Thanks for the kind words and encouragement. I also don’t get the time as I should to hang out at Steve’s Forum and am glad he sends everything to my email when something new comes up. As soon as this week is over I will definitely go through all of my email alerts from the forum.

I have not gotten to SU this week either which is a must.

Great to see you stop by and comment. Your recommendation for Steve’s forum is top, as I have registered there myself some time ago and I love the positive feel of it (unfortunately I don’t invest enough time to hang out there).

I admire your bite by just plugging away at it until… you have a great mind and will go places i have no doubt about that. Keep in touch pls as I love to get your occasional updates via SU.

I am in agreement with you Monika on this you never know the experience level or what a person has done to get to a certain rank or even get comments. Yes, people are partial and want to associate with greatness because they feel this will get them in at the top.

My thinking has always been even the top people were on the bottom at some point and if I see a topic that I can add something to I will comment whether the person is known in the blogosphere or not.

Joan you also might want to try Stevepavlina.com and join his personal development forum as an option for networking and getting post to your blog. Don’t get discouraged my blog has been up for 17 months and I can count on my one hand how many times someone has posted to my blog but, I don’t loose hope I just keep going in spite of.

I read and follow a many big bloggers to see what they are up to and it is amazing how many people suck up to them just because they are “big”.

I comment if I feel the post deserves a comment and also if I can identify with the blogger on the subject, regardless of whether he/she is famous or not.

It is sad, that so many bloggers can’t seem to use their own personality when it comes to blogging and commenting instead of blindly following the blind.

Monika

Good article, Monika. You’re making sense with this rational thoughts. In blogging I’ve noticed that people tend to gravitate towards a blogger who’s supposed to be a “cult figure” or who’s deemed a “clique member.” You can tell by the number of comments on the blog. In fact, another blog with awesome posts will remain relatively unknown or even if there are visitors they rarely leave any comment on that blog. Based on this observation, one tends to perceive that a lot of bloggers practise certain kind of selective bias in their blogging attitude. If this is really true, then there’s a lot to be desired in blogging behaviour. Or maybe it all comes down to this perennial malady called “herd mentality.”

Thank you for your nice comments. I know exactly how you feel. Even though I’m quite happy with the participation of commenter’s on my own blogs, I know that it could be better.

Allow me to share with you what I have learnt so far in this regard. And remember, I’m by no means an expert. I like you am still learning and trying to apply my new found knowledge to my blogs.

I understand, that people comment if they can identify with you as the blogger. What helps this if for example you write between the first person and the third person. So the blog does have your own voice in terms of having your personality showing through, but not entirely as otherwise this can have the opposite effect than intended.

Other bloggers love to hear stories of struggles and beating the odds by others and generally those blogs get the most comments. They seem to identify with the blogger and they feel inclined to comment because it speaks to their heart.

If you are looking for the contact form plugin and using wordpress, then you can use the following.

http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/secure-form-mailer-plugin-for-wordpress/

This will allow others to contact you right from your contact page by tweaking a few things in your admin after installing it to your “plugins” directory.

I hope this helps.

Monika

Obviously I’m very un-geeky about all this. I like your idea about doing a contact form plug-in. I will contact my blog person to see about that. At this point, people must login just like any other blog. I manage the posts.

If you have other ideas you could send me to make this work easier for the people posting, I’d love to hear them!

Joan