One of the things that some bloggers do to fight spam is simply turn of their comments section. Now, I don’t know about you, but turning off the comment section is just not an option I will ever consider, after all how will (real) readers be able to provide their (sometimes) valuable feedback easily (no one really likes to email and anyway posting your email can lead to spam in your email!).

Another thing that bloggers do is to moderate their comments. Now this is what we do here but this is not a good option for everyone, especially those who do not the time to browse through comments, which of course contains spam that Akismet failed to catch, and approve or disapprove them.

So what this leaves us with is re-CAPTCHA. re-CAPTCHA is a an anti-spam technology that requires people to type in the letters/words/numbers they see on the screen before the comment can be posted. This ensures that the comment isn’t automated and the the commenter is a real live person. It may be seen by some as cumbersome but it really is a good compromise between having to wait for comment approval and no sort of moderation at all. The only catch though is that people who link drop and provide no real valuable comments can not be filtered through re-CAPTCHA. However, at least that leaves you with a lot less spam to deal with.

For the most part informative blogs have no difficulty adhering to this truth, after all there is really no need to embellishment simple facts. However, the area where a lot of bloggers usually end up giving white lies would be the opinion part. When it comes to giving opinions people suddenly either start watering down the truth or worse, simply going with the flow since they are afraid of stepping on anyone’s toes.

Making your opinion known, whether it’s the popular or not, is important for any blogger. By telling your opinion you:

make sure that your blog has its own voice – If you notice the A-list bloggers are vocal about their opinions; their blogs are a reflection of their personality an character. Being a copycat blogger wouldn’t send people flocking to your blog, after all there’s already a more popular and established blog that posts the same opinion as yours every single time.

will encourage dialogue among your readers and bloggers with opposing views – If you want people to have a real discussion on your comments page then post you opinion even if it’s unpopular. That’s when you’ll see people posting their own opinions instead of the usual boring congratulatory “Great post!” comments.

will serve as a check and balance for other bloggers – Opinions can be wrong or right. Sometimes you’ll be wrong, sometimes right, and sometimes both opinions can be right at the same time. It’s all a matter of perspective. By offering your own other bloggers can examine their own opinions and who knows, might even realize why yours make more sense.

The ironic thing was that I clicked on a link that was supposed to be giving tips on blogging and contests. I guess the blogger, whose good enough to give tips, didn’t even know the first rule of blogging: Don’t violate rules and if you do, don’t get caught! I mean isn’t that the rule in life?

Anyway this made me think and I realized that I personally haven’t even read Wordpress fine print in its entirety. Come on, who has? The fact that no one really reads every site’s Terms and Conditions doesn’t excuse anyone from suffering the consequences when rules are violated. We all know after all that ignorance of the law excuses no one.

So what does this mean? It simply means that we should all get our act together and start reading the fine print. Starting with that of the services we use to create and maintain our blog – from the hosting service to feed readers and search engines. At least read the most important parts, which for me is the privacy part and the responsibilities part, which is where we find the DONTs.

For now here are some of the DONTs listed on Wordpress’ Terms and Conditions:

1. infringing on proprietary rights
2. content that contains or installs any viruses, worms, malware, Trojan horses or other harmful or destructive content
3. spam
4. content that is pornographic, libelous or defamatory, contains threats or incites violence towards individuals or entities, and violates the privacy or publicity rights of any third party
5. blog name that misleads your readers into thinking that you are another person or company

You might be wondering how some blogs take off immediately but what you should realize is that the keyword here is SOME because most blogs really do take time before getting the traffic and readership to achieve the blogger’s desired goals: popularity, reputation, or conversions. Furthermore if you look at the reasons why these blog get a lot of readership almost instantaneously you’ll find that it’s highly likely that:

1. the blogger is already famous in his niche and has another popular blog/website. In short the blog’s “new readers” are already old followers (whether offline or online) of the blogger.
2. the blog is a newly bought but old has an old and established URL. This takes care of the “aging” part so that the blogger need only take care of other SEO efforts and of course churn our good content.
3. it’s due to good old plain luck. It just so happened that the blog’s recent launch coincided with some event that drew lots of people’s attention to the blog’s particular theme or even a single post.

The point is that as a blogger you have to be realistic in setting goals. Do not expect to be a famous blog within several month’s time. If you’re starting from scratch it will take several months just to start ranking decently. However, this fact should not discourage you but make you realize that your efforts will start bearing fruit in time. For now, make sure you’re doing everything you can to ensure that success will come sooner than later.

If you are interested in learning more and getting more out of Google AdSense then the perfect place to start would be by getting your info straight from the most reliable and knowledgeable source – Google’s Adsense Team.

This past year the Adsense Team has been working to make information more accessible and easy to understand by offering FREE webinars. The good news is that even if you missed the webinars they are all available at AdSense Help: Past Webinars.

