Blogging: It All Started with a Single Comment

Lately, I have been contemplating the notion of leaving comments on blogs that I visit. It has been about a month since I began blogging, and I have noticed a trend in my statistics that I too am guilty of at times, and that is not always leaving comments on blogs that I visit. I have tried to leave comments on many of the blogs that I surf. However, there have been times when I would stop at a blog, browse for a moment and move on without leaving a comment. And it's got me thinking.

As I looked back at when I started, I realized that it was not until my fifth post that I received comments on my blog. I am sure I am probably breaking a blogging rule by referring back to past blogs, but what I have realized is this, It all started when I left a comment on someone else's blog. Up until that point I was blogging to myself. In addition to the comment I left, I blogged about the blog I had visited. I did that because I appreciated the information that I received there, and that blogger responded in kind by leaving me further advice on my blog that helped me get my start.

I am sure you are thinking to yourself, what is the "It" he is referring to? I am glad you asked, because I am referring to traffic. You see had I not left my comment on the blog I visited I might not have found out about the blogging communities that I am now a part of like MyBlogLog.com, which is in part responsible for a large share of the traffic I am now receiving. Not only am I getting regular traffic to my blog, but my posts are now popping up in search results as well, and surfers are clicking on those results. And Technorati.com is now registering several links back to my blog.

What does this all mean? Well consider this, here we all are, blogging in the blogosphere, posting and reading one another's posts. And it is this activity that makes the blogosphere live and breath. I would have to say that much of the traffic I've seen thus far is from fellow bloggers, many of whom have never left a comment, whether positive or negative. How am I supposed to know how to find the blogger who visited me so that I can return the favor? I mean, an IP address is nice for tracking who visits your blog, but it often does not translate into a URL. Not every blogger is a member of MyBlogLog.com.

Comments enable us to track back to the blogger that has visited us. Without them I only know that I have been visited, but I don't know who that visitor was. And without a comment I may never know. Comments are an integral part of the traffic that we all receive as bloggers. Could it be, that if we increase our commenting, we also would increase traffic back to our own blogs?

I am not begging for comments, just thinking out loud. Because, I will leave comments for bloggers regardless of whether bloggers leave them for me. I think I am going to test my theory and start leaving more comments on the blogs I visit.