Monday Musings About Interacting With Other Bloggers

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…

• Describe one of your reading habits.
• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).
• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.
• Do you have a bookish rant? Something about books or reading (or the industry) that gets your ire up? Share it with us!
• Instead of the above questions, maybe you just want to ramble on about something else pertaining to books — let’s hear it, then!

If you’re a new blogger looking for advice, everyone will tell you to get social because many of us have found the social aspect of blogging the most enjoyable part. What not everyone will tell you is that not all comments are equal. I’ve tried a variety of ways of finding blogs to comment on and today I’d like to talk about the best ways to spend your commenting time if you want to create meaningful interactions, make blogging friends, and draw some new readers to your blog.

I’ve always thought of myself as a social blogger. When I first started blogging, that included replying to all the comments on my blog; trying to comment on a few posts each time I checked my feed reader; and periodically visiting and commenting on my followers blogs and blogs that used the wordpress tags “books” and “non-fiction.” There were a few things wrong with that strategy. First, I only went through my reader once or twice a week, so commenting on a few of those posts meant I was commenting on a very small percentage of the blogs I was reading. And second, commenting on blogs using the same wordpress tags as you often leads to one reply comment and that’s it, since one post that shared one tag with your posts does not a deep shared interest make. So what have I done that’s better and has made me feel more involved with the book blogging community? I thought you’d never ask 🙂

Here’s what I do these days:

I don’t just try to comment on a few posts when I check my reader every few days. I’ve finally, finally, finally gotten caught up to where each day, I only have that days posts to go through and I read all the posts in my reader thinking about a way I could make a meaningful comment at the end. This means I don’t read my posts when I’m feeling rushed for time and am only going to skim if I try to read them.

This may seem obvious to some of you but I recently started not  just replying to every comment on my blog, but also re-visiting the commentors blog to comment there. I never make a comment if can’t say something meaningful (well almost never… sometimes cute animal pictures just deserve an “Awwww” ok? :-P) but I do go through the commentors most recent posts and try to find one that I can make a good comment on. Does this mean that you get comments that you know are “just ” reciprocal comments? Of course. But as long as someone took the time to make a meaningful comment on my blog, the thoughtfulness, the conversation and the connection are there.

For contact with new bloggers, I comment on the 3-5 blogs ahead of mine in each linky in which I participate. I’ve found that I have more in common with these bloggers than bloggers who just share some wordpress tags, so these comments are more likely to turn into long term interactions.

Finally, I’ve gotten brave enough to actually talk to people on twitter. Yes, it can feel strange and intrusive to randomly tweet someone, but I just remember that I’m always happy when someone randomly contacts me.

And that’s Katie’s advice for making bloggish friends and meeting people 🙂 What would you add to the list? Are there ways of commenting and interacting with other bloggers that you would avoid or others which you’d recommend for particularly good interactions?