My experience at the Blogelina Commentathon

Blogelina Commentathon

Recently the fine folks at Blogelina, which is a blog that I often read, announced that they were going to have something called a Commentathon. The idea was to get a bunch of people together and post comments on each other’s blogs. The reason for this would be to 1) expose people to your own blog and 2) get more comments on your blog which would help you out with the search engine rankings. (At least those are the benefits from a selfish side of it. There is also the idea of relationship building and networking and all that.) So I agreed to sign up and I brought my buddy Mitch Mitchell along as well. Mitch writes at I’m Just Sharing and several other blogs and is known in certain circles as the Motivational Marvel. The Tantamount Trainer. The Boss of Bloggers. I mean he has a really good blog. Actually several of them. I just like his ‘I’m Just Sharing’ blog best.

I’m not sure how many people signed up for the Commentathon. All of us were broken down to several, what I presume were, random groups. My group was a total of 50 people including myself. Each of us was to supply a URL of an ‘epic blog post’ to Blogelina who would then assign each blogger a list of 50 URLs from the other participants. The idea is I would go to each person’s blog and leave a comment on their “epic post”.

The instructions found here included, “Step #2 – Write An Epic Post. Make it really good and Make [sic] it something easy to comment on (a question at the end of the post is a great way to make it easy for people to leave a meaningful comment). This is going to be THE post that bloggers will be visiting to [sic] be sure to leave a good impression!”

Mitch supplied a really good post called 10 Blogging Lessons From 10 Years Of Blogging On A Different Blog and I wrote How to find a smile everywhere.

Mitch was in a different group and actually started commenting on his assigned groups of blog posts before I did. He sent me a private message saying that some of the blogs weren’t even relevant to him. Many of the blogs he was assigned to read and comment on were about breast-feeding or how short Jewish women could find reasonably priced clothes that fit them. Not up Mitch’s wheelhouse.

I thought Mitch might be pulling my leg at first but then I got into starting to read the blogs that were assigned to me and that’s when it hit me. There are a lot of crappy blogs out there. It is not always the subject matter. I mean just the lack of thought or effort that goes in to much of what I saw. Many articles had numerous spelling and grammar errors and broken links and all sorts of silliness. Maybe the writers are just lazy. It left me scratching my head wondering where the ‘epic posts’ were.

I mean I know my blogs are nothing special. I have no idea why you guys even read this or 1KSmiles but I know you do. I know there’s a lot of people that read this blog as well as 1KSmiles. I can see the traffic in the analytics. Now if I could just get you guys to leave some comments that would be awesome, but anyway the point is you do come to my blogs and check them out and that means I must be doing something right. Right?

How or why some of these people are putting some of these blogs on the Internet just amazes me. And I’m wondering who is reading them? When Mitch told me that one of the blogs he was supposed to comment on was a sort of Dear Abby site where the question was how a petite Jewish woman could find fashionable clothes at reasonable prices I thought he was joking. But then I was looking through my list and I found articles similar to what Mitch was describing. Ugh!

I would love to post the list that I was assigned here but I think it is not necessary to publicly shame a lot of these people. Perhaps they have good meaning and what not but really the point is if you’re going to do something at least put some effort into it. If the assignment is to write an ‘epic post’ in the hopes of procuring new repeat visitors, why would you offer a 300 word review of Huggies Pull-Ups training pants that read like it was copy and pasted from the corporate website or from Amazon that includes this at the end: “Disclosure: This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Pull-Ups®”? Epic? Not so much.

Maybe a lot of these folks are stay-at-home moms with nothing else to do. I actually think that’s more along the lines which is why neither Mitch or I had much to really say constructively to any of these bloggers. One of the articles I was supposed to comment on was called “How I failed at breast-feeding and why am okay with that” while another one was “Cleaning with a toddler. Can that really happen?” In fact probably 85% of the blog posts I was to comment on had something to do with either being a mom or with god or the church. I guess that just tells you something about the readership at Blogelina.

So how can we improve our blogs Boys and Girls?

If you want to see an example of what I consider a good blog, look at Mitch’s or ImNotAStalker.com or AdrienneSmith.net and TheNomadGrad and take notice.

I am just saying to try to put some effort in folks. And I am not saying all of my group was bad. Some where quite good and I added them to my Feedly reader.

In conclusion, would I do this again? Probably. After all I did get some good traffic to 1KSmiles but it did take me a bit of time to go through each of those posts on blogs that I will never visit again and leave a meaningful comment. The only way I will do this again in the future will be if I know the other bloggers are writing about topics I am truly interested in on blogs I will visit again in the future.

What are examples of both good and bad blogs you have seen? Let me know in the comments below. I would especially love to hear from you if you were involved in the Blogelina Commentathon or one similar to it.