Have you ever added a comment on somebody's blog, just to find it removed or never pass the authors screening?

Most bloggers want to see comments on their posts, but they want to see related ones. We spend a while each day clearing the deluge of bogus and automated comments in a hope, an almost desperate hope, that one may be serious.

The fact is many Internet Marketers see blogs as being a quick and easy way of growing links to there own blogs and websites. However, most blogs instruct search engines not to follow comment links (see our post on no-follow mechanics). So they are, to a certain extent, wasting their time.

Having said this, adding related and relevant comments helps you build rapport with the author and over time you may be able to leverage the relationship to your advantage. Perhaps the blogger may post some information about you or your company, they may consider you when carrying out other day-to-day business activity. You can look at the comments section of a blog as an opportunity to network.   

So here are some guidelines;

1. Always read the article first!
2. Always read the article first! (No, this is not a mistake, we want to be sure you get what we're saying here.)
3. OK, now that you have read the article, think about what interested you about it and make some notes. Did you agree or disagree with the post? Do you have any thoughts that may extend or improve the information within the post?
4. Now write a sentence or short paragraph about your thoughts. Don't just compliment the author on how great she is, that's just annoying!
5. Use your name in your comment, not your company name or the keywords you want to be known for. This is a sure fore way of getting your comments deleted really quickly.
6. Always use your real email address. Most blogs don’t publish your email address, and using free Gmail and Hotmail email addresses is sure to make the author think very carefully about keeping your post active or not.

On the 16th to 17th October 2009 the Internet saw a new trending topic. Promoted by Social Media Marketing of Atlanta GA. People were told far and wide to post to Twitter, Facebook and on their own blogs the hashtag #beatcancer.

Superb sentiment and with 209,771 recorded posts, a superb result, which is now being proclaimed a world record. Twitters' search of the hashtag reported that eBay/Paypal and MillerCoors would be donating 1 US cent for every recorded hit. Well as far as we can tell, all three companies could afford to bump that up to a nice square dollar, but hey, I'm not one for spending other people's money!

So what now? Although the intention in this case was obviously sincere, what's going to happen next? There's enough SPAM on Twitter as it is, all we need now is a bunch of copycat marketers "Trying to beat the world record". Suddenly you're being asked to tweet #abcelectrics because they want to hit the 300,000 recorded mentions.

I know it's grumpy and perhaps a bit sceptical, but I just hope we don't see an overuse of this strategy, at least, save them for the really important things.

Having said that we got involved with our partner iPhone App iCamWait which donates 10% of pre-tax profits to a number of charities one of which is the World Cancer Research Fund. So at least we can say we did our bit, however #abcelectrics? Well Goodluck if you do try I guess!

Would you walk into a crowded room, filled with people you didn't know and shout out "Hey, anyone want to tell me their life story?" I guess the answer would be no.

However, online the request for comment is significant and also expected to a certain extent. It's difficult to know why people don't see a difference, but this is our take on the subject. Obviously, feel free to share your comments (ha ha he he)!

Firstly, most regular online activity is more conversational, long gone are the days of simple static pages. We are in the age of social networking and this is all about expression and collective discussion. Therefore you have to have an outlet for these dialogues and the perfect way to do this is through comments, feedback, RSS feeds etc.

The next part is about developing a community, this takes time as people, lets face it, don't necessarily trust everyone else just because they say they are trustworthy. So encouraging readership is done through promoting discussion. Hence the request for comment.

Above we added a very soft request for comment, did you spot it? However, you don't have to be so reserved, you can just write an entire post dedicated to requesting comments. See todays post at Daily Blog Tips and see how they have proactively focused an entire blog post on getting readers to comment. It worked too, at the time of writing this, they were up to 32 comments. I think these include some replies from the author but still, a great response in less than a day.

Give it a try, ask for comments in your posts or write a post dedicated to getting comments! If you do, let us know and we'll sure get the ball rolling for you. All you have to do, you guessed it, is post a comment here and ask!

Happy days everyone!

BlogEngine.Net is very cool! One of the best things about it is an integrated Ping service. A ping service allows your blog to inform syndication services around the Internet that you have new content. It's a bit like saying "Hello World, something interesting here for you to see!"

Anyway, we have been looking around for a list of ping services for a while now and we stumbled upon Mads Kristensen post here. Now the Ping service class that Mads provides here is already available in the current version of BlogEngine.Net, but at the very bottom of his post is a link to a gem of a post.

As always, we like to share! This post provides a nice big list of Ping services, we haven't checked them out fully, but the post is here, take a look and include them in your blogs ping service. Blog Ping Services.

So, the blog is up and running!

We have our designers coming up with some ideas and we are looking at developing some widgets also. We did have a bit of a, well, aggravating time today. Mainly this was down to installation and the fact we forgot all about .NET as a whole. I guess this happened because we were installing a pre-built application and didn't think about this stuff. Anyway, to get to the point, here is a few gotchas to keep in mind.

Don't forget who's running your new Blog site!

If your hosting your new blog with a shared hosting provider, you must ensure that your App_Data folder has Read/Write permissions set to it. This will ensure that you can add posts, change settings etc.

If, like us, you are running on dedicated machines, you need to look at your application pool under IIS 6/7 and check the Identity of the process running the website. To do this follow these steps;

1. Open the properties of your new blog website by right clicking the website icon and selecting properties;
2. Select the Home Directory tab and make a note of the Application Pool at the bottom of this window. Click Cancel to dismiss the website properties;
3. Expand the Application Pools folder and right click the pool you previously noted;
4. Select the Identity tab. In here it will display the security account which is running your new blog.

Once you have the account which is running the application pool, you need to grant this user Read/Write permissions on the App_Data folder. The BlogEngine.net website discusses adding permissions to the ASPNET user which is correct for your development machine or localhost, however in IIS 6/7 this is unlikely to be the case.

Let me know if you need any further help on this.

Hey, .NET 1.1 don't get so upset!

So we have copied our blog to the server and setup a bog standard website in IIS 6. Then, hold on! everything stopped working! Hey BlogEngine.Net, thats not fair, whats going on?

Then we remembered, we have .NET 1.1 applications running and we setup the new website in the same application pool. The key thing here to remember is to setup your new website along with a dedicated application pool if you have multiple applications running. Then again, it doesn't need to be dedicated, it can be shared across applications as long as they are running the same version of .NET. Make sense?

Here's a few links that may help also on these issues and more.

• Complete Installation Video for BlogEngine.net
• Installation Query in Discussions

Have fun, its a great solution, well done chaps!