Hello. I'm glad to see you all here today. Now if we can all take our seats - Oh come on now MommyPie , Beej and SDM, your hangovers aren't so bad that you can't take your shades off. There now, get nice and comfy. On second thought, Beej, keep yours on, that's not a pretty sight. You're kinda scaring me.
As Doris has so nicely pointed out, today's seminar is all about asserting yourself to get what you want! You know, mama always said, "The squeaky wheel gets the oil!" and so it is in the blogging world.
What, you think the comments will just fall into your lap? No you silly gooses, you have to MAKE IT HAPPEN, however you can. And that means using everything to your advantage even if you end up being a New Media Douchebag.
Take Twitter for example...if you think no one is listening to you, you're wrong. Why just the other night I was sitting there, bemoaning the fact that I didn't "get" how to add Kirtsy (another one of those social media thingys) to my TypePad blog. It gave me a sentence of instructions in what could have been Japanese for all I knew. It was technical and way over my head. So I sat there and tweeted (READ - bitched) about it and low and behold, the next morning there's an email from some nice lady at Kirtsy saying she'd seen my tweets and wanted to know if she could help.
It's that old squeaky wheel theory!
Now, how do you make this work as far as reaping some comments? Well, you need to be a tad more aggressive.
Do leave lots of comments all over the place, even on the the uber-big bloggers who have seventy billion comments per post and in all likelihood don't even know you exist. And then, when they don't bother commenting back, replying, or taking time from depositing their big fat ad revenue checks you can slip in a subtle snarky comment in a post of your own, from time to time. This is where Beej's Seminar will come in handy. You also need to perfect the art of the "stalk." Stalking and Comment Aggression go hand in hand!
Now, I will concede, this could backfire and you might possibly end up in the mother of all pissing matches with said uber-blogger. But hey, you'll be sure to get some hits off of that. I mean, bad publicity is still publicity, is it not? Hasn't Britney taught us at least that much? It's kind of like trying to get that cute football players attention back in high school. Some of us had to bite the bullet and throw ourselves down the stairs whilst he was walking by, sometimes even suffering shattered bones. But in the end we prevailed! We had a prom date. OK so after prom we discovered what a total wanker he was, but that's neither here nor there.
Again, use Twitter to your advantage here. Oh and make sure when you are calling out the name of the person who so rudely failed to acknowledge your existence, be sure you include "@" in front of their name, once again upping your chances of getting them to notice you. If you want some comment bling, you're gonna have to work it girl. Word!
I hope that this seminar has been helpful, and I hope you were able to clearly hear me, especially those of you in the back of the room who seem to have passed out. I know I can be hard to understand at times with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek.
For more awesomeness that is Bloghernot '08 (I'm really sorry all of you sweet people at BlogHer are missing out!) head on over to MommyPie's and get yourself registered and then grab a drink and join in the fun!
