I Must Be An Expert In My Field

There’s my attempt at writing a passionate and ridiculous statement in order to get comments. Seriously though, I don’t pretend to be an expert. So why do so many of my posts go by with no comments?

I was thinking about this today before I read junger’s post about this very topic. He asks, “What do bloggers rant about?” His answer:

There’s only two answers here: either their life, or something that they are passionate about.

If you’re a blogger who writes about life, can you really expect people outside of your real-life social circle to care so much about your day-to-day activities as to leave comments on your blog?

And if you’re a blogger who writes about a passion, there’s a fair assumption that you are somewhat of an expert in the subject. People reading your blog come to it for information — and not necessarily conversation.

Your visitors see you as an expert in your field, which they aren’t. So unless they are asking a question, will they really chime in to discuss the topic if they are trying to learn from you?

That’s a great, easily-understood explanation. Additionally, I don’t ask for comments. But you will find that there are far more comments on my blog than posts; yet most of the posts don’t have comments. 846 posts and 3,658 comments. That’s a lot of comments! Why?

Because some posts have hundreds of comments, while others have none. I think the explanation is search engine traffic. I don’t have very many regular visitors, or else they would be commenting on what they read. I get comments from visitors who found my blog via a search engine, be it Yahoo, Google, MSN, or something else. They see one post, which ranks high for an extremely specific but common search term, leave a comment, and then leave forever, never to be seen again.