[rmfo-blogs.com]: About

Some of you have asked me how you get more folks to read your Weblog. [Some have asked directly; others have asked rhetorically on their Weblogs. ;)] I’ll offer you an example of mine: just post more. To wit:

IJSM.org has lots more traffic than GFMorris.com, which has more than GFMorris.org. Check the relative posting volume of the three, and you’ll see the simple correlation: posting more means more visits.

Now, if you’re concerned about getting people to post comments and interact with you—and yeah, feeling like you’re shouting into a vacuum sucks—the answer to that is simple: ask questions. If you tell a story about something that happened in your life, ask a question at the end of it: “Has something like this ever happened to you?” or “What would you have done in my shoes?” are both good choices.

Do not fret over a lack of interaction. It’s hard to know what people will respond to and what they won’t; I’ve had entries that I’ve never gotten comments on and thought no one read, but then had friends mention to me as something they thought was witty or insightful or something. I’ve also found that soul-searching and declarations typically don’t drive comments, for whatever reason.

NewsForge has a great article on how syndication feeds save time. That’s the main reason that I use feeds.

Syndication is gaining popularity with savvy Internet users as the way to keep up with the tide of information updates. Rather than manually browsing all of your bookmarked sites, you use a computer program to do all that boring work for you, and prepare a complete list of all the latest information. If a website hasn’t update yet, you don’t need to waste your time checking it. If all of your favorite websites have updated, you can read all of that fresh content in a single sitting, without waiting for the pages to load or looking at the annoying advertisements.

[rmfo-blogs.com], as users of WordPress, supplies its readers with syndication feeds out-of-the-box. [rmfo-blogs.com] users are also granted installations of the wonderful Feed on Feeds Web-based syndication aggregator by request.

[Hat tip to Weblog Tools Collection.]

As [rmfo-blogs.com] continues to mature and get inbound links, your PageRank as determined by Google is going to increase.

When your PR gets above three, you’ll start to see comment spam. Peter is already seeing comment spam on his Weblog.

Just delete these comments as they come in, folks. They’re shilling for in-bound links from your site to theirs purely so they can get a little higher in Google’s ranking and make a few bucks.

When I’m comfortable enough with the newer versions of WordPress to upgrade everyone, you’ll see that there will be an option to set moderation for comments that have more than N outgoing links. When this functoinality’s available, you’ll find it useful.

I just don’t know when that will be.