My Blog Needs More Comments {smiley face}

I love comments.  

I love feeling like I am talking to real people.

But sometime during my beginning years of blogging, I ended up selecting in my comment settings that you had to have a Google account in order to leave a comment.

Why would I do that???

Because I'm not tough skinned.

A few times I would receive comments that were from people just trying to be MEAN!!  It was horrible and to be honest, I let those few bad comments ruin it for me.   I remember one comment on a post when I was so excited about building our house.  I had put up pictures of our house plans and the commenter went OFF about how ugly my house plans were and said they hope I didn't actually PAY to have the plans drawn up because it looked so generic and had no style.

Believe it or not, I have had a few comments of that sort and I just was fed up and said, FORGET
THIS, I am going to go to my settings and make it so that only people with a Google account can leave a comment.  With a click of a button, I made it so no one could leave me those "anonymous" comments.  (With a Google account you have a name attached to your comment, those mean people ALWAYS left the comment anonymously)

but then......

the crickets began chirping......

chirp.....chirp...... chirp 

In the wilderness it's a good noise.

On a blog....not such a good thing. :-)

I thought it might be worth the trade that I no longer had to worry about the "TROLLS" out there but I miss the dialogue, and I'll be honest, I miss the encouragement.  I love hearing if my ideas inspired you to try something new or if you had another tip to leave about something I had just written about.

What can I say?  A one man show just isn't as much fun - right??  

I also really missed feeling like I had readers. :-)  I mean sure, I can SEE that I have over 1200 subscribers etc etc, but I didn't hear them!

So, I am announcing, I "freed" up the comment section again!  Now anyone can leave me a comment.  It's worth dealing with a few of the bad guys to hear from all my GOOD blogging friends!

I want you to know that I read every comment that comes in - actually the comment goes directly to my personal Selina inbox.  A lot of times I will reply to a comment from my email if the commenter has their account connected to an email.

PLEASE NOTE that if you have not set up your google account to an email, there is no way for me to respond to your comment directly!


Be sure and check if you have your Google account set up to an email -  this gal wrote a very simple post on how to do it :-)

ALSO I have made a secret incentive to leave me a comment - hee,hee.

There is no doubt that building backlinks (your blog's URL listed on other blogs) is the best way to improve your website's search engine optimization (SEO) and gain a higher ranking with top search engines.  It's actually a really big deal for growth!!  Some people pay money just to have their text link on the front page of someones blog.  I'd like to "give back" to you guys and let YOUR blog get more recognition so I added a "TOP COMMENTERS" widget to my sidebar.  I suppose it's my little way of saying thank you for your comments.  :-)

Now you can see my rockstar commenters on my sidebar, I totally appreciate you!
(very close in the running is Olga, Anne, Caren, Jessica, Ann and Lauren)

Of course, I truly appreciate ALL my readers, comments or not.

Here is my question for you guys......I know there are a lot of  you that don't comment because you think it's too confusing.  Hello mom and mother in law :-)  

What would help in explaining how to do it?  

(Great, I'm asking people who don't know HOW to comment, to leave me a comment.)

OK 

For those that do leave comments on blogs, what is your favorite way to do it?  Do you like the pop up box, or the embedded comment form where it goes directly at the bottom of the posts?

Do you guys HATE having the captions that you have to write in to get the comment published? (I believe doing that cuts way back on the spam)

Can you tell me if it is now simple to comment on my blog?  Seriously, even if you write "testing 1...2...3..."  I'll be happy you tried it out. 

Will you give it a shot mom?  :-)

Thanks my friends!

~ Selina