Show Yourself In The Comments

in Blogging by Thomas Skavhellen on December 19th, 200811 Comments

Comments are a very important part of the blogging. It gives you as a blog owner valuable input from your readers on what they thought about your blog post. That way you can take that information and make your next post even better.

You may also get questions about the topic in your blog post and it’s highly recommended that you answer all of the questions you get. This makes your readers know that you are truly reading their comments and are interested in the feedback.

Today’s topic is about showing yourself in the comments. You may or may not have seen the pictures next to the comments on various blogs you have read in the past. Even this blog have different pictures next to the comments. Some of the pictures looks kind of random themed to the blog. It can also be grey with a person icon or like on one blog I visited, it was different bugs. Then you have a few people leaving comments with picture of themselves. I feel that is more personal and it’s easy for me to connect with that person on a personal level.

So you want to know how to get your own picture next to the comments you leave on everybody else’s blog? It’s simple and you only have to do this once and it works on every blog, or at least every Wordpress, you will comment on in the future.

Go to www.gravatar.com. On the top sign up for your own account. It’s totally free which is totally awesome. You then upload your picture that you want to use for your comments, be it a picture of yourself, your dog, your bird, your birds dog. Yhe you get the picture. Then when commenting, remember to use the e-mail address that you signed up on gravatar.com with. And your picture will follow the comments all over.

Simple and personal, it’s time to show yourself in the comments!

Thomas Skavhellen

About the author

Responses to “Show Yourself In The Comments”

Joe Trueman 20.12.2008 um 7:51 pm
Hey Thomas,

Thanks your message, re: screenshot.

I’ll let you know how I get on with the video!

BTW, I’ve got a free prize draw for registered members on my site. The prize is a new 8gb Ipod Nano this month. There aren’t many people on my list at the moment, so the odds of winning it are QUITE HIGH!!! http://www.JoeTrueman.com/register

Thanks again. :-)

Have a great weekend!

Joe
@ http://www.JoeTrueman.com
Gordan 21.12.2008 um 5:44 pm
Hi,
Just wanted to say hello and see how you’re doing with traffic generation
and to tell you how the things working out for me.
I would really like to hear everybody’s story regarding traffic.
I will give you my insights to what is working for me.

I went on squidoo and created my first lens which was actually fun.
I noticed that within first 20 minutes after I saved my page there was 6 views already.
I could not believe it.

I also created twitter account and made connection from Squidoo to twitter.
I still need to check how twitter works.

Also I wanted to mention another site that I have not heard anybody mentioned so far.
It is called

http://delicious.com/about

It is social bookmarking site to increase the traffic to your site.
I am creating my account there now and will make a post about it with more info.

I know some people that praise this site very highly.

I really hate to come on here asking people to come on my blog
but sometimes that is the only way to get your ideas through.

I have created testimonial site and would like everyones participation
and believe that this kind of site would help us in the future
when our relationship with Alex expands.

If you are interested in being part of this site or you would like to see
my page at squidoo just to have an idea that will help you to start your page off,
have a look at my blog.
I dont want to mentioned my sites here as I dont find it tasteful.

That’s it for now,
Speak to you soon,
Gordan Bosnjak
http://www.gordanbos.com
Gordan 21.12.2008 um 5:45 pm
Hi,
I forgot to mention,
Bergen, what a beautifull place…and that fish market…:)
Gordan
http://www.gordanbos.com
André T 22.12.2008 um 1:12 pm
Halla Kompis!!

Cool to see a fellow Norwegian at Alex Jeffreys coaching “club”.

You`ve got a bright and goodlooking site there! Very clean!

I just got my site up after some trouble with my hosting company. I had to re-innstall everything from scratch… arrgh… But we`re all set now :)

Have you added me to your blogroll?

http://AndresMarketingEvolution.com/blog

Come over and throw some love over my new and fresh site :)

All the best,
André T.
(Oslo, Norway)
Peggy Schoonover 22.12.2008 um 3:13 pm
Thanks for the tip for the photos. I’ll check it out. I am just checking out others site. I will add you to my blogroll. Please do the same.
Thanks
Peggy Schoonover
Gary SIMPSON 26.12.2008 um 6:15 am
Hey Thomas,

First, I watched that dude on your site in the video where he remembered the order of all 52 cards in a deck. UN-real! Is he a friend of yours?

