Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

Now that I’m back in the game with my little personal site (getting larger, in terms of miscellaneous crap, by the minute it seems), I want my commenters back.

I spend a lot of time on the ol’ internets. A lot. OK… A LOT. What I’ve noticed is I read tons of blogs but rarely do I take that additional step and post a comment. Rarely do I contribute to the discussion and share my opinion. This isn’t to say that I don’t have an opinion — anyone who knows me will tell you I have an opinion on everything.

So am I being a huge internet hypocrite in wanting people to comment on my little personal project here at Vocino.com? Probably. But who cares? I want what I want and to get back to that place where I had regular readers I’ve decided I need to take a few cunningly calculated steps in promotion and reader retention.

It may seem odd to read advice on personal blog promotion from someone who just explained his desire for more readership, but that’s me. When you consider my friend Matt just spent his hard-earned cash on Search Engine Optimization (yes, the hottest internet scam of 1999) I figure it can’t hurt.

• Give in order to get. Post more comments! I need to get out there. When I read an interesting post by someone else, instead of just saying to myself “Nice.” I’m going to simply type “Nice.” (or whatever) into the friggin box and hit submit. Commenting means links to my site which translates to traffic. I’ve had some celebrity commenters grace these pages — Jeffery Zeldman, Jon Hicks, et cetera. These are people I respect and I was pleasantly surprised when they gave attention to my work. In all cases this attention came from posting insightful (hopefully) commentary on their sites or projects their involved with. After that, they may dig your stuff and link you. Good stuff.
• Write quality content. Duh. I’m trying. My time is sometimes limited and my attention span is always short. This makes getting quality content out difficult for me. Usually I’ll be writing out a nice long article and get bored. At that point it will either end up living in my drafts for all of eternity or, even worse, I’ll just delete it. This sucks. I also want to offer more than just a link to an article. I want much more commentary that provides a window to my existence.
• Update, update, update. I fall behind. I admit it. When the people you know in person, your friends and colleagues don’t even check your blog often, it sucks. I feel that updating often would be easier if the comment support was there in order to drive my need to publish more content. Chicken and egg situation, I know. I do plan to update more often though. I also need to stop taking months upon months off — totally neglecting my site. That’s just bad business.
• Buzz word articles of death. Yeah, I don’t know either. What I’m trying to say is, post about what’s going on. People like that. If you’re regularly posting about current events in whatever genre you’re interested in, people will find you. Either by search engines, Technorati, Weblogs.com or whatever. When something happens in the news, a current event that I want to know about, a good option is always to type in a tag search at Technorati. If I’m not on that list (and it relates to a genre I’m interested in), that’s wrong and I should be. OK?
• Include visual aides. Words are boring to look at. Sure, they provide information but when I first look at an article, I like to see pretty pictures. No, I didn’t ride the short bus. I like visual aides with my articles. Even this the image is just a subtle compliment to the post I still think it adds substantial value to it.

That’s about it. Seems pretty basic but I wanted to get it down as a mental reinforcement for myself. Hopefully I’ll be seeing more and more exponential comment growth in the near future.