I stopped commenting on Problogger almost completely. The main reason people go and comment on there is the hope that other people will notice the comment and click through to visit their site.

However, when you have so many people vying for attention in the same place, it becomes diluted, and a waste of time. Plus, I would rather spend my time connecting with other bloggers and having REAL conversations in the comment section instead of stupid crap like

“Excellent Article, I think I will try this. Come check out what I wrote this week”.

This annoys me, and by avoiding the sites that tend to have an abundance of these types of comments, I get more enjoyment out of my blogging time, and I feel that I’m not wasting my time.

I will, however, comment on a problogger post if I genuinely feel the need to thank them for the advice, or to offer additional information.

But you hang in there. I’ll keep watching and spread the word.

We’ve all been to movies that sounded like a good idea, but when the lights come up we ponder what went wrong. Was it the acting? Directing? Writing? The truth is that everyone on the show wanted to make a good movie, but so often the money people test the thing to death to the point that the released film falls within a safety zone of reaching the broadest audience.

What these bean-counters miss is that 100% of those low to medium budget breakout films succeed because it worked as a collaborative effort. From the first to last frame their passion projects on the screen. The passion resonates with the audience.

Blogs are like that. Done by the numbers will eventually even the creator of the blog; much less the reader(s). If you are not passionate about what your writing about, then you better be writing about a topic that churns out new information on a regular basis.

A few thoughts:

One that you’ve not covered is the nature of my blog and the type of readers it attracts. My blog’s for beginner bloggers primarily so one would expect their blogs to reflect that.

I find that my blog reader has a life cycle – they usually are new bloggers who read on a daily basis for 3-6 months and who then drop off either because they stop blogging/give up or because they progress beyond the basics and begin to stand more on their own two feet.

I find that bloggers who succeed tend to transition into more of a ‘lurking’ mode – they follow on RSS and only drop by the actual blog less regularly, comment less and use ProBlogger more like a reference tool when they need it than reading every single post.

I’m not claiming that 100% of my readers progress to this – I know a lot do give up, a lot do procrastinate and not put into action what I advise and that perhaps some of what I write isn’t applicable to every blogger – however I suspect that just looking at comments isn’t going to give you a really accurate reflection on whether my blog helps people. In fact my stats show me that less than a quarter of a percent of my readers leave comments – perhaps those that do represent a certain type of blogger?

Not really sure – all I can say is that in my experience most bloggers give up too early, get distracted or become obsessed with one part of their blog rather than working holistically on a blog like I advise. For some this means that they rarely actually write posts, for others it means that they focus more upon SEO or monetization, or design than some of the other important areas.

I read Roman’s slightly depressing post today “Commenting on Problogger does not improve your blog.” In it he has spent some quite considerable time researching commentators on Darren’s blog from six months ago to see if their traffic has signi…

What makes for a hit? More often than not it comes down to passion the creators and caretakers have for the project. A producer said it best when I told him that I liked his show that had just premired the night before. He grimmiced at my comment the said, “That’s the problem. People like the show and that means death.” Still green in the business I asked him what was wrong with people ‘liking’ his show. His answered changed my thinking about what is good entertainment, “When people like a show it means death because they don’t feel compelled to watch it. Passion is what hooks them in. Love it or hate it they talk about the show and that’s good.”

You have 8 times the amount of posts as me (237/31) and you have 8 times that amount of traffic as me (500/60). Maybe those A bloggers (and you) have a point

The point of this post was not suppose to be depressing. It is just pointing out that statistically there is no difference between Problogger visitors who read Problogger’s advice yesterday or a year ago.

As you know, I also started my main blog just over six months ago. It is currently getting more than 500 visitors per day. Since I started it I have written 237 posts (almost 40 a month, or more than one per day) and I suspect that’s the reason why it’s succeeding in the time period where so many others have failed.

It might be worth investigating how many posts each of the sites in your survey have done to check that connection. On the other hand, maybe invest that time in writing more posts on here to start to increase the traffic