When Commenting Kills Blogging

Photo by ~C4Chaos  / CC BY-NC-SA

I was shocked to see how less I blog recently. But I'm writing articles almost every day. How can that be? After a research what went wrong it was obvious. I'm writing extensive articles as comments on someone's postings and forget about the topic. A big mistake that seems to affect not only myself.

If you are engaging a discussion about topics of your concern, you'll end up writing a lot of informative and useful stuff. No matter if it's your opinion, or a deep research because someone asks for sources or explanation. In fact, you just wrote an article. Think about it. Just add a nice photo and rearrange the paragraphs, text-styling and there you'll have it.
The problem is, it sits there. On someone else's posting. It's almost hidden for your readers. Even if there was an effective method to track down all your comments everywhere, not many would follow you around on the web.
You invest a lot of energy in writing comments sometimes and then it sits there read by the people in the discussion of the posting. That's it.

Two things you can do: Write your "comment" as an article from the beginning on your blog e.g. Then write a short comment text and link to your article in the blog.
This method however is not appropriate in every situation and post owners could easily think you are just spamming. So it's not ideal.

The 2nd way is better: Write the comment like you first intended to do. Then copy your own text from the comment and arrange it for a proper article in your blog. After that, you can inform people in the discussion of the posting that you have published the comment as an article, too. It's much more polite to do it this way, and you don't split the discussion of the original posting, but you have put valuable information on your site.

With that, you can build up a good posting frequency on your blog e.g. and still participate in discussion without losing the momentum.