No Comments Does Not Equal No Readers

I have a client who is, I think, a really good blogger. She writes compelling posts that are personal and truly from the heart. Problem? She has no confidence in her writing. Like many bloggers (including myself when I started) she wonders why anyone would read her blog let alone care what she has to say. Setting her lack of self-confidence aside, she thinks that because no one comments on her blog that no one is reading it. However, I’m here to tell her otherwise.

Comments are great because they do show engagement and, for some, validate that people are actually reading their blog. But just because you don’t have 50 comments per post doesn’t mean that people aren’t reading your blog.

Here are two ways – both qualitative and quantitative – to validate that your blog is being read.

Quantitative: I don’t like running my blog by the numbers but check your blog statistics to see a) how many visitors and page views you have and b) how long folks are hanging around per post. If you have folks that are spending more than a minute per post, they are either reading your work or going to the bathroom. See how many folks subscribe to your blog. It doesn’t prove that they are reading it, but it is getting dumped in their feed reader. Track your stats month to month. This is as easy and setting up an Excel spreadsheet and adding basic data – visitors, page views, feeds. See if your traffic grows or stagnates from month-to-month and make changes accordingly.

Qualitative: If you are writing quality posts, readers and even other bloggers refer to you even if they are not engaging you. Set-up keyword alerts so you can track when other folks are linking to your blog or quoting you in their own posts.

And I’m here to tell you that the day will come when a complete stranger approaches you in a coffee shop or on the street and comments on something personal that they have no way of knowing…until you realize that you blogged about it. And that is one scary feeling.

Moral of the story? Comments come in all shapes and sizes – not just text on your computer screen.

Tagged as: blog comments, Blogging, google alerts