Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Self-esteem rising...only to fall again

I'm going to go out on a limb here and generalize that those who blog do so with the anticipation and hope that others will read their writing. I will go even further to say that those of us who leave our blogs open hope that strangers may also read and find interesting the things that we write. Even if this isn't true for other bloggers, it is for me, even if I wasn't willing to admit it right away. Blogger has two easy ways for me to know if others are reading my blog: the follower gadget and comments at the end of posts. So far I have three followers (one of which is my mom) and I appreciate them all. And, I think around 8 or 9 people have commented on my blog overall. Not bad, considering that this blog has really only been active for a month.

Now, I will admit that I've decided that I will feel somewhat successful as a blogger when I have a stranger either comment on my blog or become a follower. So, imagine my delight when I opened my e-mail a few days ago and saw a comment from a person I did not know! My confidence sky-rocketed and I felt ever so slightly proud of myself. It was on my post about jogging strollers, which I did think was a pretty interesting post, if I do say so myself. And then I opened the e-mail to read the comment and saw this:

"Thanks for sharing that! Nice post. I just glanced through it. "

It was followed by a link to buy strollers.

So. Not only did my one stranger commenter only "glance" through my post, but he then used the comment section to advertise! Not exactly what I had in mind...

Oh well, I guess I haven't quite reached stranger-commenting-worthy status yet, after all. It's a good thing that I don't really base my self-esteem on the comments on my blog or that could have been a real doozy!
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6 comments:

  1. BridgetNovember 4, 2009 at 6:03 AM

    Two things: You can put in a tracker, if you want, so you have visual confirmation that people are, in fact, looking at your blog (but people viewing it in readers won't be counted on there).

    The second thing is that it's even worse than you thought - that comment from the stroller person was probably somewhat automatically generated. I get those sometimes too and it always makes me sad.

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  2. AmberNovember 4, 2009 at 3:29 PM

    Ooh, I like the idea of a tracker. How do I find such a thing?

    And, your second thing made me even sadder...Automatically generated comments! I will say that I take pride in the fact that I did not click on that link - I'll show those phoney-baloney commenters afterall!

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  3. ZoeyNovember 5, 2009 at 6:20 PM

    I use Google Analytics and I like it. You can track all sorts of things. You can find it here:

    http://www.google.com/analytics/

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  4. UnknownNovember 7, 2009 at 1:03 PM

    You now have 4 followers - officially!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Kristen November 11, 2009 at 1:19 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Kristen November 11, 2009 at 1:21 PM

    I use Sitemeter, which Bridget referred me to long ago. I like it better than Analytics personally, but you can use both. It's free: sitemeter.com (and I'm not being paid to post this!) :) I once had a stranger become a follower and got so excited, but then she "unfollowed" a few days later. It must have been an error. Also, if you want to know about feeling bad about a comment, please read THIS post on my blog. And let me know what you think. :)

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