As of today the topics you can watch there include:

1. Adsense Optimization – Everything you need to know
2. Teaching our teachers: AdSense on your Education site
3. AdSense for Search: Improve the user experience and generate revenue
4. Using Analytics to optimize your AdSense performance
5. Why AdSense is right for Retail
6. Maximize your AdSense revenue on your Home and Garden site
7. Make the most of your forum with AdSense
8. Improving AdSense performance using Google Ad Manager
9. Market your site to Advertisers using Google Ad Planner
10. Optimizing AdSense on your Business and Finance site
11. AdSense Optimization – Everything you need to know
12. Market your site to Advertisers using Google Ad Planner
13. AdSense for Search: Improve the user experience and generate revenue
14. Using Analytics to optimize your AdSense performance

Just an added warning: Don’t post comments in the heat of the moment. If you will be commenting on something controversial or simply disagree with a blogger or another commenter pause first and process things before you reply. First of all you don’t want to sound idiotic. Secondly you don’t want to sound unprofessional. Remember you can disagree without being argumentative. And third, you want to be persuasive and witty so that your comment will catch people’s attention (in a positive way) and hopefully end up in more traffic for you.

As a blogger, yesterday’s tale serves as a reminder for us to be more vigilant in moderating comments. If your blog is hosted by Blogger comment deletion is that big a problem since commenters can delete their own comments on their own (except for anonymous comments). If you are using Wordpress and don’t moderate comments (require author approval before publishing of comments) make sure you check in on your comment section regularly. You want to not only keep track of the discussion in your comment section but also clean it up. You should delete comments not only when asked by commenters but also when you see spam, and accidentally repeatedly published comments.

Having made a mistake of clicking on the SUBMIT COMMENT button just a few minutes ago and then realizing I have more to say (no problem I just left another comment), I remembered an incident a couple of year back. A tragedy happened to a friend’s family when their baby died. They announced it on their blog a few days later to tell people the funeral service schedule and to assure everyone they were coping fine despite the grief. Comments started pouring in and while I was scanning through them a comment that was so completely out of place caught my eye. This guy (a close friend of the dad) left a comment that was not only really cheeky but was also calling the blogger out for backing out of their supposed night out. Everyone was appalled but none more than the commenter. Apparently he was multi-tasking and ended up switching comments on the two blogs he was reading simultaneously. He ended up scampering around for a way to delete his comment but since the blog was hosted by Wordpress there was no way to do so. In the end he left another comment apologizing for his mistake and asking the blogger to delete his comment as soon as he had time for inane stuff like that. The blogger did moderate his comments weeks later (understandably he went on a hiatus to mourn his loss) and deleted the comments to his friend’s relief, but not until everyone read the booboo.

My point in this long story is simple. When commenting on blogs make sure you double check not only the contents of your comment (from wording to spelling) but also make sure that you are leaving your comment on the right blog.

Most of the time our comment mistakes will not be as embarrassing as the one above but remember leaving an unprofessional comment will reflect on you as a blogger.

Technical knowhow and capabilities – Consider your readers’ technical limitations. If your target audience are techies chances are that you won’t have to consider limiting your blog design to accommodate slow internet connections. However, since they know more about technical matters they will also be more critical of such facts and will probably be using a more varied set of web browsers. If you have audience from the older generation do consider internet connection speed and possible outdated browsers and computer specs. Make sure you also consider the user interface for the sake of usability.

Tone – If you have an industry-specific blog make sure your blog has a tone suitable to the general personality of the people in that industry. For example, a law blog means formal and deep content. An entertainment blog, on the other hand, calls for a laid back writing style.

Length – The length of your blog posts will also be determined by your target audience. In general blog posts shouldn’t be long but if your audience expects in depth discussions then you have to adjust accordingly. A kids blog will obviously need consistently short posts using age-appropriate words.

These are just some of the ways knowing your audience will help you adjust to make your blog more suitable and appealing to your readers. The important thing is that, as soon as you realize that there’s an aspect of your blog you can tweak to serve your readers better, you do something to address your readers’ needs.

Google Wave team announced the preview to thousands of users yesterday morning. Here’s what they said…

“ Starting Wednesday, September 30 we’ll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.”

They also said that Google Wave is (of course) not fully ready yet and has lots of features that they still haven’t rolled out. I don’t know if it will already be possible to comment on blog posts via Google Wave but am pretty certain that collaboration on a post and posting via Google Wave is already possible since as they said “we [Google Wave team] collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.”

Now I just need to get an invite and start playing around.

Setting apart the author comments – This is an advantage to your readers because it will make it a whole lot easier to scan comments so that at a glance they can pick out your responses to their and fellow reader’s questions and comments. This is even more important when the comment section gets really busy and threaded comments appear making it harder to see which reply is the author’s.

Showing the readers your extra effort – As I said it is pretty easy to do, which means no real hard work on your part, but to readers the extra effort will reflect on how much you pay attention to details and how much you want to make things more user friendly to your readers.

As I have mentioned above the main purpose of stylized author comments is a better UI for your readers. Now this means that when styling your comments you should keep it simple. Highlighting your comments is the usual way to do it. You can also add an image that will really easy to spot and is distinctively you but make sure that it is not overdone to keep the professional look.

Here’s a couple of useful links to help you style your author comments:

Highlight Author Comments
Style Author Comments in WP 2.7