3 ways of reconnecting with blog readers through comments

There are many ways that a blogger can promote a blog, oneself, and attract readers as I shared in page 46 of the book Blogging from Home. Perhaps one of the most time-consuming yet very important is commenting on blogs. Used the term time-consuming as one has to read the blog first and then start participating in the discussion or simply comment.

Connecting with bloggers

For new bloggers, one will usually reach out to blogs that covers the same topic as they do or those that complement your niche. You can use Google Blog Search and Technorati for this purpose. On a simpler level, you can visit the blog of your social networking friends who regularly promotes them from time to time.

You can also subscribe to a blog and monitor on a regular basis using your Google Reader.

Once you have an established set of blogs, reconnecting with your past readers is important whether they are active in commenting or not in your blog. This is the present situation with my old blogs. Some approaches I have taken:

1. Look at past comments
   Visit the blog of those who commented at your blog in the past just to drop by and reconnect.
   
   If they are not active in blogging, connect through other means like re-tweeting something they posted on Twitter. Or respond to their Facebook activity such as giving a thumbs up, leave a comment, and share.
   
2. Visit past contest, events, writing project, or promotion participants
   If you have ran or sponsored a contest or promotion in your blog before, then visiting those who joined is also a practical thing to do.
   
   I find this easier said than done though. Had a writing project at Influential Blogger for the past 3 years and reconnecting would meant consistently communicating with past winners and reach out to past participants (around 400 bloggers).
   
3. Visit your members
   Whether you have an informal community, club blog, MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog, or NetworkedBlogs, you can scan through your community members, visit their blog, and leave a comment.
   
   For this blog specifically, that would meant visiting the blog of past book buyers and owners to keep in touch.

If you have additional inputs on this topic, hope you can share them.