog And Podcast Are Not Enough – Start Adding Comments

I’ve been watching the traffic to this Six Pixels of Separation Blog and Podcast. It’s not that things have slowed down. Quite the contrary. There seems to be more action in the comments section then ever before and, by the looks of our web-based analytics tools (which does include my favorite, Google Analytics), the traffic is rising as well.

But that’s not enough.

I was just listening to episode #291 of For Immediate Release – The Hobson And Holtz Report Podcast and they had a segment about commenting on Blogs inspired by a ProBlogger Blog posting entitled, The Power Of Commenting On Blogs. The big lesson? A simple way to drive excellent and steady traffic to a Blog is to comment intelligently on other highly-trafficked Blogs. While it seems simple enough, it was a huge slap in the face meets wake-up call for me.

When I think back to early days of this Blog – I’m going back over four years – I built the initial traffic by finding out others who were creating valuable Blog content, and by adding to their conversations… or by joining the conversation in general it inspired readers to come and check out my Blog. As our lives get increasingly complex with Podcasts, twitter, Facebook profiles and more, taking the time to be a part of the community has been usurped by expecting others to join this one.

Not cool.

While inspiration on other Blogs does inspire the content here (and trackbacks) – like that posting from ProBlogger, I’m becoming increasingly more aware that while the conversation on this Blog is deep and rich, I need to "be out there" to keep up with what’s going and, more importantly, to get my ideas out there. Having a Blog and Podcast is, simply, not enough. I need to encourage the conversation here, trackback to those Blogs that are inspiring me, but – more importantly – I have to get out of lurker mode and engage in the conversation that is taking place beyond my own RSS feed.