Now, I need to ask you a couple of things – bowing to your greater expertise in these matters here – can you take a look at my site, specifically this page:

http://motivationselfesteem.com/talk/309/christmas-2008-new-year-2009.htm#comments

(note I have fixed the permalink status – THANKS to YOU!) and tell me if the inbound message below the gravatar of John Halderman – about half way down the page – is worthwhile or just spammy trash? I have been allowing some of these on my blog but they are coming in so thick and fast now that they are out of control. I have 13 in “unapproved status” on my dashboard.

Are they spam? I have visited the sites and they are pretty valueless links but I just want your opinion before I drop the guillotine on all of them.

I notice they are on many of the sites I visit. But they have gone absolutely berko on mine of late. Hence, I am now holding them back.

Also, Tommy Gun, while you are there can you take a quick look at that java script from Aweber at the top of the page and let me know how I can adjust that to sit inside the boundary of the sidebar? Mark Austin said it was a default in the sidebar html that was set to 20 and should be set to 15. I did that and it made no difference, so I reset it back to 20. I have searched everywhere for the control of this bit but I am now wasting WAY too much time on it.

If you could give me some idea on these matters I’d be very thankful.

Regards

Gary SIMPSON
http://motivationselfesteem.com/talk/
Gary SIMPSON 26.12.2008 um 6:18 am
Thomas,

Oops, I forgot to say, I’ll drop back here to read your answers just so we can keep the Q&A together for others to follow.

Gary SIMPSON
http://motivationselfesteem.com/talk/
Thomas Skavhellen 26.12.2008 um 8:56 am
Wow.. I have totally forgot to answer some comments on this post so I will do it in one big comment. Look after your highlighted name.

Joe Trueman: I’m very excited on what you are going to use the screenshot of my website for in a video. So I’m glad you will let me know when it’s up and running. I’m sorry I don’t want to give my email away just to maybe get an iPod. I don’t see the value given in that. But contests drive traffic for sure.

Gordan: Great to so you are working on your traffic Gordan. I will have my list of traffic sources and what I’m working with at the moment up very soon.
You have taken a lot of good steps with your traffic building. I know some of them are feeling more slow then others but you just have to take those step and together they will bring in huge amount of traffic.

And Yes, Bergen is a beautiful city. I truly love it and said I would never leave it. But 2 months ago I left and now I live in Stavanger. That’s how life works sometimes.

Peggy Schoonover: I’m glad this helped you out Peggy. Hope to see your pictures on the comments around here very soon. It’s so much more personal when you see who comments on your blog :)

Gary Simpson: Hi my man! I’m glad every time you come over here with your questions or thoughts. Let me pull out a good chair for you and lets begin.

Yes, Marius is a very good friend of mine. I have learned the basics of his memory methods but 52 cards in a deck, even I can’t pull that off. We are still thinking “Why didn’t we learn THIS when we where at school?”

I did see the comment on your blog under John Halderman’s comment. And one thing is for sure. It’s not a real comment. If you got a bunch of them I think they are what wordpress calls Track Backs.
A wordpress blog can automatically track if another wordpress blog links to them through a blog post. You will get some kind of notification under Incoming Links, but I haven’t got any of them under comments. I would just delete them since they are just information that someone is linking to you.

About your aWeber form. I can’t see any problems with it. I cant see why you would have it any smaller og bigger. It’s inside the design for me and looks very good indeed. I need to get my aweber form on my site too. I have forgot about all that in the process.

Please send me a screen shot of what you are seeing if you want me to look at the problem. I would be more then happy to look at it, but I cant see anything wrong with it from my view now.

- Thomas
Gary SIMPSON 26.12.2008 um 10:43 am
Thanks Thomas,

OK. I’m gonna dump all those inbound valueless links that are sitting in my queue. I was getting tired of them anyway. I guess they have more value to me if I DON’T link back as they are then just inbound with no reciprocation.

If you think the aweber JS box looks OK then I’ll leave it as is. Some people (I guess on different browsers) reckon it sticks out too much.

Have you seen my long post on your other thread? Hope you are OK with it. Basically, it is just a bunch of ideas from me for you to mull over.

Regards

Gary SIMPSON
http://motivationselfesteem.com/talk/
Matt Cross 26.12.2008 um 5:48 pm
Thomas, great stuff! Let me know what is working for you with traffic generation. Appreciate the blog about gravitar. It’s so easy to use and I agree that it adds personality to ones post. Well good luck to you, and talk soon.

Matt
http://www.matt-cross.com
Thomas Skavhellen 27.12.2008 um 3:41 pm
Gary: I have seen your long post on the other thread. I’m very thankful for the input and will comment on it right away. :)

Matt: Thanks for kind words. I’ll get my post up on traffic generation very soon. I got some good stuff coming up there for those with and without a budget.