photo credit: BJ Carter

How do you decide what to write a post about?  One of the considerations is a choice with regard to what the purpose of your post is going to be.  Basically there are two choices.  Are you blogging for comments, or are you going to use what I call the teach and preach?

Blogging For Comments

If you are all about a community of readers then this will usually be your choice.   You want to use your posts to start a discussion.  Your entire blog is similar to a forum, and each of your posts is comparable to a new thread.  This blog favors this style.  I always encourage commenting.  I try to answer each comment, and will continue to try as long as this blog exists.  I enjoy the small community that is starting to come into being here.  In fact I wrote a post on the subject.  It concerned how I saw the increasing traffic to my blog turning the blog into a community and beyond.  A lot of it was tongue-in-cheek, ‘cuz I do try to entertain you, my beloved readers.

Comments are a compass.

I think most bloggers allow comments and there is another benefit to using comments.  You can use them as a compass to point you in the direction your readers are interested in.  It requires a little thinking though.  In my case, I sometimes check the number of comments that my posts have generated.  I try to see if there is a common idea behind those that gather the most comments.  Care must be used in this case though; a little thought to analyze the situation.

What you don’t see can be what’s important.

For instance, yesterday I wrote a post that was critical of Steve Pavlina.  It has had the most comments of any post I have ever done on this admittedly new blog.  I am not going to assume that my readers want to read more posts criticizing people.  Perhaps what I mean can best be illustrated from looking at it another way.  The posts that I have written that received the fewest comments have been those concerning keywords and the use of them to try to get ranked on the search engines as a source of traffic.  What I learn from that is that those articles would best be published on a different blog.  Maybe in the future I will submit them as guest posts.

As you can see, using comments to give you some idea of what will engage your readers and turn them into a community is a good idea.  Then there are the other guys.

Teach And Preach

Listen to me.

There is another type of blog.  These usually belong to authorities.  These blogs do not want comments, and some don’t even allow them.  The writers of these blogs see themselves as authorities.  They feel that their readers are there to learn from them.  Sometimes, as is the case of Steve Pavlina, they have a forum associated with their blog and feel that discussion can take place there.  It’s a good idea, and makes for a cleaner page I suppose.  It is probably better suited to writers like Mr. Pavlina who tend to write very long articles too.

Seth Godin is a well known internet marketer with many books that he has written on the subject available.  He has  stopped taking comments due to the time it took him to respond to them, and even more interestingly, because he found that it affected his writing.  He said that he found himself writing differently in anticipation of the comments he thought would be elicited from his posts

But don’t ask me to join in.

Some sites allow comments but the writer rarely takes part in the discussions that take place in their comments.  A post about Chris Brogan on this very subject was recently written by my friend Allyn Hane  on his extremely educational website Blogger Illustrated.  Al’s preferred media for blogging is a hybrid form.  He combines the written post with video blogging.  It is a very effective method.  Make no mistake,  Allyn is a believer in commenting on his blog.  He, like most of us, enjoys the discussions.

So there you have it.  You have a decision to make.

As always, comments are encouraged.